Effective Teaching Strategies that Accommodate Diverse Learners - Softcover

Like the first edition of this book, this edition is about diverse learners who, by virtue of their instructional, experiential, cultural, socioeconomic, linguistic, cognitive, and physiological backgrounds, bring different and oftentimes additional requirements to instruction and curriculum. What are these "different" and "additional" instructional and curricular requirements? Why are they different? Why are "additional" instructional and curricular requirements necessary for these learners? What is it about diverse learners that requires teachers, publishers, developers of educational materials (e.g., textbooks and basal reading programs), school administrators, legislators, and others to consider these additional burdens? Will a teacher's effective response to these additional instructional and curricular requirements help the average and high-performing learners?

Although this book is about diverse learners, it would be of little value if it focused exclusively on them and their learning and behavioral characteristics, because as we see it, they are not the issue. Instead, they are our challenge and our promise. Thus, in the interest of full and accurate disclosure, this book is about the teaching, instruction, and curricula required to give diverse learners a fighting chance to beat the odds both in today's classrooms and outside the classroom.

We offer in this text a synthesis of our critical examination of pedagogical and curricular requirements in schools. What is demanded explicitly or implicitly of students with diverse learning and curricular needs by typical school tasks and materials in grades K-8? Based on these analyses, we have developed a core of six architectural principles for designing, modifying, or evaluating the instruction and curriculum for diverse learners. These six principles are the core of this text and serve to frame our analysis and recommendations in teaching beginning reading (Chapter 3), writing (Chapter 4), mathematics (Chapter 5), science (Chapter 6), social studies (Chapter 7), and also in teaching English-language learners (Chapter 8).

The text consists of nine chapters: an introductory chapter, a chapter on the characteristics of diverse learners, six content-specific chapters, and a chapter on the contextual social and economic issues that influence curriculum change and reform. But the heart of the text is the six principles—big ideas, conspicuous strategies, mediated scaffolding, primed background knowledge, strategic integration, and judicious review—and the application of these principles across different and sometimes unwieldy knowledge structures and skills in reading, science, social studies, and mathematics. We assert that these six principles serve as the organic basis, if not the DNA, for the design of instruction and curriculum for diverse learners.

We view these principles as representing the minimum instructional and curricular elements necessary for the adequate design of school materials. However, architectural principles for designing instruction, principled curricular, and instructional analyses are necessary but insufficient to ensure that diverse learners succeed in the classroom. As most practitioners know, the harsh reality is that the day-to-day success of teachers and children resides in the instructional and curricular details—in the examples teachers use to teach a concept such as proportion in mathematics; in the strategies used to make visible and clear how best to work with concepts efficiently, effectively, broadly, and deeply; in the integration of concepts across topics; and in the decisions made to schedule further review and practice that students may need to ensure critical concepts or big ideas are not forgotten, or that these ideas are not confused with other highly similar concepts or ideas.

In this text, we offer guidelines for determining the curricular and instructional priorities in teaching diverse learners, who are typically behind their school-age peers in academic performance and content coverage. In addition, we describe concrete examples of how key concepts (big ideas) in reading, mathematics, science, social studies, and writing are taught, scaffolded, integrated, and supported. What the reader will discover is surprising conceptual and technical coherence and generality of the six principles as they are applied across the content areas. For students with diverse learning and curricular needs, there is no time to waste and little room for error and reckless experimentation. These students are deserving of our best thinking and our best instructional and curricular efforts.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers of this edition of the text: Thomas L. Baumgarten, Texas Southern University; Jeanne Bauwens, Boise State University; Greg Conderman, University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire; Charles Hughes, Pennsylvania State University; Patricia Mathes, University of Texas; and Mary Anne Prater, University of Hawaii.