This popular book investigates the teaching, instruction and curricula required to meet the needs of diverse learners who by virtue of their experiential, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, challenge traditional curriculum and instructional programs. It provides a summary of the characteristics of students with diverse learning and curricular needs as well as an essential examination of current issues in education. It also introduces six key principles to direct teachers through the design of instruction and curriculum to ensure that diverse learners succeed in the classroom. Characteristics of Students with Diverse Learning and Curricular Needs; Effective Strategies for Teaching Beginning Reading; Effective Strategies for Teaching Writing; Effective Strategies for Teaching Mathematics; Effective Strategies for Teaching Science; Effective Strategies for Teaching Social Studies; Modulating Instruction for English-language Learners; Contextual Issues and Their Influence on Curricular Change. For teachers of diverse learners.

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 areour challengeandour 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 thecoreof 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 instructio