Culturally Diverse Teaching

Engage diverse learners in your classroom with culturally responsive instruction! This new edition covers standards-based, culturally responsive lesson planning and instruction, differentiated instruction, RTI, and the Common Core.

The author/educator reflects on the last fifteen years of reform efforts that have left a generation of poor children of color feeling that higher educational achievement is not for them. This book is a passionate reminder that there is no achievement gap at birth. Poor teaching, negative stereotypes, and a curriculum that does not adequately connect to poor children’s lives conspire against the prospects of poor children of color. From K-12 classrooms through the college years, Delpit brings the topic of educating other people’s children into the twenty-first century, outlining a blueprint for raising expectations based on a simple premise: that all aspects of advanced education are for everyone.

Designed to promote reflection, discussion, and action among the entire learning community, Educating Everybody's Children encapsulates what research has revealed about successfully addressing the needs of students from economically, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse groups and identifies a wide range of effective principles and instructional strategies.

Although good teaching works well with all students, educators must develop an extensive repertoire of instructional tools to meet the varying needs of students from diverse backgrounds. Those tools and the knowledge base behind them are the foundation of this expanded and revised second edition of Educating Everybody's Children. Each strategy discussed in the book includes classroom examples and a list of the research studies that support it.

In a radical analysis of contemporary classrooms, MacArthur Award–winning author Lisa Delpit develops ideas about ways teachers can be better “cultural transmitters” in the classroom, where prejudice, stereotypes, and cultural assumptions breed ineffective education. Delpit suggests that many academic problems attributed to children of color are actually the result of miscommunication, as primarily white teachers and “other people’s children” struggle with the imbalance of power and the dynamics plaguing our system.

A new classic among educators, Other People’s Children is a must-read for teachers, administrators, and parents striving to improve the quality of America’s education system.

In easy to understand, engaging language, Jensen provides a basic orientation to the brain and its various systems and explains how they affect learning. After discussing what parents and educators can do to get children's brains in good shape for school, Jensen goes on to explore topics such as motivation, critical thinking skills, environmental factors, the "social brain," emotions, and memory and recall. He offers fascinating insights on a number of specific issue, including
* How to tap into the brain's natural reward system.
* The critical link between movement and cognition.
* The impact on learning of environmental factors such as lighting, temperature, and noise.
* The value of feedback.
* The importance of prior knowledge and mental models.
* Why stress impedes learning.
* How social interaction affects the brain.
* How to help students improve their ability to encode, maintain, and retrieve learning.

People in poverty face challenges virtually unknown to those in middle class or wealth--challenges from both obvious and hidden sources. The reality of being poor brings out a survival mentality, and turns attention away from opportunities taken for granted by everyone else. If you work with people from poverty, some understanding of how different their world is from yours will be invaluable.

In the second edition of her critically acclaimed book the author revisits the eight teachers who were profiled in the first edition and introduces us to new teachers who are current exemplars of good teaching. She shows that culturally relevant teaching is not a matter of race, gender, or teaching style. What matters most is a teacher's efforts to work with the unique strengths a child brings to the classroom. The Dreamkeepers challenges us to envision intellectually rigorous and culturally relevant classrooms that have the power to improve the lives of not just African American students, but all children.

Because the attrition rate for new teachers in high-poverty schools averages between 40% and 50% over the first five years of teaching, this investigation offers practical solutions to more than 100 of the daily challenges they face. With an emphasis on pragmatic approaches that can be accomplished in the classroom, the book argues that many of the skills necessary for teaching in urban schools are not properly taught in university programs and that most white teachers simply have to learn by experience.

This compelling look at the relationship between the majority of African American students and their teachers provides answers and solutions to the hard-hitting questions facing education in today's black and mixed-race communities. Are teachers prepared by their college education departments to teach African American children? Are schools designed for middle-class children and, if so, what are the implications for the 50 percent of African Americans who live below the poverty line? Is the major issue between teachers and students class or racial difference? Why do some of the lowest test scores come from classrooms where black educators are teaching black students? How can parents negotiate with schools to prevent having their children placed in special education programs? Also included are teaching techniques and a list of exemplary schools that are successfully educating African Americans.