Teaching Every Child Every Day: Learning in Diverse Schools and Classrooms (Advances in Teaching & Learning Series)

Today’s classrooms are increasingly diverse—in English proficiency, special educational needs, and social, economic, and racial backgrounds. For successful teaching and learning, the authors recommend an eclectic combination of approaches—for example, integrating literacy skills into content areas—and a variety of techniques, from explicit instruction to discovery-oriented approaches. Such integration allows greater flexibility for meeting the needs of a range of students, while enhancing skill development and content learning.

This book provides guidelines for implementing these programs in elementary and middle school settings. It focuses on successful teaching and learning in these diverse classrooms, with the idea that such instruction can be enhanced by an integrative instructional approach combining competing models of teaching and learning in ways that maximize the strengths of each while compensating for weaknesses of specific models. This approach allows a balance between conceptual learning, understanding, and problem solving on the one hand, and basic competencies for literacy, including fluency and automaticity of skills and strategies, on the other. Powerful knowledge develops in both teachers and students through a variety of student and teacher actions, ranging from explicit instructional approaches (such as didactic instruction/direct explanation) to discovery-oriented approaches.