Leadership for Differentiating Schools and Classrooms by Carol Ann Tomlinson

Leadership for Differentiating Schools and Classrooms by Carol Ann Tomlinson

Learn how to encourage and support teachers who are striving to match their instructional approaches to the needs and interests of every student. Two leaders in the field explain the fundamental principles that support differentiation and guide you through the process of moving schools and districts toward differentiated classrooms.

Try going a week without hearing a call for a massive overhaul of our educational system. Parents, students, educators, bureaucrats, pundits . . . everyone says something must be done. But what? And who should do it?

In this environment, school leaders must build bridges for change. As the system now stands, many students spend great portions of their lives feeling inferior if they struggle, invisible if they already know the material, problematic if they're not a child of the dominant culture, and perverse if they question the school agenda.

This book explores how school leaders can develop responsive, personalized, and differentiated classrooms. Differentiation is simply a teacher attending to the learning needs of a particular student or small group of students, rather than teaching a class as though all individuals in it were basically alike.

Expert educators teach individuals the most important things in the most effective ways. No single approach works with all students. Classrooms function best when teachers and students join to develop multiple avenues to learning. Until every student is growing and successful, our own growth is unfinished. The authors show how school leaders can encourage and support growth in our classrooms.

Carol Ann Tomlinson is William Clay Parrish, Jr. Professor, Chair of Educational Leadership, Foundations and Policy, and Co-director of the Institutes on Academic Diversity at the Curry School of Education, University of Virginia. Her university career follows a 20-year career as a public school teacher and a leader of district programs for both struggling and advanced learners. She and her colleagues developed a model for what we now call differentiated instruction in their work with heterogeneous 7th grade classrooms. Tomlinson was Virginia's Teacher of the Year in 1974 and won an All-University Teaching Award in 1994. The author of more than 300 publications, she works throughout the United States and internationally with educators who want to create classrooms that are more responsive to a broad range of learners.

Marcia B. Imbeau is a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where she teaches graduate courses in two programs. She is actively involved in university and public school partnerships, working as a university liaison and teaching courses in curriculum development, differentiation, classroom management, and action research. Imbeau is a regular presenter at ASCD's annual conference and has worked with a variety of school districts implementation efforts as a member of the ASCD's Differentiated Instruction Cadre. She is co-author (with Tomlinson) of Leading and Managing a Differentiated Classroom along with several book chapters on the differentiated instruction and classroom management.