Teaching Reading to Struggling Learners

Learning Disabilities makes the connection between the characteristics of students with learning disabilities and the classroom tested instructional strategies that work in class. With up-to-date content, this practical guide offers insight into practical educational concerns from a teacher’s perspective, while covering the relevant scholarship to best prepare your students for working with these students.

Although much has changed in schools in recent years, the power of differentiated instruction remains the same — and the need for it has only increased.

Today’s classroom is more diverse, more inclusive, and more plugged into technology than ever before. And it’s led by teachers under enormous pressure to help decidedly unstandardized students meet an expanding set of rigorous, standardized learning targets. In this updated second edition of her best-selling classic work, Carol Ann Tomlinson offers these teachers a powerful and practical way to meet a challenge that is both very modern and completely timeless: how to divide their time, resources, and efforts to effectively instruct so many students of various backgrounds, readiness and skill levels, and interests.

With a perspective informed by advances in research and deepened by more than 15 years of implementation feedback in all types of schools, Tomlinson explains the theoretical basis of differentiated instruction, explores the variables of curriculum and learning environment, shares dozens of instructional strategies, and then goes inside elementary and secondary classrooms in nearly all subject areas to illustrate how real teachers are applying differentiation principles and strategies to respond to the needs of all learners.

This book’s insightful guidance on what to differentiate, how to differentiate, and why lays the groundwork for bringing differentiated instruction into your own classroom or refining the work you already do to help each of your wonderfully unique learners move toward greater knowledge, more advanced skills, and expanded understanding. Today more than ever, The Differentiated Classroom is a must-have staple for every teacher’s shelf and every school’s professional development collection.

When Marvin’s name is not on the class roster on the first day of school, he feels like he’s one too many – in fact he doesn’t even have a desk. Plus, Marvin can’t seem to catch on to reading as quickly as the other kids. Perhaps a little help from his teacher and his parents will give Marvin the boost he needs.

Basic reading proficiency is key to success in all content areas, but attending to students’ literacy development remains a challenge for many teachers, especially after the primary grades. Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading presents recommendations for the essential knowledge about the development, acquisition, and teaching of language and literacy skills that teachers need to master and use.

Increasingly, teachers are learning about the important role of Response to Intervention (RTI) in the success of every child. RTI is a multifaceted approach that provides immediate, relevant, and research-based services and interventions to students in general, compensatory, and special education. Written by two legal and special education experts, this concise, reader-friendly guide introduces educators to the purpose, core principles, legal basis, benefits, and application of this service delivery model.

How and when does a child begin to make sense of the world? Why does a lively preschool child so often become a semiliterate and defeated school failure?

Developmental psychologist Margaret Donaldson shows that much of the intellectual framework on which we base our teaching is misleading. We both underestimate the astonishing rational powers of young children and ignore the major stumbling block that children face when starting school.

Given a setting and a language that makes sense to them in human terms, very young children can perform tasks often thought to be beyond them. The preschool child learns everything in a human situation. Only in school is he asked to acquire skills―reading, writing, arithmetic―isolated from a real-life context. This transition is difficult.

The author suggests a range of strategies that parents and schools can adopt to help children. She argues that reading is even more important than we have thought it to be, since learning to read can actually speed children through the crucial transition.