NIUSI

part of the Education Reform Networks

Teaching Design & Practices

• At the end of the day: Lessons learned in inclusive classrooms
  This book encompasses eight case studies featuring diverse children with varying disabilities - from preschool to high school - that show how including them in the classroom affects families, teachers, and other students. These case studies, combined with the latest research, enable educators to evaluate different methods for inclusion.
• Leadership Academies - Module 4, Co-teaching
  Co-teaching is a method for delivering instruction that draws on the strengths and expertise of multiple educators. Although there are many styles of co-teaching, each involves two or more educators collaborating to plan and deliver sound instruction for a group of students.
• The Academic Achievement of Minority Students: Perspectives, Practices, and Prescriptions
  This book presents a collection of papers by educators and researchers who discuss various methods of improving minority student achievement.
• "There Is No Way To Prepare for This:" Teaching in First Nations Schools in Northern Ontario--Issues and Concerns
  The author of this qualitative study examined the experiences of 10 mostly inexperienced, female teachers working in two geographically isolated Native communities in northern Ontario. Findings focus on teachers' uncertainties about appropriate pedagogical goals, the relationship of teachers to First Nations communities, living in the North, cross-cultural and multicultural teaching, and teaching English as a second language.
• Living (and Teaching) in an Unjust World: New Perspectives on Multicultural Education
  This collection of essays is a response to educators who limit multicultural education to "culture of the quarter" or "country of the week." The authors of these essays examined the issues of multicultural education deeply, exploring the just and unjust issues of schooling, the need to move beyond teaching about culture to facilitating self discovery, and the way classrooms mirror larger society.
• Diversity Education in Administrator Training: Preparation for the 21st Century
  This article investigates the impact and necessity of multicultural training in administrator-preparation programs, and the extent to which administrators can ensure that teachers honor diversity. The importance of the quality of the administrator's training is emphasized.
• "The Politics of Multiculturalism and Bilingual Education: Students and Teachers Caught in the Cross Fire," by C. J. Ovando and P. McLaren (2000). Book Review
  The author reviewed an anthology that provides undergraduate and graduate students with theoretical and practical discussion on various ideological convictions in the fields of multiculturalism and bilingual education. The author discussed theoretical conflicts and ideologies affecting the field of multiculturalism, and the more immediate effects of politics on teaching and learning in schools.
• The Relationships between Situated Cognition and Rural Preservice Teachers' Knowledge and Understanding of Diversity
  The authors of this study examined the influence of situated knowledge embedded in 17 rural preservice teachers' autobiographies on their perspectives on diversity and future classroom practices. The authors found four emerged themes in interviews: situative cognition in rural contexts; cultural groups being together but existing apart; understanding group similarities and differences; and desire to teach in a small rural school.
• Addressing diversity in schools: Culturally responsive pedagogy
  This paper is one of the short practitioner-oriented pamphlets produced by the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt). This practitioner brief deals with how to address educational needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students.
• Black English in a Place Called Waterloo
  For many black students, the school language differs significantly from the home language, but preservice education rarely examines this issue. The author of this article examined implications for teaching children who use two different forms of language to navigate the demands of their contrasting sociolinguistic speech communities.
• Impact of Two-Way Immersion on Students' Attitudes toward School and College. ERIC Digest
  This digest reports on a study that examined the impact of participation in a two-way immersion program on the language and achievement outcomes of former program participants and on their current schooling path and college plans. The study explored outcomes for three groups of students: (1) Hispanic students who began the two-way program as English language learners; (2) Hispanic students who began the program as English-only or English-dominant speakers; and (3) European American students who entered the program as monolingual speakers of English.
• Inclusive education for the 21st century: A new introduction to special education
  The authors of this book challenged pre-service special education and regular education teachers to develop the knowledge and skills to produce and support "inclusive school communities." Pre-service teachers are introduced to the inclusive community philosophy-include everyone, regardless of intelligence, disability, ethnicity-in supportive, mainstream classrooms and schools in which all student needs are met and all students are offered the same opportunities for success. To meet this growing challenge, the teacher-to-be must embody concepts of inclusion, community, collaboration, democracy, and diversity.
• Looking for Answers in All the Right Places: Urban Schools and Universities Solve the Dilemma of Teacher Preparation Together
  This article discusses urban teacher shortages, the interaction between poverty, ethnicity, and academic performance, and how licensure contributes to poor results in urban schools. Two partnerships between local universities and school districts to address these shortages are described.
• Racial Disproportionality in School Disciplinary Practices
  This paper is one of the brief practitioner-oriented pamphlets produced by the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt). This practitioner brief is for all parents, teachers and school leaders interested in understanding how we as educators can identify the overrepresentation of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children in special education and monitor the extent of it.
• Preparing Teachers for Diversity: Lessons Learned from the U.S. and South Africa
  The author analyzed U.S. and South African teachers' discourses, investigating differences in development of commitment among teachers who engaged in talk-related activities within teacher education versus those who engaged in talk-related activities plus theory-enacting activities within diverse classrooms.
• States' Requirements for Teachers' Preparation for Diversity
  The authors investigated the state teacher licensure requirements regarding diversity among the 50 states and District of Columbia. Overall, 67 percent of respondents required some level of diversity preparation in their teacher preparation programs, though specific requirements varied greatly from state to state.
• (Dis)Integrating Multiculturalism with Technology
  The author examines whether K-12 teachers are prepared to use technology in innovative and effective ways to authentically present multicultural education. He discusses the potential inability of teachers to provide an authentic version of multicultural education in the presence of technology as both an individual decision and as the result of generally underconceptualized teacher preparation in the instruction of multicultural education.
• On PreparingTeachers for the Future
  This practitioner brief is produced by the National Institute of Urban School Improvement (NIUSI) and on teacher education. The author of this paper suggests that as American schools seek to accommodate an increasing range of students, teachers are challenged as never before.
• Toward a conception of culturally responsive classroom management
  The authors provide a discussion of culturally responsive classroom management (CRCM).They propose a conception of CRCM that includes five essential components: (a) recognition of one's own ethnocentrism; (b) knowledge of students' cultural backgrounds; (c) understanding of the broader social, economic, and political context; (d) ability and willingness to use culturally appropriate management strategies; and (e) commitment to building caring classrooms.
• Art-Centered Approach to Diversity Education in Teaching and Learning
  The author described the advantages of an art-centered approach to diversity education in teaching and learning, which provided students with both a window into others' reality and a mirror that reflects their own cultural identity and community. She explained how to craft an art-centered approach to diversity education, offering examples of instructional activities and strategies and sample ethnographic research projects.
• Principles and practices of socio-cultural assessment: foundations for effective strategies for linguistically diverse classrooms.
  The authors provide assessment principles and practices that are coherent with the socio-cultural perspective and emphasizes four assessment accommodations that are appropriate for ESL learners in mainstream classrooms.
• Special Education or Racial Segregation: Understanding Variation in the Representation of Black Students in Educable Mentally Handicapped Programs
  The disproportionate representation of black students in special education programs has been well documented, yet explanations for the overrepresentation are rare. Using a unique sample of U.S.
• Improving Student Achievement through Formative Assessment
  Professional development of teachers and improvement of their abilities have become frequent topics in the ongoing debate surrounding educational policy and reform. Schools, more than many professions, go through constant periods of change that require new training.
• Teacher Education and the Cultural Imagination: Autobiography, Conversation, and Narrative
  Making culture a more central concept in the texts and contexts of teacher education is the focus of this book. It is a rich account of the author's investigation of teacher book club discussions of ethnic literature, specifically ethnic autobiography--as a genre from which teachers might learn about culture, literacy, and education in their own and others' lives, and as a form of conversation and literature-based work that might be sustainable and foster teachers' comprehension and critical thinking.
• Preparing Teachers for Culturally Diverse Schools: Research and the Overwhelming Presence of Whiteness
  The author reviewed research studies on preservice teacher preparation for multicultural schools, particularly schools serving historically underserved communities, examining the effects of such strategies as recruiting and selecting students, cross-cultural immersion experiences, multicultural coursework, and program restructuring. Very little research actually examined which strategies prepared strong teachers.
• Overrepresentation of bilingual and poor children in special education classes: A continuing problem.
  The authors investigated factors affecting the overrepresentation of poor and bilingual children in special education classes. They discussed the lack of educator knowledge in language learning and association of bilingualism with disability, poor educational policy in assessing of bilingual children and influence of bilingualism on special education classroom.
• Enhancing Learning Environments Through Solution-based Knowledge Discovery Tools: Forecasting for Self-perpetuating Systemic Reform
  The rapid growth of databases in many disciplines has overwhelmed the traditional, interactive approaches to data analysis and created a new generation of tools critical to intelligent and automated data discovery.The authors explored how knowledge-discovery applications could empower educators with the information they needed to provide anticipatory guidance for teaching and learning, forecast school and district needs, and find critical markers for making the best program decisions for children and youth with disabilities. The authors discussed data mining for schools.
• Narrative Therapy: A Storied Context of Multicultural Counseling
  Narrative therapy attempts to examine and use the meanings and consequences that are the foundation of the stories and experiences clients bring to therapy. The authors of this article reviewed narrative theory, including a description of key narrative techniques, and its application to multicultural counseling.
• Moving Marginalized Students Inside the Lines: Cultural Differences in Classrooms
  The author discussed what she has learned in her job at an elementary school in Northeast Mississippi as liaison between English-speaking school personnel and Spanish-speaking students and parents, most of whom are recent immigrants from Mexico. Also, the author discussed what she learned, through extensive talking and questioning of students and parents, about how cultural differences affect classroom activities and interaction.
• Beyond the Rhetoric: Moving from Exclusion, Reaching for Inclusion in Canadian Schools
  In this article, the authors reported a 3-year study in Toronto (Ontario) schools. They examined educational practices that engender exclusion or inclusion, especially of racially marginalized groups.
• The Critical Literacy Process: Guidelines for Examining Books
  The author recommends that children, teachers, and parents critically read children's literature to identify and clarify ideological perspectives. She lists types of books for multicultural collections, presents guidelines for critical discussions about books, and identifies types of biases in books.
• The Theoretical Foundations of Professional Development in Special Education: Is Sociocultural Theory Enough?
  This authors reviewed sociocultural, multicultural, and critical pedagogical theories and suggests that an adequate and sufficient theoretical framework for professional development in special education must explicitly and directly address issues of power, discrimination, and relative status that underlie dilemmas of practice. They offered vignettes of such dilemmas, with reference to the 1998 Council for Exceptional Children's professional standards.
• Teaching Social Studies Multiculturally: Implications for Teachers
  The changing demographics in U.S. institutions have contributed to the increasingly multicultural nature of classrooms.
• Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics
  Did affirmative action programs solve the problem of race on American college campuses, as several recent books would have us believe? If so, why does talking about race in anything more than a superficial way make so many students uncomfortable? Written by college instructors from many disciplines, this volume of essays takes a bold first step toward a nationwide conversation. Each of the twenty-nine contributors addresses one central question: what are the challenges facing a college professor who believes that teaching responsibly requires an honest and searching examination of race? Professors from the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and education consider topics such as how the classroom environment is structured by race; the temptation to retreat from challenging students when faced with possible reprisals in the form of complaints or negative evaluations; the implications of using standardized evaluations in faculty tenure and promotion when the course subject is intimately connected with race; and the varying ways in which white faculty and faculty of color are impacted by teaching about race.
• Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. Multicultural Education Series
  The author of this volume made the case for using culturally responsive teaching to improve the school performance of underachieving students of color. Key components of culturally responsive teaching are discussed.
• Profoundly Multicultural Questions
  The author argues that multicultural education practices in most schools today have not adequately addressed the larger issues of social justice and equal access to educational resources. She discusses four profoundly multicultural questions educators must address: Who's taking calculus? Which classes meet in the basement? Who's teaching the children? How much are children worth? .
• Forging a Knowledge Base on English Language Learners with Special Needs: Theoretical, Population, and Technical Issues
  The authors of this article reported on a conference held by the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt) concerning the topic of English Language Learners (ELLs). The article applies to teachers, families and policy makers interested in issues related to ELL students placed in Special Education.
• Cultural identity and teaching
  This paper is one of the brief practitioner oriented pamphlets called On Points produced by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI). We selected this particular On Point for all teachers who want to explore issues around teacher’s identity, culture, and teaching.
• From Rhetoric to Reality: Opportunity-to-Learn Standards and the Integrity of American Public School Reform
  Focusing on national policy and practice, this paper suggests key recommendations for consideration in the context of standards-based reform. The reform produced teachers who are multiculturally literate; re-assess ability grouping and tracking practices, reduced K-3 class size and elementary and secondary school size, and expanded and improve federal compensatory education programs; and incorporate school reform into broader social reform.
• From individual acquisition to cultural-historical practices in multicultural teacher education
  This article applies to all teacher educators, teachers, and pre-service teachers. Due to poor school performance among minority students in U.S.
• Differentiating cooperative learning
  Effective cooperative learning methods help students grow academically, socially, and emotionally. The authors of this article encourage teachers to implement cooperative learning more thoughtfully and differentiate tasks within the group to personalize learning for each student.
• Crafting Multicultural Science Education with Preservice Teachers through Service-learning
  The author explores community service-learning as one way to address the multicultural dimensions of preservice science education. She provides background information on multicultural science education and the use of service learning.
• Useful Practices of Inclusive Education: A Preliminary View of What Experts in Moderate to Severe Disabilities are Saying
  The authors examined the opinions of experts in the field of moderate to severe disabilities on useful practices for inclusive education across nine categories of practices: promoting inclusive values in the school; collaboration between general and special educators; collaboration between educators and related service providers; family involvement; choosing and planning what to teach; scheduling, coordinating, and delivering inclusive services within the school; assessing and reporting student progress on an ongoing basis; instructional strategies; and supporting students with challenging behavior.
• Beyond Affirmative Action: Reframing the Context of Higher Education
  Based on extensive interviews with Latino and Latina students and faculty, the author of this book introduced a theory of "multicontextuality" that proposes that many people learn better when teachers emphasize whole systems of knowledge and that education can create its greatest successes by offering and accepting many approaches to teaching and learning.This revolutionary paradigm also addresses why current thinking about academic systems and organizational culture, affirmative action, and diversity must be revised. The author based his groundbreaking proposals upon his own synthesis of findings from anthropological, educational, and psychological studies of how people from various cultures learn, as well as findings from extended interviews he conducted with Latinos and Latinas who pursued graduate degrees and then either became university faculty or chose other careers.
• The Linguistic Nature of Language and Communication
  The author discusses five recent books about language that address issues that arise in classrooms with an increasing number of diverse dialects and varied home languages. She discusses the complexities of language, misunderstandings in the Ebonics controversy, socioeducational issues, and classroom ideas for teachers.
• Backward design for forward action
  Using data to improve student achievement is a crucial issue and indicates an everyday challenge for all teachers and school leaders. In this the article, the authors explicitly demonstrate how school improvement initiatives can be integrated at the school and district levels.
• Teaching Other People's Ideas to Other People's Children: Integrating Messages from Education, Psychology, and Critical Pedagogy
  The authors of this paper discuss that educational endeavors are enriched by diverse forms of knowledge and experience, and, particularly in urban schools,by diverse children and teachers. An important educational task is teaching other people's ideas to other people's children.
• Making science accessible to all: results of a design experiment in inclusive classrooms
  The authors of this article presented their findings from a study of four elementary classrooms. They indicated that with advanced instructional strategies to support special needs students, all students demonstrated significant learning gains, and that special needs and low-achieving students in three of four classes showed changes in understanding comparable to those of normally achieving students.
• Identity and Learning: Student Affairs' Role in Transforming Higher Education
  Self-definition plays a crucial role in complex learning. This article offers a framework for making identity central in learning to promote learning and self-authorship.
• Technology as a Tool in Multicultural Teaching
  The authors explore various applications of multimedia, interactive, Internet, and Web-based electronic tools to multicultural teaching, asserting that while sound classroom pedagogy and constructive dialogue are still very important in education, technology integration is a useful addition. They suggest that these new media broaden the form of materials available to students in multicultural contexts.
• Addressing Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Student Overrepresentation in Special Education: Guidelines for Parents
  Do bias or inappropriate practice play a role in the placement of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education? Is the representation of low-income students in special education programs larger than their representation in the school population at your child’s school? If the answers to these questions are yes, it is possible your child’s school may be facing a problem that is called “overrepresentation” in its special education programs. This paper is one of the practitioner-oriented briefs produced by the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt).
• Working Together:Grououpwowork, Teamwowork, and Collollollaborative Work Among Teachers
  This paper is one of the brief practitioner oriented pamphlets called On Points produced by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI). This On Point is for all teachers who want to explore issues around teamwork among educators.
• Recommended Books about Latinos for Children and Adolescents
  The author reviews children's and adolescents' literature on the influence of Latinos in the United States, focusing on books in the following categories: the arts, fiction, literature, simple and interesting, and reference materials.
• Teachers of Gifted Students: Suggested Multicultural Characteristics and Competencies
  The authors of this article discussed desired characteristics and competencies in teachers of gifted students who are culturally, ethnically, or linguistically diverse. These include: culturally relevant pedagogy, equity pedagogy, a holistic teaching philosophy, a communal philosophy, respect for students' primary language, culturally congruent instructional practices, culturally sensitive assessment, student-family-teacher relationships, and teacher diversity.
• Culturally Responsive Literacy Instruction
  This paper is one of the practitioner-oriented briefs produced by the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt). It applies to all teachers of culturally and linguistically diverse students who are interested in improving literacy instructions.
• Instructional leadership challenges: The case of using student achievement information for instructional improvement
  This article is about the instructional leadership. It applies to educational leaders.
• Culturally Sensitive Strategies for Violence Prevention
  The author discusses cultural influences on behavior, theoretical assumptions about culturally diverse students, and culturally sensitive behavior management strategies that educators might consider in their efforts to curtail school violence. The strategies are intended to be culture-specific and culture-fair, to humanize school environments, and to encourage a sense of community and collective responsibility.
• How Multiple Intelligences Theory Can Guide Teachers' Practices: Ensuring Success for Students with Disabilities
  This OnPoint written by National Institute of Urban School Improvement (NIUSI) explored the intersection between Multiple Intelligence(MI) and special education. MI can be used to improve the learning opportunities for diverse learners, and it has a positive impact on both students with special needs and their teachers.
• The Role and Responsibilities of Teaching Assistants in Inclusive Education: What's Appropriate?
  This study describes a social validation of appropriate roles and responsibilities for teaching assistants (TAs) in inclusive classrooms. A self-report survey was rated by a sample of general education teachers, special education teachers, and TAs employed in urban and rural inclusive programs.
• Preparing for Culturally Responsive Teaching
  The author discusses improving the school success of ethnically diverse students through culturally responsive teaching and for preparing teachers in pre-service education programs with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to do this.
• Teaching Mathematics from a Multicultural Perspective
  The author describes principles and instructional strategies for teaching mathematics to culturally diverse students. She explains the fundamental principles of multicultural mathematics; approaches to multicultural mathematics instruction (e.g., portrayal of cultural groups in instructional materials and historical roots of mathematics concepts); and instructional strategies for diverse student(e.g., high expectations, questioning, cooperative learning, and technology use).
• Leadership Academies - Module 5, Assessment
  Conducting sound assessments is a necessary part of exemplary teaching. Assessments not only evaluate student learning, they serve to guide subsequent instruction.
• Becoming Culturally Responsive Educators: Rethinking Teacher Education Pedagogy
  This paper is one of the short practitioner-oriented pamphlets produced by the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt). This practitioner brief deals with designing teacher education programs (TEPs) that are mindful of student diversity.
• Outcomes for students with and without learning disabilities in inclusive classrooms
  The authors focus on intensive staff development for general and special educators that taught the educators how to implement instructional strategies with students who had a wide range of abilities in an inclusive classroom. Their study that examined social outcomes of 59 elementary school students with learning disabilities, 72 low- to average-achieving students, and 54 high-achieving students, found that students in the consultation/collaborative-teaching setting demonstrated more positive outcomes than students in the co-teaching setting on friendship quality and peer acceptance.
• Looking at the Evidence More Carefully: Achieving the Ideal?
  Schools could make a major contribution toward a racist-free society by stressing more emphatically the need for teachers and students to critically examine all the evidence before making judgments or taking action. By instilling into children a basic set of rules enabling them to make appropriate judgments, teachers can help people rationally defend their beliefs, opinions, and behaviors.
• Integrating Lifelong Learning Perspectives
  This report was developed by United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It includes forthy-three papers on the topic of promoting lifelong learning.
• General and Special Educators' Perceptions of Teaching Strategies for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students
  The authors of this article presented results from a survey of 403 general and special education teachers. They found most had received no training in multicultural education even though most reported that cultural knowledge would help them understand the influence of their students' verbal and nonverbal learning/behavioral styles.
• Multicultural Technology Integration: The Winds of Change Amid the Sands of Time
  This case study describes how a high school language arts teacher in a poor border community in southern New Mexico combined technology-based teaching strategies with multicultural elements to ensure learning and equitable access to technology for her minority students. The authors discuss bilingual and bicultural students, constructivist classrooms, and instructional flexibility.
• Towards Equal Educational Opportunities for Asylum-Seekers
  The authors interviewed and surveyed staff, asylum-seeking/refugee English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students, and ESOL students who came for other reasons at one British college, examining why the college's ESOL provision featured separate programs for the two groups. The authors discuss: the consequences of this divide; teacher discourses; alternative pedagogies; labeling of students; integrated provision; and multicultural education.
• A Call for Change in Multicultural Training at Graduate Schools of Education: Educating To End Oppression and for Social Justice
  Graduate-level multicultural training is important for preparing future teachers to work effectively with diverse students. The author suggests professionals experienced in multiculturalism must revise and refine multicultural training to better address immigrants' diversity issues and issues around sexuality, disability, and spirituality.
• Inclusive Schooling in a Plural Society: Removing the Margins
  The author proposes a multi-centric model of education that actively works to de-center dominant Eurocentric knowledge and incorporate other worldviews throughout all aspects of teaching and learning. The model has four primary learning objectives: integrating multiple centers of knowledge, affecting social and educational change, recognizing and respecting difference, and teaching youth and community empowerment.
• First things first: Demystifying data analysis
  This article applies to all teachers who struggle with which data can be used to improve teaching and learning. In this article, Schmoker points out that in developing data driven practices, teachers need to overcome experts’ tendencies to make the analyses of student achievement data complicated.
• The Relationship Between Teacher Effectiveness and Teacher Attitudes Toward Issues Related to Inclusion
  The inclusion of students with special needs in regular education classrooms has become a major focus of current educational reform, and regular education teacher's acceptance is a critical component in how this type of service delivery will play out. The author of this study reexamined the results of a study which indicated that more effective teachers were less willing to include students with special needs in their classrooms.
• A Faceless Bureaucrat Ponders Special Education, Disability, and White Privilege
  The author of this article critiques categorical approaches to special education, overrepresentation of minority children in special education, inclusion and exclusion, and white privilege. Also, she describes the potential of multicultural education, transformation, and participatory leadership approaches to address the issues raised in the critique.
• Anti-Bias Teaching To Address Cultural Diversity
  Multiculturalism must be integrated into classrooms and the curriculum, and it must be all-encompassing, taught through formal lessons and modeled and demonstrated at all times. The author describes how teachers can create an anti-bias curriculum and promote a multicultural or anti-bias classroom.