A Room with a Differentiated View

Grades K-4

Foreword by Carol Lyons

These days, ballooning class sizes make it harder and harder to meet students' individual educational needs without losing sight of the class's larger goals. Enter differentiated instruction, a flexible, smart way to teach a classroom of individuals instead of an individual classroom.

In A Room with a Differentiated View, Joanne Yatvin shows you how the parts of your class can exceed the whole by presenting a practical and theoretically sound handbook that's loaded with exciting, workable, and easy-to-use systems, routines, and strategies that give children the freedom to manage their own learning and you the freedom to guide them each through it. Yatvin address the major questions and topics associated with differentiated instruction in three parts:

• What Is Differentiated Instruction? lays out what you need to know to get started, including in-depth discussions of classroom space, grouping, scheduling, and using assessment as feedback toward further differentiation.
• Differentiating Throughout the Curriculum offers focused vignettes and substantial example activities that take you inside differentiated classrooms to see teachers developing children's literacy skills across the content areas while responding to the individual reading and writing needs of students.
• Exceptional Students and Differentiating Teachers answers two challenging questions for differentiated classrooms: What do you do with learning-disabled and gifted students?; and What specific supports do you need to develop a differentiated practice?

Differentiated instruction is good teaching, responsive to specific student needs and professionally satisfying for you. Embrace the diversity of learning styles in your classroom, read A Room with a Differentiated View, and find out how teaching to individuals will improve your class's performance as a whole.