Blackstone Valley Prep, a K-12 charter school network, admits students from across four racially and socioeconomically diverse communities in the northeast corner of Rhode Island. The network integrates students within classrooms, regardless of performance level. Its culturally responsive curriculum aims to reflect and incorporate the range of…

One of the pressing issues facing public schools in the United States is the challenge of providing a quality education to English Learners (ELs). The vast majority of the teachers licensed at the authors' institution graduate with very little knowledge of how to work successfully with EL students. The need to prepare all teachers for work with…

One way to meet the unique challenges in diverse classrooms is co-teaching. Friend and Cook (2010) described co-teaching as an approach that provides specialized services to individual students in a general education classroom. Specifically, co-teaching involves two or more educators working collaboratively to deliver instruction to a…

Scholars who study teaching and learning have provided the academy with a range of progressive pedagogies that move beyond traditional ways of teaching. In the call for the use of diverse classroom practices in higher education, many have highlighted the benefits and challenges that come with collaborative teaching models. In this chapter, the…

This paper explores the need for innovative leadership in teacher education in the Canadian context, with a particular call for renewed professional development of current teachers. Within a country defined as multicultural, recent demographic shifts, interregional migration, growing ethnic diversity, and the emergence of a paradigm of inclusion,…

Despite greater responsibility for creating equitable and inclusive classroom models, some research suggests that educators "may not have the necessary attitudes, dispositions, or perhaps more important, the professional skills to successfully instruct students in diverse, inclusive classrooms" (Van Laarhoven, Munk, Lynch, Bosman & Rouse, 2007, p.…

The pedagogical assumptions and teaching practices of learning community models reflect exemplary conditions for learning, so using these models with unprepared students seems desirable and worthy of investigation. This chapter describes the key role of faculty in creating active, integrative learning experiences for students in basic skills…

High schools are under tremendous pressure to increase graduation rates and lower dropout numbers. A survey conducted for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation indicated that over a third of students entering high school never graduate on time. Students who drop out claim that the curriculum is disconnected from real life and that their schools…

The rationale for and documented benefits of collaborative planning and teaching are explored in this article. When teachers collaborate on their planning and teaching, they are better able to meet the needs of diverse students and fulfill their legal responsibilities. In addition, the authors describe the multiple ways to collaborate and coteach,…

The university curriculum for an elementary education degree traditionally includes a "basics of music" and a "basics of art" course. These two courses represent a nod to the importance of the arts in the elementary school, and they may be the only formal contact with music and arts pedagogy that prospective teachers receive. One way to make these…

Over the past 7 years the authors have been involved in the development of a new model for the education of science teachers that has the potential to address teacher education in challenging urban settings characterized by problems such as teacher turnover and retention, low job satisfaction, and contradictions arising from cultural and ethnic…

This article describes one school's year-long effort to provide equitable access to the core curriculum to a very culturally, linguistically, and academically diverse student body while increasing teachers' needs for responsive professional development by piloting a dramatic change in the special education service delivery system with the support…