Leadership for Differentiating Schools and Classrooms

Book excerpt: 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.