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Leadership for Differentiating Schools & Classrooms

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Leadership for Differentiating Schools & Classrooms by Carol Ann Tomlinson and Susan Demirsky Allan offers an interesting and invigorating view of the way classrooms could and maybe should be. Written for school leaders, this work is even more meaningful for teachers. Students come to school in all stages of readiness, and with all levels of skills and talents, and the usual approach has been to treat them the same, as a group, and bring achievement levels up en masse. However, the authors point out that the old approach of taking "gifted" students out of the mainstream classroom has worked out well for those students to an extent, but there is a better way. That way is differentiating instruction within the classroom.

Tomlinson and Allan's book offers an overview of differentiating instruction, that is, of challenging students regardless of their abilities, at their own levels, in their own classrooms. Because no single approach works with all children, a variety of approaches are examined, as well as suggestions for leaders who wish to pursue this direction. This book will open the minds of teachers, administrators, and parents, alike.

With Leadership For Differentiating Schools & Classrooms, Carol Tomlinson and Susan Allan effectively collaborate to explore 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. A timely and important contribution to today's reinvigorated national discussion on educational policies and classroom practices at the national, state and local levels, Leadership For Differentiating Schools & Classrooms reveals how school leaders can encourage and support growth in our classrooms.