Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning

How can you empower students with invisible disabilities to manage their challenges, accept and advocate for themselves, and reach their goals and dreams? This guidebook has inspiring and informative answers. Told with the authentic voices of adults with hidden disabilities, this encouraging, eye-opening book will help you guide students on the Path to Disability Pride and support their success in the classroom and community. Personal stories blend with powerful strategies as the authors share reflections on their experience with disability—and offer up practical teaching tips and interventions based on the latest research. An essential resource for educators, families, and self-advocates, this book will help students with non-visible disabilities dare to dream big and unlock their full potential.

Since the first edition was published, author Susan Winebrenner has spent eight years using it with school districts, teachers, parents, and kids across the U.S. and the U.K. this revised, expanded, updated edition reflects her personal experiences and the changes that have taken place in education over the years. Her basic philosophy hasn’t changed, and all of the proven, practical, classroom-tested strategies teachers love are still here. But there’s now an entire chapter on identifying gifted students. The step-by-step how-tos for using the strategies are more detailed and user-friendly. There’s a new chapter especially for parents. And all of the forms in the book are also on CD-ROM (sold separately) so you can print them out and customize them for your classroom.

Completely updated, with 40 percent new material, this is an indispensable guide for people with disabilities who wish to improve their lives through computer technology. It lists what’s available and how best to use it; provides names of organizations, vendors, and online resources; and tells the stories of real people of all ages who are using technology successfully.

The middle level years are an extraordinary period of our human development. The only other time we grow as much physically, emotionally, and intellectually is form ages zero to two. But early adolescence is much more than just tripping over large feet and calling friends on the phone to discuss who likes whom. The ways we deal with conflict, relationships, and personal development as adults have direct connections to specific experiences we had between the ages of ten and fourteen. We can create a very positive future then, when we provide careful and compassionate experiences for today’s young adolescents.

This widely adopted text and K-8 practitioner resource demonstrates how successful literacy teachers combine explicit skills instruction with an emphasis on reading for meaning. Distinguished researcher Richard L. Allington builds on the late Michael Pressley’s work to explain the theories and findings that guide balanced teaching and illustrate what exemplary lessons look like in action. Detailed examples offer a window into highly motivating classrooms around the country. Comprehensive in scope, the book discusses specific ways to build word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, especially for readers who are struggling.

New to This Edition
*Updated throughout to reflect important recent research advances.
*Chapter summing up the past century’s reading debates and the growing acceptance of balanced teaching.
*New and revised vignettes of exemplary teachers.

How and when does a child begin to make sense of the world? Why does a lively preschool child so often become a semiliterate and defeated school failure?

Developmental psychologist Margaret Donaldson shows that much of the intellectual framework on which we base our teaching is misleading. We both underestimate the astonishing rational powers of young children and ignore the major stumbling block that children face when starting school.

Given a setting and a language that makes sense to them in human terms, very young children can perform tasks often thought to be beyond them. The preschool child learns everything in a human situation. Only in school is he asked to acquire skills―reading, writing, arithmetic―isolated from a real-life context. This transition is difficult.

The author suggests a range of strategies that parents and schools can adopt to help children. She argues that reading is even more important than we have thought it to be, since learning to read can actually speed children through the crucial transition.