Teaching Transformed

This book aims to convey a vision of the ideal classroom for today's students and academic standards. It proposes that schools made of the classrooms described here can achieve four goals—excellence, fairness, inclusion and harmony—simultaneously and maximally. All school reformers are trying for better schooling; but all are not marching to the same drum. Four goals-- Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion and Harmony-- are emphasized by different groups. Are the four goals competing ideas of the good, so that national political debates must result in prioritizing, in winners and losers? Tharp, Estrada, Dalton, and Yamauchi demonstrate that the four goals can all be achieved, simultaneously and maximally, by classrooms of a new vision.All school reform has one final common pathway -- instructional activity. Whatever the specific reform, from policy or finance to teacher preparation, none will have any effect on student development except as it operates through the teaching-and-learning activities of classrooms. Teaching Transformed is a new vision for classrooms, based on consensus research findings and unified practice prescriptions, explained and justified by new developments in sociocultural theory, and clarified by an explicit five-phase developmental guide for achieving that transformation. In the spirit of Rousing Minds to Life, Teaching Transformed is both visionary and practical, both theoretical and data-driven, and determined to create effective education for all students. Professional educators, parents, policy makers, and any reader concerned with saving our schools will find this book necessary to understand our current plight, and to envision a realistic means of transformation.