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Teaching is often characterized as an isolated activity, yet opportunities for teachers to work and learn together in schools are increasing. Underlying this shift is the view that as teachers work on new practices and teaching challenges together, they will express varied perspectives, reveal different teaching styles and experiences, and stimulate reflection and professional growth. Despite strong research interest in teacher learning groups, few studies have looked at the relationship between teachers' conversations and collaboration outside the classroom and their actual classroom teaching. Drawing on data from a larger study of literacy instruction with middle‐school teachers, this article describes how three teachers participated in an ongoing literacy program with a research group. Two were seventh‐ and eighth‐grade language‐arts teachers, the third was a special‐education teacher who taught a substantially separate class of cognitively delayed and learning‐disabled students. Case studies of each t...

Located in the Florida panhandle, Apalachee High School has a student population of 1,894 students, 13% of whom have identified disabilities. The school has a highly experienced teaching staff and a special education faculty that provides acknowledged leadership in the school. Apalachee includes students with disabilities in all aspects of school life and sustains a high level of community involvement in students' success. The graphic metaphor used to represent Apalachee's approach is a set of globes and pathways that represent the academic programs and the support structures that students use to progress within and between programs. Three student case studies help to illustrate how the “pathways” respond to students with disabilities at different points on a continuum of academic and social needs and abilities. Four-year transcripts for 39 students reflect the range of opportunities and supports (pathways) that characterize Apalachee and are illustrated by the three students we shadowed.

Opportunities to discuss literature with peers are critical to students' development of literary understanding. Despite the importance of these discourse experiences, many middle-school students are not afforded these opportunities or the necessary teacher support in their English language arts classrooms. Based on a sociocultural perspective, we set out to examine the ways that middle-grades students, particularly those with disabilities, contribute to peer-led discussions and how their participation enables them to build toward textual understanding, social understanding, and understanding of literary discourse. We conducted an in-depth analysis of a verbatim transcription of a video-taped literacy lesson in an urban classroom. Drawing on that analysis, we describe the ways students participated in the literary discourse and the teacher practices that supported students' participation in this discourse. This analysis provides evidence that students with disabilities can acquire the discourse practices needed for interpreting challenging literature with their regular education peers.

Over a three-year period, Education Development Center, Inc. selected and studied three urban middle schools that intentionally set out to serve all of their students, including those with identified disabilities, those acquiring English proficiency, and those recently immigrated to the United States. The three schools share the philosophy that all students are academically competent when they are given the tools for constructing knowledge. All three schools have strong records of progress on various measures of academic learning, including standards-based, statewide tests. Although these schools have developed different cultures around academic excellence, they share a number of common features. This paper discusses seven features of the cultures of excellence and belonging that characterize these schools, drawing on a case study of one of the schools to illustrate how the features interact and mutually support one another.

Literacy curriculum reforms in the middle grades require students to interpret challenging literature and write well-formed texts. Teachers are accountable for designing instruction that builds these high-level literacy skills with increasingly diverse groups of students. In this article we describe findings from studying a literacy approach aimed at supporting'teachers and students in meeting these demands. Based on a sociocognitive perspective, the Supported Literacy approach engages students in collaborative interpretation through a seamless integration of reading, discussing, and writing about compelling literature. Through classroom observation and outcomes assessment, we have identified features of learning opportunities that enable students with disabilities to perform similarly to their peers. We describe these instructional features and illustrate how they work together to support all students in achieving rigorous outcomes.

State frameworks emphasize literacy goals such as understanding literary concepts and understanding how to read and compose texts with varied purposes. Students with learning disabilities need to engage in instruction that addresses these goals and takes into account the special literacy challenges these students face. This article describes a study of how middle-school teachers in general education classrooms implemented a Supported Literacy approach and how students with disabilities performed in relation to their peers. Supported Literacy engages students in integrated thematic units in which they read, discuss, and write about a shared, age-appropriate text. Findings indicate that teachers provided students with disabilities access to the full range of challenging reading and writing activities in the unit. Students with disabilities performed similarly to normally achieving and honors students in one of the most challenging comprehension and writing activities, writing persuasively about their interpretation of a text. Results also indicate that all students need a fuller understanding of the process of developing a persuasive argument and that teachers need more skill in assessing students' work to determine and respond to students' levels of understanding. The article discusses implications of these findings for studying complex literacy interventions.

Students with learning disabilities often perform poorly on multiple-choice tests that emphasize recall and factual knowledge. This study compared the effect of two alternative assessmentsa constructed diagram test and a written questionnaireon fourth-grade learning disabled (LD) and non-learning disabled (Non-LD) students' learning. As part of a larger investigation of different approaches to hands-on science learning, 172 students (including 33 LD students) in six urban and two suburban classrooms participated in the study. Results indicate that students' assessment outcomes are a function of learner status (LD, low, average and high achieving) and level of domain specific knowledge after instruction. After controlling for domain specific knowledge, students with LD, and low and average achieving students obtained higher scores on the constructed diagram test than on the questionnaire. High achieving students were not sensitive to format differences, performing comparably on the two measures. The facilitative effect of the diagram format may have been due to differences in the primary symbol systems (graphic vs. text) and the openness of the response format (constrained vs. open) of the constructed diagram and questionnaire, respectively.

Word processing offers promising support far students with learning disabilities (LD). We compared fourth‐grade students' writing quality over a 7‐month period in computer‐supported versus paper‐and‐pencil writing‐process classrooms. LD and non‐ID students improved the quality of their imaginative stories over time, regardless of the writing tool, with one exception. Students who carried out long‐term writing assignments with paper and pencil demonstrated a negative growth rate in writing quality. LD students in particular may be impeded by paper‐and‐pencil tools during extended writing assignments that call for sustained engagement and revision.

Everyday conversation between parents and toddlers provides a rich context for the child's acquisition of conceptual skills and communication abilities. While earlier studies generally have analyzed the utterances of either parent or child, this analysis of conversations of one mother and 22‐month old child focuses on the interaction of the two. The paper describes the sequences the pair uses in clarifying one another's focus of attention and in instructing and learning about concepts and motor skills. Mother and child adapt clarification and instruction patterns to the constraints of three play situations: free play, reading aloud, and parallel activity. The child adopts a “clarification” and the mother an “interpreter” role during free play, where the mother supports the child's focus. They reverse roles and communication strategies in the parallel context, where the child attempts to draw the mother into collaborative play. Further studies of mother‐toddler discourse should focus on variations across m...

This paper addresses the need for models for assessing multicultural programs in the community college, the most culturally and socioeconomically diverse educational institutions in the country. A three-dimensional framework presents faculty, student, and curriculum variables critical to the implementation and outcomes of multicultural programs. The framework emerged from the formative evaluation of a new interdisciplinary social science curriculum and guided the design of the national field test of that curriculum in 30 community college classrooms. Three kinds of results are reported: implementation patterns; appropriateness to faculty members' teaching goals; and impact on reading behavior, interest, overall learning, and political efficacy of students with diverse ages, ethnic and sociocultural backgrounds, and political positions. Political efficacy gains of older students and students with lower socioeconomic backgrounds are discussed. The importance of such a framework in documenting the interaction between a curriculum and its sociocultural context is stressed.

The evaluation profession is profoundly critical of its own failure to have more impact on educational programs. Discussions of the need for evaluation theory and improved evaluator training largely focus on improving summative evaluation of program impact (Weiss 1972a, 1972b; Cohen 1975). Until recently, much less attention has been given to clarifying and strengthening the role and methods of formative evaluation, which assists in early program development and revision. While there is a general acceptance of the idea of formative evaluation, the profession has only begun to clarify how early evaluation research can influence the quality of the program (Fisher 1974; Sanders and Cunningham 1974; Dick 1977; Miree 1977).1 The question of how formative and summative evaluation may be linked has been almost entirely neglected. The current formative/summative distinction in evaluation research