Be the Architect of Your Inclusive Classroom

This practical book shows today’s educators how to design a sustainable classroom architecture that maximizes student engagement, learning, and belonging.

Based on the authors’ collaborative work with K–12 public school teachers, this practical book offers an invitation to create dynamic learning opportunities in classrooms designed to challenge and support all learners.

Because teaching contexts are always unique and shifting, we cannot rely primarily upon scripts, recipes, “best practices,” and prescribed curriculum. Rather, based on teachers’ analysis of their own contexts, the authors describe and show how today’s educators can curate strategies, curriculum, and methods to design a sustainable classroom architecture that maximizes student engagement, learning, and belonging.

Attending to principles of culturally sustaining pedagogy, Universal Design for Learning, and “backwards design,” Be the Architect of Your Inclusive Classroom focuses on curriculum design, classroom behavior, and building relationships with students, colleagues, families, and communities. Readers will come to understand why this kind of teaching is both complex and inherently rewarding.

Book Features:

• Provides actionable tools to create classroom curriculum and practice that will improve learning and equity outcomes for all students.
• Stimulates collaborative dialogue through Fearless Inventories that invite teachers to examine their own practices that promote belonging and student success.
• Uses a lens of critical inclusivity, offering a bottom-up and collegial approach to designing instruction.
• Focuses on learning rather than compliance and belonging rather than ranking and sorting learners.
• Includes numerous examples of teachers creating inclusive classrooms as central teaching points.

Celia Oyler ended her long career in education as vice dean for teacher education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Erika Hughes Hooper is an educational consultant and coach affiliated with Inclusive Classrooms Collective. Britt Hamre is a lecturer in the Elementary Inclusive Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University.

“This illuminating guide achieves the difficult but urgent work of blending brilliant social analysis with pragmatic advice to educators, positioning and preparing them to become architects of critically inclusive classrooms. Each provocative chapter on the essential components—building communities, organizing learning experiences, creating curricula, and assessing learning—is paired with a ‘fearless inventory’ to be used for self-assessment or in an educator study group. Essential and inspirational reading for all educators!”
—Lesley Bartlett, professor and associate dean, University of Wisconsin–Madison

"In Be the Architect of Your Inclusive Classroom, Oyler, Hooper, and Hamre provide educators with both the inspiration and practical strategies to create truly inclusive classrooms. This book not only helps teachers envision spaces where all students can thrive, but also underscores why such environments are essential for every learner. With practical approaches and a strong focus on building safe, communal learning experiences, it empowers teachers to foster classrooms that are both inclusive and impactful.”
—María Cioè-Peña, assistant professor, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

"So much about contemporary schooling stresses rote compliance and encourages toxic uniformity. This ignores difference. It flattens the identities of children and the adults who love them. This book is a bright torch in that dark landscape. It gives practical classroom approaches and offers the insight necessary for all those who want to journey toward the light, but do not have the institutional support to do so. This book is a vital first step, trusted mentor, and essential resource all in one."
—Kass and Cornelius Minor, The Minor Collective