Everybody's Classroom

Most people are keenly aware that every student is different and that today’s classrooms challenge educators to build safe and successful learning communities comprising students whose races, languages, cultures, experiences, assets, and dreams vary greatly. This book offers K–12 teachers both the foundations for differentiating their instruction and the means to maximize learning opportunities by getting to know students beyond the labels and stereotypes that often accompany them into the classroom. Tomlinson shows how to use “highways and exit ramps” to reach the whole class, with “highway” content and “exit ramps” to specialize needs. Chapters offer numerous recommendations for modifying environments, activities, and assessments; for helping teachers move forward in their instructional planning; and for helping each learner grow academically. Everybody's Classroom extends Tomlinson’s previous work by looking more deeply at specific student populations to help educators create classrooms that are more inclusive than ever before. Chapters cover successful differentiation for English learners; students experiencing poverty; students with different ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender orientations; and students with diverse identified special needs.

Book Features:

• Provides a framework for understanding the scope of differentiation, as opposed to seeing it as a prescribed set of instructional strategies.
• Shows how to recognize common student needs that cut across student labels, from gifted to traumatized.
• Offers suggestions for teacher actions based on observation of students and student work.
• Includes classroom examples and helpful tables, charts, and graphics.

Carol Ann Tomlinson is a bestselling author, international professional developer, William Clay Parrish, Jr. Professor Emeritus, and former chair of educational leadership, foundations, and policy at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development, where she was also codirector of the University’s Institutes on Academic Diversity. Prior to her work at the university, she was a K-12 teacher for 21 years.

“ Everybody’s Classroom is recommended as a critical resource for teachers as they consider the needs of all students and design the most impactful instruction and learning environment for them.”

—Teachers College Record

“Tomlinson offers truly helpful ideas and approaches that will allow readers to experience the kind of success that is both immediately rewarding and also highly motivating to continue to do the needed work as they see students flourish.”
—From the Foreword by James H. Borland, Teachers College, Columbia University

“In this latest addition to her lifelong work on differentiation, Carol Ann Tomlinson makes the case that every student in the classroom matters—across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, and every other category in a given classroom—to the extent that differentiation is absolutely necessary and unavoidable.”
—Baruti K. Kafele, teacher, school leader, and author

“With her uniquely insightful lens as prolific scholar and grounded practitioner, Tomlinson focuses on the needs of specific populations in Everybody’s Classroom, exploring how teachers can meet the social, emotional, and academic needs of all students. Her guidance is at once inspirational and practical, speaking directly to the questions ringing in the minds and hearts of teachers grappling with what it takes to support student success in today’s classrooms.”
—Kristina J. Doubet, professor, James Madison University