High-Expectation Curricula

Despite growing evidence that all students will benefit from engaging and challenging instruction, many struggling students continue to experience a circumscribed curriculum that emphasizes low-level skills. Featuring contributions from emerging and well-known researchers, this important volume is about the enactment of high-expectation curricula in everyday practice. Chapters document specific classroom strategies that make a difference in the learning of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and cultural and linguistic minority communities. While the book focuses on language and literacy instruction, key chapters on math and science also demonstrate high-expectation teaching across the curriculum.

Book Features:

• A broad framework for creating high-expectation curricula in underperforming K–12 schools.
• Clear illustrations of what alternative literacy practices look like.
• Powerful examples of rich math and science instruction.
• Research-based strategies for second language learners, students with disabilities, and struggling readers.
• An incisive critique of the “deficit-driven” curricula that dominates in underachieving schools and classrooms.

Curt Dudley-Marling is a professor at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Sarah Michaels is professor of education and senior research scholar at the Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts.

“High-Expectation Curricula features work by some of this generation’s leading researchers on classroom talk. But it also provides an accessible entry into a century-long conversation on what works in the education of those students whose socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds have led to educational marginalization, lower achievement and, in some instances, systematically engineered failure. ”
—From the Foreword by Allan Luke, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

“In an age of ever increasing inequality and proliferating equity gaps in school, it is not our children that are broken, but our schools and our relationships with our children within them. High-Expectation Curricula is a virtual field guide on how to fix both.”
—James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University

2013 The U.K. Times Higher Education Suggested Reading List