How to Differentiate Learning provides guidance for schools and districts to start or improve the effort to differentiate instruction. Based on what educators know about the differences among children they teach, and based on what we know of brain research, teachers must find and embrace ways to differentiate curriculum, assessment and entry points to understanding in order to make all students successful. This book provides background from experts and clarifies what is not differentiation as well as what is. It offers ways for teachers to think about student interests and learning profiles and also looks at varied ways to approach instructional planning for differentiated learning.

Educators Brian Pete and Robin Fogarty present research-based instructional ideas that encompass an essential repertoire for beginning and developing teachers as they become skilled professionals.

Through a meta-analysis of studies on instructional strategies, they have identified nine families of strategies that significantly increase student achievement. The results of this meta-analysis point educator to a proven pedagogy with teacher-tested, tried-and-true techniques that work to increase student achievement through cognitive and cooperative efforts.

The skills are organized in a 'framework for quality' that includes observable skills in four instructional areas:
  • Creating an Environment for Learning,
  • Teaching the Standards of Learning
  • Structuring Interactions with Learning,
  • Reflecting about the Learning.

This is useful reading for anyone who wants to develop as a teacher.

Here Brian Pete and Robin Fogarty explain how the brain learns best and all the things teachers can do to facilitate the learning part of the teaching scene.

They present a unique organization of Renate and Geoffrey Caine's twelve brain principles. The twelve principles are arranged in four specific quadrants. Each quadrant speaks to a particular aspect of the high-achieving classroom and highlights how instructional decisions are governed by the twelve principles. The Table of Contents:

Part One: Climate for Learning
Challenge/Threat: Learning Principle
Emotions/Cognition: Learning Principle
Focused/Peripheral: Learning Principle
Part Two: Skills of Learning
Parts/Whole: Learning Principle
Spatial/Rote: Learning Principle
Parallel Processing: Learning Principle
Part Three: Interactions With Learning
Physiology: Learning Principle
Brain Uniqueness: Learning Principle
Social/Experience: Learning Principle
Part Four: Learning About Learning
Meaning: Learning Principle
Patterning: Learning Principle
Conscious/Unconscious: Learning Principle

The analysis of data for instructional decision making is a hallmark of the 21st century. Teachers and administrators alike need a process that links instant, consistent, and relevant data to instant, consistent, and relevant results. Data! Dialogue! Decisions! describes a simple process--selecting a piece of data, dialoging about the data, and making SMART goal decisions about how to increase student performance--that includes the critical elements for powerful school improvement: meaningful teams, managed data, and measurable goals. Using a collegial process, administrators and teachers choose their own school of class achievement data to analyze and interpret as they target 'breakthrough' instructional decisions that yield rapid and quantifiable results. Results have been staggeringly successful.

A Look at Transfer examines the six levels of transfer and the adult learner. The book explores the seven bridging strategies to use with adult learners as they learn how the professional development content they are learning does, indeed, transfer into their classrooms and into their life situations.


The Adult Learner: Some Things We Know addresses the 'warrior' who rises to the challenge of teaching the adult learner. The discussion is designed as a catalyst for dialogue about the adult learner and to uncover the complexities of teaching this rare and riveting species.This book is organized around three interlocking themes: some things we know about the adult learner; some things we know about change; and some things we know about professional development. In the process of reading the book, the reader gets a glimpse into the research that supports the theory of the adult learner, into the principles that guide the learning practices of the adult learner, and into the strategies that 'work in the work setting' for the adult learner.