Managing Diverse Classrooms

How to Build on Students' Cultural Strengths

By: Elise Trumbull, Carrie Rothstein-Fisch

This book helps teachers understand some of the most powerful cultural differences that can lead to classroom conflict for many students and shows how teachers can capitalize on these differences to make each classroom a harmonious, productive environment. Drawing on research from the Bridging Cultures Project originally developed at WestEd, the authors present a simple framework for understanding cultural differences, comparing the "individualistic" culture that prevails in American education with the "collectivistic" culture that characterizes most of the world's population. The authors describe a two-part framework that makes many cultural differences understandable and easier to bridge, including information on:

• how the home culture of Latino immigrant students often differs from the "mainstream" culture of U.S. schools
• how to take advantage of cultural strengths to improve classroom management, student performance, and school-parent relations, and
• ways to use the "power of the group" to maintain a focus on instruction.

This practical guide includes teacher-developed strategies for tackling the spectrum of common challenges teachers face, from organizing the classroom to grouping students, from establishing rules to motivating reluctant learners, and from conferencing with parents to rewarding progress. The Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development selected this book for distribution to nearly 100,000 of its members in 2008.