Be the Architect of Your Inclusive Classroom: Building Communities for Learning

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,＂ the text 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 is vice dean for teacher education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Erika Hughes Hooper is a senior staff developer at Inclusive Classrooms Collective in Queens County, New York. Britt Hamre is a lecturer in the Elementary Inclusive Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University.