Seeking Diversity: Language Arts with Adolescents (Perspectives in Neural Computing)

Linda Rief takes the philosophies and ideas of Atwell, Romano, Graves, Murray, Calkins, and the Goodmans and makes them her own. She adapts them to her classroom, her students, her style, her constraints and invites other teachers to do the same- stretch the ideas, make them theirs, but above all, trust the students.

Seeking Diversity is organized chronologically, following Linda and her students from September through June. Teachers will find especially helpful:

• organization techniques-materials, the room, and expectations
• ways of using life experiences and literature to immerse the students in meaningful writing and reading
• evaluation beliefs and techniques that focus on process as well as product and on self-evaluation over outside assessment
• portfolios from a range of students-what's in them, who chooses, and what they show us
• a new look at art as an integral part of students' literacy
• an appendix filled with handouts for both students and parents
• numerous lists of best-liked books for individualized reading, reading aloud, and reading together.