Collaborate, Communicate, and Differentiate!: How to Increase Student Learning in Today’s Diverse Schools

"An all-in-one book―a lighthearted and well grounded introduction to collaboration, how it can improve education for all children, and its role in effectively educating students with special needs. Murawski and Spencer tell it like it is, and they do so with humor and straight talk."
―Lynne Cook, Professor, School of Education
California State University, Dominguez Hills

"As a kid who struggled in school, this is the book that I wish every one of my teachers had read. It is a stunning achievement and huge step forward to making all schools inclusive of all learners!"
―Johnathan Mooney, Author, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal

Collaboration 101 for teachers, parents, and school communities

Teachers in both general and special education classrooms are being asked to collaborate to give all students access to the general education curriculum. The challenge is that teachers receive very little training in how to work together to educate students successfully. Do you wonder how to get started, how much time it will take, and what the results will be? Collaborate, Communicate, and Differentiate! addresses those issues and more, taking collaboration out of the abstract and supplying easy-to-use strategies that apply to daily tasks such as

• Planning and differentiating instruction
• Communicating with families
• Using Universal Design for Learning to form instruction
• Assessing students with diverse backgrounds and abilities
• Co-teaching
• Coordinating with all staff members

This reader-friendly text ties each strategy to the goal of improving student outcomes. Included are vignettes, In a Nutshell and Eye on the Research quick-reference guides, reproducible forms, Principal Points to share with administrators, and a companion website. Educators who have wondered how to make collaboration reasonable, feasible, and time-efficient will find the answers in this book!

Wendy W. Murawski, Ph.D., MBA, MEd, EdS, is the Executive Director and Eisner Endowed Chair for the Center for Teaching and Learning at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where she is also a Full Professor in the Department of Special Education and the Director of SIMPACT Immersive Learning. Dr. Murawski is the national Past President of the Teacher Education Division (TED) of CEC and an internationally known speaker and author, presenting in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. Her research focuses on co-teaching and inclusive practices nationally and internationally. She has published extensively around inclusive education, co-teaching, collaboration, and Universal Design for Learning, to include 18 books and numerous chapters, blogs, and peer-reviewed articles. She is the CEO of 2Teach^Ò Global (www.2TeachLLC.com), an educational consulting company dedicated to promoting inclusive education around the world. In her personal life, Wendy enjoys traveling with her husband, learning languages, reading, drinking merlot, seeing movies, going to Book Club, visiting her college-bound son Kiernan, and pretending she is going to work out.

Sally Spencer, Ed.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Special Education at California State University, Northridge, where she teaches courses in assessment, special education teaching methods, reading instruction, and collaborative processes. Prior to that, she was a special education teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District, where she experienced the joys and challenges of collaboration as a teacher of self-contained special education classes, as a resource specialist, and as a co-teacher in a fully-inclusive elementary school. In 2001 she was awarded Outstanding Special Educator of the year by the Southern California branch of the Council for Exceptional Children, and her heart is still in the classroom with the hundreds of students who touched her life and taught her everything she knows about special education. Sally is a presenter nationally on the subject of teaching reading to students with mild to moderate disabilities, and is published in the areas of reading instruction, collaboration and inclusion. She lives in Northridge, CA, with her husband, three dogs and six birds.