Collaborating to Support All Learners in English, Social Studies, and Humanities

How can we help students develop the thinking skills they need to be successful learners? How does this relate to deep learning of important concepts? How can we engage and support diverse learners in inclusive classrooms where they develop understanding and thinking skills?

In this book, Faye and Leyton explore these questions and offer classroom examples to help busy teachers develop communities where all students learn. This book is written by two experienced educators who offer a welcoming and “can do” approach to the big ideas in education today. In this book, you will find:

• insightful ways to teach diverse learners, e.g., literature and information circles, open-ended strategies, cooperative learning, inquiry curriculum design frameworks, e.g., universal design for learning (UDL) and backward design assessment for, of, and as learning
• lessons to help students develop deep learning and thinking skills in English, Social Studies, and Humanities
• excellent examples of theory and practice made accessible real school examples of collaboration — teachers working together to create better learning opportunities for their students

Faye Brownlie’s (she/her/hers) goal is to build capacity with teachers, co-planning and co-teaching, providing seminars, workshops, and keynote presentations in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Passionate about including and supporting all learners, her work focuses on literacy, teaching for thinking, assessment, and inclusion. She has co-authored many books for teachers, including It’s All About Thinking series for Portage & Main Press and most recently, a 2nd edition of Grand Conversations Thoughtful Responses. Faye believes, ‘We know enough, collectively, to teach all our students to read, and more importantly, to create readers who not only can read but want to read."

Leyton Schnellert, PhD, (he/his/him) is an associate professor in UBC’s Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy and Eleanor Rix Professor in Rural Teacher Education. He focuses on how teachers and teaching and learners and learning can mindfully embrace student diversity and inclusive education. Dr. Schnellert is the Pedagogy and Participation research cluster lead in UBC’s Institute for Community Engaged Research, inclusive education research lead in the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship, and co-chair of BC’s Rural Education Advisory. His community-based collaborative work contributes a counter argument to top-down approaches that operate from deficit models, instead drawing from communities’ funds of knowledge to build participatory, place-conscious, and culturally responsive practices. Leyton works and learns on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Sinixt who were declared extinct by Canada’s government in 1956 and stands in solidarity with the Sinixt in their reclamation efforts.

Leyton has been a middle and secondary years classroom teacher and a learning resource teacher for grades K–12. His books, films, and research articles are widely referenced locally, nationally, and globally.