Seeking Diversity, cloth - Hardcover

Rief, Linda

4.39

74 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 043508724X ISBN 13: 9780435087241

Publisher: Heinemann, 1992

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Seeking Diversity is the result of watching, listening to, and learning from adolescents. It is also about a teacher, a learner engaged in the process of coming to know herself as a reader and writer in her own classroom. It is a chronicle of apprenticeship, where the students do astonishing things as readers and writers because their teacher believes they can, because she expects them to, and because she is right there beside them-reading, writing, questioning, thinking, learning, and growing.

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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Linda Rief is the author or coeditor of five Heinemann titles, including Inside the Writer's-Reader's Notebook, The Writer's-Reader's Notebook, Adolescent Literacy, Vision and Voice, and Seeking Diversity , as well as the author of 100 Quickwrites. She is an eighth-grade teacher at Oyster River Middle School in Durham, New Hampshire, and an instructor in the University of New Hampshire's Summer Literacy Institute. She is also a national and international consultant on issues of adolescent literacy. In 2000 she was the recipient of NCTE's Edwin A. Hoey Award for Outstanding Middle School Educator in the English/Language Arts. Her classroom was featured in the series Making Meaning in Literature produced by Maryland Public Television for Annenberg/CPB. Read a New York Times article that shows how Linda and Oyster River Middle School are responding to increased high-stakes testing pressures.

Review:

“In order for any classroom's diverse population to progress toward a sense of quality and a broadening of mind, expectations must be high and individual goals must be recognized. Linda Rief does more than show her students the way, she joins the journey.”–Voices from the Middle

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.