Student Diversity and Learning Needs

To successfully reach out to a diversity of learners requires substantial support. Although budget-minded critics will argue that such support is costly, they need to be reminded that an investment in prevention today will eliminate or lessen the expense of remediation tomorrow. Not surprisingly, educators who receive substantial help are more effective when carrying out worthwhile innovations that increase all students' potential for success. This notion of support is vitally important because students' "at-riskness" will not disappear and because the government and educational community continue to believe in the efficacy of raising academic standards. This Digest will discuss some sources of support intended as a complement to and a scaffold for teachers and administrators who experiment with different ways of meeting a diversity of learning needs.

Curricular Congruence

At-risk learners benefit from instructional activities that are carefully planned and mutually supported by classroom teachers and learning center staff (Nelson, 1994). Unfortunately, many schools provide separate instruction in both settings. For example, in the English classroom, students may explore the theme of good and evil by reading and discussing William Golding's "Lord of the Flies," whereas in the learning center, at-risk students may complete workbook exercises and other fragmented activities unrelated to the instructional theme. Clearly, at-risk learners are more likely to be successful when classroom and learning center teachers provide them with congruent goals, resources, strategies, and skills.

A model that can be adapted to both push-in and pull-out efforts represents an ambitious approach, but it can be a major source of support for at-risk learners (Sanacore, 1988). Specifically, these learners receive language arts instruction 7 periods a week. Twice a week, the majority of students experience a double period of instruction, while the at-risk learners are enriched with activities that support the language arts program. If "Lord of the Flies" is being highlighted, the classroom teacher might immerse students in interactive activities concerning important themes, concepts, and vocabulary of the novel. Meanwhile, the learning center teacher might engage individuals in a similar instructional focus, while providing support through a prereading plan, structured overview, semantic mapping, or semantic feature analysis.

An important part of this classroom/learning center connection is cooperative planning time that is built into the teaching assignments of the English staff (Raywid, 1993). These professionals are scheduled weekly for 20-minute periods of teaching and for one period of mutual planning with the learning center staff. During the planning session, the key players discuss their community of learners and organize congruent activities that support effective learning.