T From High Chair to High School : Research - Based Principles for Teaching Complex Thinking

his classroom description is an enactment of the research-based practices demonstrated to be most effective for all populations we have studied (Tharp et al. 2000), kindergarten through middle school. Four decades of research in the field of education and diversity have produced a clear and solid body of evidence strong enough to guide teachers, regardless of the languages, ethnicities, race, or prosperity of their communities. No matter children’s cultures, races, individual interests, or abilities, these findings apply and thus are particularly appropriate for fully inclusive classrooms. The authors both work with the national Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence (CREDE) and the senior author worked with its predecessors, the National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning and the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP). There we conducted 200 studies of children considered to be potentially at risk of academic failure due to cultural and linguistic diversity, race, poverty, and geographic isolation. The children we studied include Latinos, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians and Alaskans, Asian and Caribbean immigrants, and African Americans and Whites living in poverty in inner cities and rural mountain settings. These are the children who frequently have been left behind and who continue to be left behind, although knowledge is available for reforms that would bring them all along into school success. The research work has been slow, laborious, and careful. Drawing from our own work and from all our colleagues’, we used analytic deducRoland Tharp and Susan Entz