Teaching Diverse Learners was written over the span of six years while working with teachers struggling with how to teach their diverse learners. Using real-life teachers’ issues as the organizing topics, it recognizes the current reality that because of America’s pressing diversity issues, it is not enough for teachers to have a mastery of content knowledge and general concepts of pedagogy, since even the best of them are likely to fail in diverse school environments for which they are not prepared. The author invites his readers to reason with him on basic questions, one of which is: Why are there teacher shortages in “challenging,” diverse schools, but an over-supply of teachers in predominantly mono-cultural, wealthier suburban schools across the nation? The answer lies with cross-cultural teaching proficiency.

This book begins with first principles—that humans are products of their cultures and life experiences. However, because people are often unaware of the effect of their cultures and life experiences on their own actions, diverse teachers and students find themselves as prisoners of cultural trappings in multicultural classrooms. The result is that teaching and learning processes are hindered. This book uses an encyclopedic scope of knowledge to foster deeper understanding of the basic differences across ethnic, social, economic, and gender-based cultures, among several others, including their origins. More importantly, it incorporates solutions to real-life teachers’ narratives and issues as they experienced the impact of cultural conflicts in their own classrooms. Each topic in the textbook is addressed with lesson-planning in mind, and teacher-generated best practices (lists of ideas) for lesson planning are also included.