The Differentiated School

Carol Ann Tomlinson's career as an educator includes 21 years as a public school teacher. She taught in high school, preschool, and middle school, and worked with heterogeneous classes as well as special classes for students identified as gifted and students with learning difficulties. Her public school career also included 12 years as a program administrator of special services for advanced and struggling learners. She was Virginia's Teacher of the Year in 1974. She is professor of educational leadership, foundations, and pol-icy at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education; a researcher for the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented; a codirec-tor of the University of Virginia's Summer Institute on Academic Diversity; and president of the National Association for Gifted Children. Special interests through-out her career have included curriculum and instruction for advanced learners and struggling learners, effective instruction in heterogeneous settings, and bridging the fields of general education and gifted education. She is author of over 100 articles, book chapters, books, and other professional development materials, including How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms, The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners, Leadership for Differentiated Schools and Classrooms, the facilitator's guide for the video staff development sets called Differentiating Instruction, and At Work in the Differentiated Classroom, as well as a professional inquiry kit on differentiation. She works throughout the United States and abroad with teachers whose goal is to develop more responsive heterogeneous classrooms.

Kay Brimijoin is currently associate professor and chair of the Education Department at Sweet Briar College in central Virginia, where she helped launch a master's program in differentiated curriculum and instruction and teaches courses on curriculum and instruction, assessment, literacy development, and student teaching. After 20 years of K-12 classroom teaching experience and school administration, Brimijoin completed her PhD in educational psychology with concentrations in gifted education and curriculum and instruction at the University of Virginia. She has received awards on curriculum design, research and evaluation, and distinguished dissertation work from the National Association for Gifted Children. She co-authored The Differentiated School in 2008 (ASCD) and a unit in Differentiation in Practice: Grades 9-12 in 2005 (ASCD). Brimijoin has authored numerous articles and co-authored a 2003 review of the literature supporting differentiation. From 2000-2006 Brimijoin was a member of the ASCD Differentiation Faculty Cadre and continues to consult with schools across the country on differentiation, curriculum design, gifted education, and teacher education.

Lane Narvaez is a coauthor of the book The Differentiated School: Making Revolutionary Changes in Teaching and Learning. She has been the principal at Conway Elementary in the Ladue School District, St. Louis, Missouri, for the past 14 years. She has served as an administrator at the elementary, middle, high school, and district levels. Lane has worked in the public school systems of New York, Arizona, and Missouri and has 28 years of teaching/administrative experience. She has worked in at-risk as well as affluent school communities. Degrees include a bachelor of arts from Hunter College (New York), a masters in reading from Manhattan College (New York), and a doctorate in reading from Arizona State University. Narvaez’s research interests include mentoring the beginning teacher, curriculum, and instruction and schoolwide differentiation. She has presented at the following national conferences: ATE(Association of Teacher Educators), AERA (American Educational Research Association), and ASCD (Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development).

She has also presented at the Summer Institute of Academic Diversity at the University of Virginia and the Oxford Round Table in Oxford, England, on her work involving schoolwide differentiation. For the past four years she has worked with Henry County School district in Virginia to help implement differentiation throughout the schools in the district. She has served as a coach in differentiation for schools in Virginia and California, working with teachers and administrators as they implement differentiation in their schools.