Keys to Success

Researchers identify methods to help 'nonmainstream' pupils make academic gains.

By Debra Viadero

Santa Cruz, Calif.

After a lifetime spent working with Native Hawaiian schoolchildren in Hawaii, Zuni and Navajo Indian students in the Southwest, and Latino pupils in California, Roland G. Tharp has distilled some wisdom for teachers who face increasingly diverse classrooms.

With colleagues from the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, & Excellence, a federal research center at the University of California campus here, Tharp has identified five standards that he says mark effective instruction in classrooms with high concentrations of students from backgrounds outside the U.S. cultural mainstream. Now, after a decade spent perfecting and testing the standards and teaching others how to use them, the center is ready to roll them out.

The standards evoke a classroom environment in which teachers and students are talking and working together to develop ideas and products, where complex thinking and language development is encouraged across the curriculum, and where teachers work to connect their...