Exceptional Lives: Special Education in Today's Schools

Widely recognized for its innovation and accessibility through real-life stories, the new edition of Exceptional Lives helps prepare readers to become effective special educators using four themes: universal design for learning, inclusion, collaboration, and multicultural responsiveness.

Every student in each chapter's opening vignette is a real person. Within each chapter as well as, in the My Voice and Making a Difference boxes, real people's stories are integrated to provide additional insight into the exceptional lives of students with disabilities, their families, their teachers, and other important professionals who impact these students' lives.

Into Practice shows practical, step-by-step strategies and examples that will help pre-service general and special education teachers implement instruction in their classrooms.

Inclusion Tips provide helpful advice and strategies for inclusion in regard to specific disability issues.

Technology Tips highlight a technology teachers can use in the classroom (or one that supports classroom instruction) to help meet the educational needs of students with disabilities. (New!)

Collaboration Tips describe collaborative processes and strategies that can help teachers achieve a. particular-and appropriate goal for students with the specific disability featured in the chapter. (New!)

Planning Universally Designed Learning sections in each chapter address how teachers can augment, alter, or adapt curriculum, instruction, and evaluation to assure all students' progress in the general curriculum. (New!)

Multicultural Considerations features in each chapter provide meaningful information and prepare teachers to consider the broad cultural backgrounds of their students. (New!)

Inclusive Classrooms: Video Cases on CD-ROM Activity and Learning Guide comes packaged with every copy of the text. With over an hour of video footage, this new CD-ROM provides immediate access to living classroom examples of teaching and learning strategies for inclusion. These video clips, grouped by topic and classroom, give the preservice teacher a good picture of what inclusion looks like in a preschool, an elementary school, a middle school, and a secondary school. (New!)