Rousing Minds to Life is the education textbook for the '90s: A powerful synthesis of the theoretical advances in Vygotskian theory as applied to every aspect of teaching, learning, and schooling. Drawing on studies from preschool and elementary school through the university seminar, and on their own successful experience with thousands of students over two decades, this text integrates all recent work in the Vygotskian tradition with basic concepts in American and British behaviorism, cognitive science, anthropology, and sociolinguistics. Distinguished by a literate style and an...

All school reformers are trying for better schooling; but all are not marching to the same drum. Four goals-- Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion and Harmony-- are emphasized by different groups. Are the four goals competing ideas of the good, so that national political debates must result in prioritizing, in winners and losers? Tharp, Estrada, Dalton, and Yamauchi demonstrate that the four goals can all be achieved, simultaneously and maximally, by classrooms of a new vision.All school reform has one final common pathway -- instructional activity. Whatever the specific reform, from policy or...

Rousing Minds to Life is the education textbook for the '90s: A powerful synthesis of the theoretical advances in Vygotskian theory as applied to every aspect of teaching, learning, and schooling. Drawing on studies from preschool and elementary school through the university seminar, and on their own successful experience with thousands of students over two decades, this text integrates all recent work in the Vygotskian tradition with basic concepts in American and British behaviorism, cognitive science, anthropology, and sociolinguistics. Distinguished by a literate style and an...