Designed for professors who use a hands-on approach to learning, favoring qualitative or narrative assessment over testing, this book provides a balanced integration of principle and practice that places theoretical material into a practical, real-life framework. It effectively combines essays, interviews and actual classroom examples from current researchers like Anne Haas Dyson and Kenneth Goodman with the primary classic work of theorists like Piaget and Vygotsky to give readers the most relevant recent and historical insight possible into the state of language development in education today.