With the No Child Left Behind law, teachers are required to be highly qualified in the core area in which they teach.  However, is being an expert enough; or better yet, the foundation responsible for a child’s education?  A great deal of hype has surrounded the use of differentiated instruction as an effective and successful strategy for educating diverse students within the same setting.  Expertise in the content being taught is only a fraction of the overall differentiated instruction picture, as in theory, teachers can be experts in their fields, but may not be experts in how to take into account the diversities of learners.  An exemplary teacher not only is an expert in his/her core academic area, but has a strong foundation and use of differentiated instructional principles.  Differentiated instruction has the focus of diversity, common outcomes, and is student-centered.  It is designed to instigate multiple strategies impacting individual students while focusing on a common goal.  In other words, the students are all learning identical content, but the strategy for successfully achieving the common outcome/goal is dependent on individual student learning styles and developmental levels (Lieberman & Houston-Wilson, 2009).

Outwardly, Sarah appears to be like any other smiling, outgoing elementary school student, no different from the other students in her second grade class.  On closer observation, a difference is seen in Sarah’s hands.  Her hands appear to have a mind of their own, constantly moving in a repetitive, wringing, and non-purposeful pattern.   If asked, Sarah’s second grade or general physical education teacher would say Sara has difficulty engaging in performance activity with her hands, and it appears to take Sarah a great amount of focus and concentration to move her hands out of the wringing pattern.  Aside from this initial observation, several other features beyond hand wringing make Sarah’s movements different from her peers.

The lobby of the ice rink in Baltimore, MD, hums with excitement as children laugh, talk while their parents, and lace up their skates. In one corner, a little boy grins from ear to ear as his dad helps him to his feet and his mom snaps photo after photo. Across the room, another mom keeps a careful eye on her son as he practices walking in his skates, one hand on the wall for stability. These moments are familiar to anyone who has taken a child ice skating, but for these families they are especially poignant. Many of the parents never imagined their children would get the chance to skate, because simply walking was challenging enough.

Dragon boat racing has been called a modern sport with ancient traditions (Haslam, 2007); and as a sport, it has shown tremendous growth in participation in the United States and internationally (Lee, 2007). Currently, more than 50 million people in 62 countries participate in the modern sport of dragon boat racing (Haslam, 2007; Weikhorst, 2009). Most dragon boat organizations promote both competitive and recreational aspects of the sport. For instance, the mission of the United States Dragon Boat Federation is to “ promote the growth and development of dragon boating in the U.S. for fitness, recreation, and team building at all levels of competition” (United States Dragon Boat Federation, n.d.).