In Complex Text Decoded, educational consultant and former master teacher Kathy T. Glass presents strategies, activities, and assessments that target students’ ability to comprehend complex text—whether presented as traditional written text or in multimedia formats—in grades 5–10. You’ll learn * The essential elements of unit design and models for lesson planning. * Specific, step-by-step instruction for teaching vocabulary. * Effective questioning techniques. * Strategies and activities explicitly designed for teaching complex text. * How to measure text complexity and select appropriate texts that are aligned with curricular goals. It's important to provide opportunities for students to read a wide variety of texts for different purposes and along a spectrum of difficulty and length. To meet the goal of comprehensively grasping complex text, students must have concrete tools to help them become highly skilled readers. Complex Text Decoded enables teachers to provide precisely that.
What if your next faculty meeting began with this question: What are the strengths of our underachieving students? When teachers recognize and focus on student strengths, they transform the learning environment into one of positivity and potential. Students begin to believe in themselves as capable, valued, and respected and show more willingness to invest and engage in school. They perform better. They crave and enjoy academic challenge, and they delight in outdoing themselves. Focusing on strengths is a no-cost, highly effective, nontraditional way of addressing persistent underachievement. Drawing on authors Yvette Jackson and Veronica McDermott's experiences supporting the transformations of schools repeatedly labeled as underachieving, this book offers concrete ways to identify student strengths and then build on them in your classroom or school throughout the year. These field-tested strategies will help awaken students' belief in their own potential and put them on the path to lasting success.
Whether they’re the result of a mandate from on high, a crisis that needs addressing, or simply a desire for improvement, change initiatives are a constant in most every school. In this book, veteran teacher, administrator, and consultant Jeffrey Benson provides educators with a proven, practical, and broadly applicable system for implementing new practices methodically and effectively. Topics include* Identifying and communicating a clear and understandable vision of change;* Ensuring that all voices in the school are heard and respected during the change process;* Thoroughly and thoughtfully collecting, classifying, and analyzing data related to the change initiative; and* Delegating responsibilities among staff and stakeholders.Replete with checklists, surveys, and worksheets, 10 Steps to Managing Change in Schools is a practical guide for educators determined to seamlessly weave new practices or procedures into the fabric of the school.
Classroom management is traditionally a matter of encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad by doling out rewards and punishments. But studies show that when educators empower students to address and correct misbehavior among themselves, positive results are longer lasting and more wide reaching. In Better Than Carrots or Sticks, longtime educators and best-selling authors Dominique Smith, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey provide a practical blueprint for creating a cooperative and respectful classroom climate in which students and teachers work through behavioral issues together. After a comprehensive overview of the roots of the restorative practices movement in schools, the authors explain how to * Establish procedures and expectations for student behavior that encourage the development of positive interpersonal skills; * Develop a nonconfrontational rapport with even the most challenging students; and * Implement conflict resolution strategies that prioritize relationship building and mutual understanding over finger-pointing and retribution. Rewards and punishments may help to maintain order in the short term, but they're at best superficially effective and at worst counterproductive. This book will prepare teachers at all levels to ensure that their classrooms are welcoming, enriching, and constructive environments built on collective respect and focused on student achievement.
This practical, hands-on guide shows K-12 school leaders how to support STEM programs that excite students and teachers—even if the leader is not an expert in science, technology, engineering, or math. Buckner and Boyd explore ideas for fostering equitable access to rich and rigorous learning experiences, acting as instructional leaders, and building community engagement and partnerships. You’ll get advice on creating a structure to help teachers examine, discuss, and improve students' learning experiences. And you’ll learn how to support teachers in designing challenging lessons that foster students' curiosity and ingenuity in working on real-world problems. Finally, you’ll learn ways you can effectively tap into the wealth of resources in your community to help achieve your STEM vision.
Are your students excited about writing? Do you want them to be? Do you want them to ask for more writing opportunities and assignments? Do you want them to engage in writing tasks more quickly and with more fluency? The traditional five-step writing process never explicitly teaches students to be fluent in their writing—to be able to write quickly on any topic. Extreme Writing targets precisely that with focused, daily writing sessions that provide students with consistent, long-term engagement. It is designed to appeal to students in grades 4–8, and—best of all—the approach involves little extra work for you. In The Power of Extreme Writing , author Diana Cruchley not only outlines the process but also describes what it looks like in the classroom, explains how to assess student work, and highlights more than a dozen unique inspirations that motivate students to write. Extreme Writing: it's fun, it's fast, and it works.
In The Freedom to Fail, veteran educator Andrew K. Miller explains the many benefits of intentionally designing opportunities for students to "fail forward" in the classroom. He provides a raft of strategies for ensuring that students experience small, constructive failures as a means to greater achievement, and offers practical suggestions for ensuring that constructive failure doesn't detrimentally affect students' summative assessments. He also describes how teachers, too, can benefit from failure. Establishing a culture that embraces the freedom to fail helps students to adopt a growth mindset, take risks in the service of greater learning, and develop realistic expectations of what it takes to succeed in the world at large. If we deliberately let our students fail in small ways today, we can help to ensure that they'll triumph in a big way tomorrow.
Grading systems often reward on-time task completion and penalize disorganization and bad behavior. Despite our best intentions, grades seem to reflect student compliance more than student learning and engagement. In the process, we inadvertently subvert the learning process. After careful research and years of experiences with grading as a teacher and a parent, Cathy Vatterott examines and debunks traditional practices and policies of grading in K–12 schools. She offers a new paradigm for standards-based grading that focuses on student mastery of content and gives concrete examples from elementary, middle, and high schools. Rethinking Grading will show all educators how standards-based grading can authentically reflect student progress and learning—and significantly improve both teaching and learning. Cathy Vatterott is an education professor and researcher at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, a former middle school teacher and principal, and a parent of a college graduate. She has learned from her workshops that "grading continues to be the most contentious part . . . conjuring up the most intense emotions and heated disagreements." Vatterott is also the author of the book Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs .
Project based learning (PBL) is gaining renewed attention with the current focus on college and career readiness and the performance-based emphases of Common Core State Standards, but only high-quality versions can deliver the beneficial outcomes that schools want for their students. It’s not enough to just “do projects.” Today’s projects need to be rigorous, engaging, and in-depth, and they need to have student voice and choice built in. Such projects require careful planning and pedagogical skill. The authors—leaders at the respected Buck Institute for Education—take readers through the step-by-step process of how to create, implement, and assess PBL using a classroom-tested framework. Also included are chapters for school leaders on implementing PBL systemwide and the use of PBL in informal settings. Examples from all grade levels and content areas provide evidence of the powerful effects that PBL can have, including * increased student motivation and preparation for college, careers, and citizenship; * better results on high-stakes tests; * a more satisfying teaching experience; and * new ways for educators to communicate with parents, communities, and the wider world. By successfully implementing PBL, teachers can not only help students meet standards but also greatly improve their instruction and make school a more meaningful place for learning. Both practical and inspirational, this book is an essential guide to creating classrooms and schools where students—and teachers—excel.
Students following directions, dutifully completing assignments, and quietly cooperating. For some teachers, this kind of compliance is a goal worth pursuing, but for you, it's not enough. You want real engagement— a classroom filled with students who ask intriguing questions, immerse themselves in assignments, seek feedback on their performance, and take pride in their progress. So even as you race to cover a demanding curriculum and address standards, you're wearing yourself out searching for the hooks that will inspire your students and make them eager to learn. It's not that you're not doing enough to motivate your students; it's that you're probably focusing on the wrong things. In this book, Allison Zmuda and Robyn R. Jackson explain the four keys to real engagement: clarity, context, challenge, and culture . Their smart, concrete strategies for improving classroom assignments, assessments, and environments will help you create learning experiences that are rigorous, meaningful, and rewarding for your students and yourself.