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How to Create a Culture of Achievement in Your School and Classroom

Douglas Fisher

What does it feel like to walk into your school? Is it a welcoming place, where everyone feels valued? Most school improvement efforts focus on academic goals, instructional models, curriculum, and assessments. But sometimes what can make or break your learning community are the intangibles–the relationships, identity, and connections that make up its culture. Authors Fisher, Frey, and Pumpian believe that no school improvement effort will be effective unless school culture is addressed. They identify five pillars that are critical to building a culture of achievement:
1. Welcome: Imagine if all staff members in your school considered it their job to make every student, parent, and visitor feel noticed, welcomed, and valued. 2. Do no harm: Your school rules should be tools for teaching students to become the moral and ethical citizens you expect them to be. 3. Choice words: When the language students hear helps them tell a story about themselves that is one of possibility and potential, students perform in ways that are consistent with that belief. 4. It’s never too late to learn: Can you push students to go beyond the minimum needed to get by, to discover what they are capable of achieving? 5. Best school in the universe: Is your school the best place to teach and learn? The best place to work?
Drawing on their years of experience in the classroom, the authors explain how these pillars support good teaching and learning. In addition, they provide 19 action research tools that will help you create a culture of achievement, so that your school or classroom is the best it can be. After reading this book, you’ll see why culture makes the difference between a school that enables success for all students and a school that merely houses those students during the school day.

Guided Instruction

Douglas Fisher

You know that repeating the same words and the same instructions—or simply announcing the answers to questions—doesn’t help students learn. How do you get past the predictable and really teach your kids how to learn? Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey say that helping students develop immediate and lifelong learning skills is best achieved through guided instruction, which they define as “saying or doing the just-right thing to get the learner to do cognitive work"—in other words, gradually and successfully transferring knowledge and the responsibility for learning to students through scaffolds for learning. In this helpful and informative book, they explain how guided instruction fits your classroom and works for your students. Their four-part system for implementation consists of these elements: * Questioning to check for understanding. * Prompting to facilitate students’ thinking processes and processing. * Cueing to shift students’ attention to focus on specific information, errors, or partial understandings. * Explaining and modeling when students do not have sufficient knowledge to complete tasks on their own.
Each element is thoroughly explained and illustrated with numerous examples drawn from the authors’ extensive experience in the classroom and their observations of hundreds of expert teachers, as well as a broad sampling of relevant research. Aimed at teachers at all grade levels, across the curriculum, Guided Instruction will help you provide timely and meaningful scaffolds that boost students to higher levels of understanding and accomplishment.

Brain Matters

Patricia Wolfe

Everyone agrees that what we do in schools should be based on what we know about how the brain learns. Until recently, however, we have had few clues to unlock the secrets of the brain. Now, research from the neurosciences has greatly improved our understanding of the learning process, and we have a much more solid foundation on which to base educational decisions.
In this completely revised and updated second edition, Patricia Wolfe clarifies how we can effectively match teaching practice with brain functioning. Encompassing the most recent and relevant research and knowledge, this edition also includes three entirely new chapters that examine brain development from birth through adolescence and identify the impact of exercise, sleep, nutrition, and technology on the brain.
Brain Matters begins with a “mini-textbook” on brain anatomy and physiology, bringing the biology of the brain into context with teaching and learning. Wolfe describes how the brain encodes, manipulates, and stores information, and she proposes implications that recent research has for practice—why meaning is essential for attention, how emotion can enhance or impede learning, and how different types of rehearsal are necessary for different types of learning.
Finally, Wolfe introduces and examines practical classroom applications and brain-compatible teaching strategies that take advantage of simulations, projects, problem-based learning, graphic organizers, music, active engagement, and mnemonics. These strategies are accompanied by actual classroom scenarios—spanning the content areas and grade levels from lower elementary to high school—that help teachers connect theory with practice.

Learning from Lincoln

Pam Robbins

What can 21st century educators learn from the example of a 19th century president? In this intriguing and insightful book, Harvey Alvy and Pam Robbins show how the legacy of Abraham Lincoln can guide today's education leaders–principals, teachers, superintendents, and others–as they tackle large-scale challenges, such as closing the achievement gap, and everyday issues, such as communicating with constituents. The authors identify 10 qualities, attributes, and skills that help to explain Lincoln's effectiveness, despite seemingly insurmountable odds: 1. Implementing and sustaining a mission and vision with focused and profound clarity2. Communicating ideas effectively with precise and straightforward language3. Building a diverse and competent team to successfully address the mission4. Engendering trust, loyalty, and respect through humility, humor, and personal example5. Leading and serving with emotional intelligence and empathy6. Exercising situational competence and responding appropriately to implement effective change7. Rising beyond personal and professional trials through tenacity, persistence, resilience, and courage8. Exercising purposeful visibility9. Demonstrating personal growth and enhanced competence as a lifetime learner, willing to reflect on and expand ideas10. Believing that hope can become a reality Chapters devoted to each element explore the historical record of Lincoln's life and actions, then discuss the implications for modern educators. End-of-chapter exercises provide a structure for reflection, analysis of current behaviors, and guidance for future work, so that readers can create their own path to success–inspired by the example of one of the greatest leaders of all time. Note: This product listing is for the reflowable (ePub) version of the book.

Content-Area Conversations

Douglas Fisher

Teachers across the country are seeking ways to make their multicultural classrooms come alive with student talk about content. Content-Area Conversations: How to Plan Discussion-Based Lessons for Diverse Language Learners is a practical, hands-on guide to creating and managing environments that spur sophisticated levels of student communication, both oral and written. Paying special attention to the needs of English language learners, the authors • Detail research-based steps for designing lessons that spark student talk; • Share real-life classroom scenarios and dialogues that bring theory to life; • Describe easy-to-use assessments for all grade levels; • Provide rubrics, worksheets, sentence frames, and other imaginative tools that encourage academic communication; and • Offer guiding questions to help teachers plan instruction. Teachers at any grade level, in any content area, will find a wide variety of strategies in this book to help students simultaneously learn English and learn in English. Drawing both on decades of research data and on the authors’ real-life experiences as teachers of English language learners, this book is replete with ideas for fostering real academic discourse in your classroom.

Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind

Группа авторов

In Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind , noted educators Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick present a comprehensive guide to shaping schools around Habits of Mind. The habits are a repertoire of behaviors that help both students and teachers successfully navigate the various challenges and problems they encounter in the classroom and in everyday life. The Habits of Mind include * Persisting* Managing impulsivity* Listening with understanding and empathy* Thinking flexibly* Thinking about thinking (metacognition)* Striving for accuracy* Questioning and posing problems* Applying past knowledge to new situations* Thinking and communicating with clarity and precision* Gathering data through all senses* Creating, imagining, innovating* Responding with wonderment and awe* Taking responsible risks* Finding humor* Thinking interdependently* Remaining open to continuous learning This volume brings together–in a revised and expanded format–concepts from the four books in Costa and Kallick's earlier work Habits of Mind: A Developmental Series . Along with other highly respected scholars and practitioners, the authors explain how the 16 Habits of Mind dovetail with up-to-date concepts of what constitutes intelligence; present instructional strategies for activating the habits and creating a «thought-full» classroom environment; offer assessment and reporting strategies that incorporate the habits; and provide real-life examples of how communities, school districts, building administrators, and teachers can integrate the habits into their school culture. Drawing upon their research and work over many years, in many countries, Costa and Kallick present a compelling rationale for using the Habits of Mind as a foundation for leading, teaching, learning, and living well in a complex world.

Building Teachers' Capacity for Success

Pete Hall

Educators know that teachers are a school’s most essential strength. In Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success, authors Pete Hall (winner of the 2004 ASCD Outstanding Young Educator Award) and Alisa Simeral offer a straightforward plan to help site-based administrators and instructional coaches collaborate to bring out the best in every teacher, build a stronger and more cohesive staff, and achieve greater academic success. Their model of Strength-Based School Improvement is an alternative to a negative, deficit-approach focused on fixing what’s wrong. Instead, they show school leaders how to achieve their goals by working together to maximize what’s right. Filled with clear, proven strategies and organized around two easy-to-use tools—the innovative Continuum of Self-Reflection and a feedback-focused walk-through model—this book offers a differentiated approach to coaching and supervision centered on identifying and nurturing teachers’ individual strengths and helping them reach new levels of professional success and satisfaction. Here, you’ll find front-line advice from the authors, one a principal and the other an instructional coach, on just what to look for, do, and say in order to start seeing positive results right now.

Teaching the Brain to Read

Judy Willis

Reading comes easily to some students, but many struggle with some part of this complex process that requires many areas of the brain to operate together through an intricate network of neurons.
As a classroom teacher who has also worked as a neurologist, Judy Willis offers a unique perspective on how to help students not only learn the mechanics of reading and comprehension, but also develop a love of reading. She shows the importance of establishing a nonthreatening environment and provides teaching strategies that truly engage students and help them –Build phonemic awareness –Manipulate patterns to improve reading skills –Improve reading fluency –Combat the stress and anxiety that can inhibit reading fluency –Increase vocabulary –Overcome reading difficulties that can interfere with comprehension
By enriching your understanding of how the brain processes language, emotion, and other stimuli, this book will change the way you understand and teach reading skills–and help all your students become successful readers.

Detracking for Excellence and Equity

Carol Corbett Burris Corbett Burris

Ability grouping. Leveling systems. Streaming. This is the modern way of talking about tracking – the traditional practice of sorting and selecting students based on test scores and other criteria, and then steering these groups into “the most appropriate” course of study. In 1987, New York’s suburban Rockville Centre School District faced the fact that its longstanding tracking system was resulting in unequal educational opportunities and allowing racial and socioeconomic stratification of its student population. School leaders embarked on an ambitious program of reform: reexamining beliefs about intelligence, ability, and instruction, and offering all students the opportunity to study a rigorous curriculum in heterogeneous classrooms. In this book, authors Carol Corbett Burris and Delia T. Garrity, veterans of the Rockville Centre School District, offer an experience-based and research-supported argument that detracking—implemented with planning, patience, and persistence—can do in every school district what it did in theirs: raise achievement across the board and dramatically narrow the achievement gap. Their main goal is a practical one: to provide educational leaders with proven strategies for launching, sustaining, and monitoring a successful detracking reform. Here, you’ll read * Why detracking is necessary, the benefits it brings, and how to build support among teachers and parents * How to revise curriculum to “level-up” instruction * How to establish a multiyear, personalized professional development program to help teachers address new instructional needs * How to best support effective teaching and learning in a heterogeneous classroom Detracking for Excellence and Equity outlines a comprehensive approach built on self-reflection, direct action, vigilant supervision, and a set of very clear beliefs: that schools and opportunity matter; that acceleration and enrichment will improve all students’ achievement; and that all students deserve access to the best curriculum.

Transformative Assessment

W. James Popham

Testing expert W. James Popham cuts through the jargon and the hype to provide the definitive nuts-and-bolts introduction to formative assessment, a process with the power to completely transform teaching and learning. In his inimitable style, Popham explains the research supporting formative assessment's effectiveness and why familiarity with this research is the key to preserving both teacher sanity and district funds. You'll find step-by-step guidance on how to build frameworks for formative assessment and how to carry out each of the process's four levels: teachers' instructional adjustments, students' learning tactic adjustments, a classroom climate shift, and schoolwide implementation. This book is the place to start for educators considering formative assessment, curious about why their school system is embracing formative assessment, or wondering why the «formative assessments» they're using now aren't producing the desired results. Here, you'll learn what formative assessment is and isn't, what it can do and what it can't, and the practical way to reap its very real rewards: better teaching and better learning. Note: This product listing is for the reflowable (ePub) version of the book.