Discover a practical, comprehensive model of effective professional learning communities. In this user-friendly guide, educators explore research-based steps and strategies designed to increase the effectiveness of collaborative teams and enhance PLCs. Examine how the PLC process can transform critical components of education—including curriculum, assessment, instruction, and teacher development—and use reproducible agendas, scales, and checklists to improve schoolwide practices.
Cultivate a positive mindset, and choose productive actions by examining your emotions and interpretations in the classroom. By investigating three management phases—awareness, analysis, and choice—teachers can become mindful of factors that influence their interactions with students and learn a process for ensuring positive outcomes. You’ll gain concrete strategies and activities that enhance classroom practice and impact student learning.
Impact science education with direct vocabulary instruction. With this three-part resource, you’ll discover a six-step process for successfully incorporating vocabulary from the science standards into student learning. Identify the crucial aspects of vocabulary education, and learn targeted strategies to actively engage students. Gain access to lists of essential scientific terms that will help you establish an effective, organized vocabulary program.
Create a compassionate, caring school environment. Examine how a change in teaching philosophy can help awaken the passion for learning in students. Learn how to promote kindness in the classroom, and understand the power of stories in engaging students. Explore research-based strategies to enhance teacher-student and peer relationships. Discover how to inspire purpose, reach students’ hearts, and cultivate student security, identity, and belonging.
Ask targeted questions to enhance students’ reasoning skills and increase rigor in classrooms. Use a four-phase questioning sequence to help students make claims, build sound arguments, and provide evidence to support their points. You’ll discover how to coordinate sequences to elicit students’ prior knowledge, prompt the discovery of new information, and deepen and extend students’ learning in all content areas.
Successfully leverage technology to enhance classroom practices with this practical resource. The authors demonstrate the importance of educational technology, which is quickly becoming an essential component in effective teaching. Included are over 100 organized classroom strategies, vignettes that show each section’s strategies in action, and a glossary of classroom-relevant technology terms. Key research is summarized and translated into classroom recommendations.
Discover how to weave an in-depth understanding of the Common Core into successful classroom practice with this two-part resource. You’ll learn how to power the standards with guided assessment and measure student progress in a way that accurately reflects learning. Included are hundreds of ready-to-use, research-based proficiency scales for both English language arts and mathematics.
Bridge the great divide between distanced administrative duties and daily classroom impact. This book introduces a top-down power mechanism called defined autonomy, a concept that focuses on district-defined, nonnegotiable, common goals and a system of accountability supported by assessment tools. Defined autonomy creates an effective balance of centralized direction and individualized empowerment that allows building-level staff the stylistic freedom to respond quickly and effectively to student failure.
As the 21st century unfolds, the pace of change in the world is accelerating. The authors believe a combination of cognitive skills (skills students will need to succeed academically) and conative skills (skills students will need to succeed interpersonally) is necessary for the 21st century. This clear, practical guide presents a model of instruction and assessment based on these skills.
For many years, the authors have been fellow travelers on the journey to help educators improve their schools. Their first coauthored book focuses on district leadership, principal leadership, and team leadership and addresses how individual teachers can be most effective in leading students—by learning with colleagues how to implement the most promising pedagogy in their classrooms