Explores how educators are tackling major challenges in math education including: emphasizing algebraic thinking, problem solving, and communication; connecting math activities to larger purposes and everyday experiences; differentiating instruction based on students' learning styles, interests, and readiness levels; and helping teachers use classroom assessment to guide instruction.
Provides practical planning advice, case studies of successful programs, and numerous implementation resources. Also covers 1-to-1 leadership, tablet PCs, and the shift toward learner-centric educational environments.
This book provides educators with a proven, practical, and broadly applicable system for implementing new practices methodically and effectively.
Provides school administrators with practical, easy-to-use, and inexpensive ways to reward and recognize the efforts of their staff. More than 100 ideas are divided into three categories based on the amount of effort they require.
Offers busy principals an updated guide to the most relevant and useful Web-based resources.
This book is a guide to how to teach the essential, high-frequency words that appear in academic contexts-and reverse the disadvantages of what she calls "word poverty." It provides a selection of engaging strategies to help educators across all content areas and grade levels not only teach students a large quantity of words but also ensure that they know these words well.
This text will help teachers transition from simply planning instruction to designing high-quality student work. The authors share stories of successful practice and practical tools ready for immediate classroom application, and also provide opportunities for reflection and closure designed to help teachers consider (or reconsider) their current beliefs and practices.
This book explains how you can assess and answer your students' technology needs in terms of access, purpose, and audience--and why you and your school cannot afford to keep students from using technology in their education.
This book offers school and district leaders concise, practical advice on how to set up a hybrid mobile technology program or shift an existing 1:1 or BYOD program to the more flexible, cost-effective, equitable, and learning-focused hybrid approach.
This book explains how to teach middle and high school students to be close readers, how to make close reading a habit of practice across the content areas, and why doing so will build content knowledge. It explores text complexity and how to determine if a particular text is right for your learning purposes and your students.
This book explains how to teach young learners to be close readers and how to make close reading a habit of practice in the elementary classroom. It explores text complexity and how to determine if a particular text is right for your learning purposes and your students.
This book helps prospective and practicing teachers integrate existing, new, and emerging technologies into their curriculum.
An in-depth resource for workshops, professional learning communities, teacher training, and self-help. Topics include how to establish good classroom management and effective relationships with students.
Shows teachers how to engage students through hands-on, visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli and link the activities to relevant academic objectives. Provides classroom examples of how teachers use multisensory learning techniques to help students interact with material more intensely and retain what they learn for longer periods of time.
This practical reference clarifies what general education teachers need to know about special education law and processes and provides a guide to instructional best practices for the inclusive classroom.
This book discusses what the best school systems in the world are doing right for the purpose of identifying what U.S. schools, at the national, state, and local level, might do differently and better.
This book presents a lesson planning approach for the secondary classroom that generates test success as a byproduct of comprehensive literacy learning.
Provides an overview of the research on internal motivation. Includes strategies for activating internal motivation at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. Provides suggestions on how to assess degrees of student motivation and guidelines for integrating the principles of internal motivation with standards-based instruction.
Provides strategic talking points, conversation starters, and ready-made tools needed to explain how formative assessment improves student learning and achievement.
This guide will help develop a better understanding of the issues facing educational technology. Learn about the programs that transform education in the digital age.
This publication offers clear and positive strategies that empower teachers and administrators to develop effective rules and consequences.
This book helps bridge the divide that separates urban students from their birthright of a high-quality education.
Presents the core processes that are essential for all school improvement efforts--from establishing a mission to differentiating supervision based on measures of success. Includes a nine-step curriculum planning and development process and the 5 phases of a practical cycle for data analysis.
In order for a professional learning community to achieve its full potential, all levels districtwide must align with the three big ideas: ensuring a focus on learning, building a collaborative culture, and establishing a results orientation. This book breaks down the complex process of aligning the work of central office staff, building leadership, and teachers to increase student achievement.
This book addresses the needs of multilingual students who enter a new school and have to learn to adapt to a new country and a new language-and they must be assessed along with their peers. It presents the story of Ana, a newcomer to the United States and its school system and, in a month-by-month format, reveals how assessment affects students, teachers, families, and school leaders. It shows teachers how to collect, analyze, and act upon data about multilingual learners.
This publication takes an in-depth look at assessment and shows how differentiation can improve the process in all grade levels and subject areas.
This book explains the critical differences among "assignments," "activities," and "assessments" and thoroughly describes the key elements of an assignment: prompts, rubrics, products, and instructional plans.
This book identifies the 21 responsibilities associated with student achievement and shows how they relate to three key elements of effective leadership; establishing a clear focus, managing change, and developing a purposeful community.
Provides information on how to improve graduation rates, close achievement gaps, and teach 21st century knowledge and skills. Explains how any high school can improve by providing students the support they need to meet college and career-prep standards, and focusing teachers collectively on research-based instructional practices.
Describes a purposeful classroom structure that relies on four phases. Included with the description of each phase are practical strategies that help teachers use this approach, plus tips on how to differentiate instruction, make effective use of class time, and plan backwards from learning objectives.
This publication digs deeper into the hows and whys of the gradual release of responsibility instructional framework. To gradually release responsibility is to equip students with what they need to be engaged and self-directed learners.
This book provide a practical blueprint for creating a cooperative and respectful classroom climate in which students and teachers work through behavioral issues together.
The book explores the three interrelated sequences of the field-tested Discourse and Writing Cycle--the Discourse Sequence, the Transition to Writing Sequence, and the Writing Sequence--and includes classroom examples and sample lesson plans from across the content areas of English, social studies, math, and science as a means to focus student thinking, fuel deeper learning, and build complex understanding.
Instructs educators to create positive learning environments that prevent discipline problems from occurring. Explains why classroom management approaches that rely on rewards and punishments actually prolong behavior problems; how to turn misbehavior into teaching opportunities; and why changing curriculum can solve discipline problems.
This book proposes a new approach to pedagogy as the basis for the bold moves teachers and leaders need to make to engage all learners and prepare them for now and into the future. The authors examine every aspect of K-12 education, including teacher roles, curriculum, instruction, and assessment, as well as the physical and virtual learning spaces that engage 21st century teachers and learners.
Provides a cross-curricular tool that helps students not only develop a better understanding of places, cultures, and the books they are reading, but also make connections among the subjects they learn in school.
Explores brain development from birth through adolescence, the effect of exercise, sleep, nutrition, and technology on the brain, and the importance of neuroplasticity. Provides information in clear, everyday language that any teacher can immediately incorporate into classroom practice.
Covers how digital technology is actually changing students' brains. Learn why this creates new obstacles for teachers, but also opens up potential new pathways for learning.
Explains how educators can build safe and supportive classroom communities for students with learning disabilities; improve the focus of students with attention disorders; and create a rich and inviting learning environment for all students in an inclusive classroom.
Covers changing curriculum from teacher-directed and routine programs to practices that engage students in thinking, working, and interacting with others.
This book explores the path by which administrative leaders may improve their math programs, offering an overview of what an effective program looks like and examples of actions to take to achieve that goal. It addresses the three components necessary for a successful math program: how to recognize, support, and evaluate effective teachers; the steps to take to move from grand ideas to concrete results; and how to approach obstacles to achieving your goal.
Get a play-by-play guide to implementing PLC concepts. Each chapter begins with a story focused on a particular challenge. A follow-up analysis of the story identifies the good decisions or common mistakes made in relation to that particular scenario. The authors examine the research behind best practice and wrap up each chapter with recommendations and tools you can use in your school.
Explains why insufficient background knowledge is a chronic cause of low achievement, and describes how a carefully structured combination of two approaches--sustained silent reading and instruction in subject-specific vocabulary--can help rescue low achievers and boost the academic performance of all students.
Introduces a new model to clarify the structural and interpersonal components of an equitable and schooling experience, as well as a survey-based tool to help school and teacher leaders uncover equity-related issues and organize their efforts to better address physical integration, social-emotional engagement, opportunity to learn, instructional excellence, and engaged and inspired learners.
Provides research-based techniques that will motivate students to excel in social studies classes. Explains how to organize learning environments and student groups to reinforce literacy instruction and knowledge of democratic principles.
This book focuses on specific disabilities and inclusive curriculum scenarios for learners in K-12 environments. It offers advice on how to prevent labels from capping student potential and encouragement to help teachers continually improve learner outcomes, and walks teachers through the process of reinforcing, motivating, scaffolding, and planning for instruction that targets learners of all ability levels.
Focuses on building the capacity of teachers, supporting teachers to help them reach their potential, and making the best use of teachers' individual and collective contributions to school improvement efforts.
Describes how schools have to keep pace with a world that is being dramatically transformed by globalization, the "death of distance," and digital technology. Topics include expanding the definition of success beyond math and reading test scores and personalize schooling so that every student has an opportunity to learn.
This publication reveals new neurological research about the root causes of these obstacles and lays out a comprehensive five-step protocol designed to help all educators identify and address common student academic and behavior issues.
Provides practical ways teachers and administrators from schools around the world are using cell phones for classroom projects, homework assignments, and communication with parents.
Focuses on challenging every student, offering a rigorous curriculum, meeting 21st century learning challenges, using formative assessments, and preparing students for college and the world of work.
Provides a framework for effective teaching that can be applied in any subject area and grade level and practical tips on how to use rubrics, checklists, and point systems to convey your expectations.
This book offers a continuum of options, with four "destinations" on the road to improved grading and assessment.
Explores formative assessment techniques that work in any subject area and grade level. Includes types of oral language (speaking and listening) strategies; ways to use writing to check for understanding; student response techniques that increase participation and engagement; projects and performances that are easily integrated into daily classroom practice; and test items that help plan further instruction.
Provides educators with guidelines and steps for designing a comprehensive assessment program that ensures assessments and grades lead to timely, accurate feedback on specific, standards-based learning goals.
Provides instructional strategies that can be applied to ELL students in every grade level. Includes specific steps and guidance for educators that will boost the achievement levels of ELL students.
Provides instructional strategies that can be applied to ELL students in every grade level. Includes specific steps and guidance for educators that will boost the achievement levels of ELL students and suggestions for helping students develop oral language that leads to improved writing.
Identifies nine categories of instructional strategies that maximize student learning and explains the details of each including: studies in effect size and percentile gain units; guiding principles for using the strategies; and classroom examples of model instructional practice.
This book draws on the research and developments of the following decade to reanalyze and reevaluate the teaching strategies that have the most positive effect on student learning.
This publication offers sage advice on how to close the achievement gap by addressing the "attitude gap" that often affects underperforming students of all racial and ethnic groups.
This book provides time-saving routines for general and special education teachers that will increase the active roles of co-teacher partners and intensify instruction for students. Co-planning strategies for meeting IEP goals, and tips for eliminating the frustrations and barriers often associated with co-planning, are also presented.
Leverage teamwork to integrate the CCSS into your curriculum, and build on a foundational knowledge of PLCs. You'll gain a comprehensive understanding of the shifts required to implement the standards in core content areas and find valuable tips and strategies for creating strong collaborative practices. Identify the essential standards, determine learning targets, define proficiency, learn how to design rigorous assessments, and more.
The time of exclusive top-down leadership is over! Only teachers can transform education from inside the classroom, and this book defines best practices of collaborative teacher leadership. Specific techniques, supporting research, expert insight, and real classroom stories illustrate how to work together for student learning, create a guaranteed and viable curriculum, and use data to inform instruction.
This guide explains how the standards lay the foundation for successful schooling and provide a bridge from foundational concepts taught in elementary school to the more complex studies students will undertake in middle school.
This guide presents an overall guide to the standards, covering their implications for planning, teaching, and learning.
This book provides a succinct, all-in-one look at the content, structure, terminology, and emphases of the Common Core standards for English language arts and literacy at the high school level.
This book provides a succinct, all-in-one look at the structure, terminology, and emphases of the Common Core mathematics standards for high school, including the areas that represent the most significant changes.
This book provides a succinct, all-in-one look at the content, structure, terminology, and emphases of the Common Core standards for English language arts at the middle school level.
This guide covers all the conceptual mathematical understanding students need to acquire during the middle school grades.
Teams that engage in designing, using, and responding to common formative assessments are more knowledgeable about their own standards, more assessment literate, and able to develop more strategies for helping all students learn. In this conversational guide, the authors offer tools, templates, and protocols to incorporate common formative assessments into the practices of a PLC to monitor and enhance student learning.
This work presents strategies, activities, and assessments that target students' ability to comprehend complex text, both traditional written text or multimedia formats. It covers the essential elements of unit design and models for lesson planning; instruction for teaching vocabulary; questioning techniques; strategies and activities designed for teaching complex text; and how to measure text complexity and select appropriate texts.
Presents an instructional approach that helps students in every grade level understand math concepts so they can apply them on assessments, across the curriculum, and outside of school. Provides teaching practices and lesson ideas that give students a stronger foundation for reasoning and problem solving.
Provides teachers with technological ways to find STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) professionals around the world who are willing to interact with their students.
Features a field-tested framework for teaching to ensure inclusion and differentiated instruction are in harmony with standards-based education.
Offers some of the best JRTE (Journal of Research on Technology in Education) articles that focus on classroom technology integration, demonstrating how research can be used to connect theory to practice, moving education forward.
Features a collection of some of the best research articles from the Journal of Research on Technology in Education (JRTE). Topics include the impact of project-based learning on teachers' technology use, e-portfolios in teacher education, and the outcomes of a campus 1-to-1 laptop program.
Focuses on the importance of talk in classrooms. Presents core ideas from linguistics that call attention to roles and what lies behind these roles in terms of representation. Provides ways to help learners gain a curiosity and fascination with language.
Provides an outline to teaching urban students, placing an emphasis on the active participation of teachers, parents, caregivers, and coaches in each student s success.
Build a collaborative coaching culture that ensures all adults learn through activities that keep the team focused on student learning. This practical resource provides activities designed to meet a wide variety of needs so you can choose the ones that fit your leadership style, the learning styles of team members, and the particular needs of the school.
This book draws on lessons learned from educators across grade levels, content areas, and district demographics to present a guide to developing a culture of reflective practice in your school. It explores ideas to help gain a clear understanding of role and responsibilities-and those of the teachers-within each stage of the continuum of self-reflection, and uses real-life examples to determine how teacher-leadership activities and strategic coaching can move them forward.
Provides help navigating evidence-based methodologies to chart a course toward closing (and eliminating) the academic achievement gap. The authors present a comprehensive view of the achievement gap and advocate for strategies that contribute to the success of all children.
This book describes how teachers can create a structured, student-centered environment that allows for openness and surprise, and where inquiry guides authentic learning. Strategies for fostering student curiosity through exploration, novelty, and play; questioning and critical thinking; and experimenting and problem solving are also provided.
Take your professional learning community to the next level! Discover a systemwide approach for re-envisioning your PLC while sustaining growth and continuing momentum on your journey. You'll move beyond isolated pockets of excellence while allowing every person in your school system?from teachers and administrators to students?the opportunity to be an instrument of lasting cultural change.
Covers why and how schools must overhaul, update, and breathe new life into the K-12 curriculum to reflect new technologies in a globalized world.
This workbook shows how to implement data-driven decision making and make it the key to assessing all school activities, from classroom instruction to budgeting.
Offers an experience-based and research-supported argument that detracking can raise achievement across the board and narrow the achievement gap. Provides educational leaders with strategies for launching, sustaining, and monitoring a successful detracking reform.
Provides a variety of practical instructional strategies to accommodate a broad range of learning styles, abilities, and curriculum content. Explores how to use technology to differentiate by student interest, readiness, ability, learning profile, content, process, and product.
Provides an overview of research on the uniqueness of middle school students and illustrates the importance of using technology to create differentiated lessons, especially with this age group.
This book explore how to use differentiated instruction to help students be more successful learners--regardless of background, native language, learning style, motivation, or school savvy.
Explains the relevance and importance of digital citizenship and explores its elements. Provides a useful audit and professional development activities to help educators determine how to go about integrating digital citizenship concepts into the classroom.
Explains the relevance and importance of digital citizenship and explores its elements. Provides a useful audit and professional development activities to help educators determine how to go about integrating digital citizenship concepts into the classroom.
This book offers a foundational look at the internet and a better understanding of how it can be used to promote learning. Each chapter is dedicated to an important area of internet use in the classroom, including critical information literacy, telecollaborative projects, web 2.0, search engines, and digital citizenship.
This publication explores what types of assignments are worth engaging online, how teachers and students can leverage global interactions to improve their work, and how teachers can assess digital projects and other work.
This book is a guide to help teachers sort through, capture, and make sense of the messiness associated with assessment. By shining a spotlight on three types of student portfolios--performance, process, and progress--and how they can be used to assess student work, it assists educators in navigating the maze of digital tools and implement the results to drive instruction.
Provides detailed directions for preparation, production, and presentation of digital stories and the tools needed to create them. Teaches students to work collaboratively and to use new technologies required in the workforce of the future.
Offers practical solutions that focus on relationship building, curriculum relevance, and academic success. Emphasizes the prevention of problems by helping students to understand each other, work well together, and develop responsibility for their own actions. Also includes intervention strategies for handling common and severe problems in dignified ways.
This book shows teachers how they can free themselves from rigid and ineffective busywork by replacing lesson plans with learning journeys that are guided by the students' abilities, interests, and skill levels rather than by pre-selected checklists of day-to-day benchmarks.
Provides a glossary of the terminology used in the education profession.
Provides and introduction to the concept of "Greenfield Schooling" and its potential to free-up schools to be more responsive to communities and kids.
Provides an introduction to podcasting, including hardware and software needs, integrating podcasts into your curriculum, and managing podcasts in the classroom.
Shows school and district-level administrators how to set the priorities and support the practices that will help all teachers become expert teachers.
Formative assessment plays an important role in increasing teacher quality and student learning when it's viewed as a process rather than a tool. Emphasizing the instructional side of formative assessment, this book explores in depth the use of classroom questioning, learning intentions and success criteria, feedback, collaborative and cooperative learning, and self-regulated learning to engineer effective learning environments for students.
This book provides teachers with the information and strategies they need to spot, advocate for, engage, and challenge exceptional learners in their classrooms. It enables them to learn how to recognize the challenges of each child, identify the five unexpected traits of exceptional learners, and adjust teaching to meet the needs of all learners.
The purpose of this book is to provide the rationale behind engaging students, generate more ideas, and build the attitudes to succeed with students who live in poverty. This book is a "no excuses" resource that will get teachers on the path toward making good things happen every single day.
This book serves to share the stories and lessons of school leaders who overcame the cultural challenges of isolationism and teacher reluctance or resistance to successfully involve their teachers in walkthroughs. By encouraging teachers to get involved in walkthroughs and lead efforts for change and continuous improvement, andto overcome so-called teaching isolationism by promoting greater exchange of teaching ideas, student achiev
A collection of articles that explore these questions. Do students really want to learn? Can schools and classrooms become joyful? Are there natural links between standard curriculum and what motivates students to learn?.
Covers new teaching methods and a belief that technology can reshape and re-energize the high school English Language Arts classroom.
Provides a framework for successful teaching practice. Includes applications for state standards, formative assessments, and school specialists.
Provides a strengthened model of RTI (Response to Intervention) that emphasizes formative assessment and refining core instructions rather than relying only on multiple layers of intervention.
This publication addresses the questions of how teachers can collect and use strategic information to up their game and of how districts can better support teaching talent.
"This guide offers advice and real-life examples from elementary and secondary units of study across a variety of content areas and standards, as well as field-tested rubrics, protocols, and other tools. It also provides criteria for evaluating each component of a curriculum and end-of-chapter checklists to help ensure that criteria are met. "
This book acts as a manual that teaches teachers how to style questions to elicit response from students and to create an engaging environment for the student learners.
Ensure your school's grading procedures are supportive of learning, accurate, meaningful, and consistent. Discover how the seven essential Ps? can improve your effectiveness in supporting assessment and communicating student achievement. You will also learn how to avoid inaccurate grades caused by penalties for lateness or academic dishonesty; extra credit; group rather than individual work; and marking down for attendance.
Are you a K-8 principal ready to implement the PLC at Work? process? Two experienced practitioners show you how to explore the critical components needed to lay the foundation of a PLC, including how to develop a structure that supports collaborative teams, how to focus on effective monitoring strategies, how to reflect on your communication effectiveness, and more.
In this guide, the author presents an approach informed by the teachers who helped him and honed through years of connecting with kids who needed someone to show them a path to a more positive future. He shares the little things you can do to prepare yourself for the hard work of making a difference and offers advice for bridging cultural divides, earning students' trust, and equipping them to take responsibility for their own success.
The PLC journey begins by articulating a moral purpose: a dedication to ensuring that every student learns. Using many examples and reproducible tools, the authors explain the need to focus on creating simultaneous top-down and bottom-up leadership to align district- and school-level policies and procedures. Learn how to grow PLCs by providing direction and encouraging innovation at every level of the district.
This book focuses on the potentially overwhelming, sometimes puzzling, often delicate work of engaging both students and parents in the pursuit of learning and achievement.
This book provides an inspiring look at how real-world educators are creating schools where all students are able to thrive. In these schools, educators understand that equity is not about treating all children the same. They are deeply committed to ensuring that each student receives what he or she individually needs to develop their full potential--and succeed.
Provides educators with information on how to provide motivational and challenging math instruction for middle and high school students. Includes advice on setting up the classroom, planning learning experiences, and assessing results.
This book offers guidance to help educators select, implement, and assess effective school- or districtwide initiatives. It is filled with resources like action checklists, principles to guide educators, and in-depth questions and protocols, for engaging in collaborative professional development activities that strengthen teaching and learning practices and improve student achievement.
This guide provides information on what a flipped classroom is and why it works. Learn about the flipped mastery model, where students learn at their own pace, furthering opportunities for personalized education.
This book describes a plan for radically improving student learning that is built on three core elements: a focused and coherent curriculum (what we teach); clear, prioritized lessons (how we teach); and purposeful reading and writing, or authentic literacy.
This book presents detailed examples of how formative walkthroughs work across grade levels and subject areas, and provide useful templates that administrators and coaches can use to get started.
This book discusses how teachers teach the virtues of grit--tenacity, perseverance, and the ability to never give up while helping students enjoy learning and want to come to school, even through painful and frustrating experiences.
This book explores an urgent and growing issue--childhood trauma--and its profound effect on learning and teaching. It can help educators cultivate a trauma-sensitive learning environment for students across all content areas, grade levels, and educational settings.
This text 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.
Covers the cultural shift happening in schools with technology and provides a road map for how to navigate this change with buy-in from key stakeholders.
Instructs educators on how to be future-focused leaders. Includes trends that will affect education; ways to scan the environment and the world at large; a plan for setting priorities based on probabilities; a 4-step issue management process; steps to developing plausible scenarios for guiding strategic planning; and activities that make up a future-focused communications system.
Discover how the largest elementary school district in Illinois became a flourishing professional learning community. You?ll walk through each step of the PLC journey to learn how the district approached the most vital components of a successful PLC, such as building shared knowledge, forming collaborative teams, and setting priorities. Reduce your own trial and error by using their lessons learned as a road map toward long-lasting change.
This book provide a quick synopsis of the best ideas found to make the most of blended instruction by learning to navigate the technical details of Internet access and learning management systems.
Presents LEGO Robotics in a manageable, organized way so that you learn what it is, what student activities look like, how to begin, how to manage a class, and how robotics relate to standards.
Explains the mental processes students need to gather, organize, and understand information, and describes how educators can infuse their lessons with new routines and teaching approaches that influence students to become better, more independent learners.
Provides an introduction to global networks such as iEarn, Global Schoolhouse, and ePals and contains an overview of Web 2.0 tools that support global learning, such as wikis, blogs, and podcasts.
Provides an introduction to GPS and geocaching to learn where to find geocaches, how they are placed, what to do when you locate one, and what GPS tools you'll need to use.
This guide addresses the Common Core State Standards' calls for increased student collaboration with practical advice, strategies, and examples. The author explains how to assess and report on (but not grade) learning skills and group interaction skills.
Provides a four-step approach for teaching students how to acquire content knowledge, including examples of student projects as well as effective assessment tools that teachers can adapt for their own classrooms.
Covers how to use a combination of questions, prompts, cues, direct explanations, and modeling to guide students' learning and build their understanding.
Through first-hand accounts, learn how the habits of mind help students at all grade levels successfully deal with the challenges they face in school and beyond.
This book provides instructional strategies and lets you choose among strategies presented for those that interest you and fit your classroom needs. Exercises help you check your understanding and rubrics help you to assess the effectiveness of the strategy with your students.
Focusing on the unique response to intervention challenges faced by those working in a secondary school including larger student and educator populations, curriculum specializations, a growing achievement gap, and more the authors outline three imperative components of a successful RTI program and then provide action steps and examples illustrating how each component should surface within the different RTI tiers.
Covers how to develop and use test questions and other assessments that reveal how well students can analyze, reason, solve problems, and think creatively.
This book provides research tools that will help 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.
In this guide, the author identifies two essential components of effective rubrics: (1) criteria that relate to the learning (not the "tasks") that students are being asked to demonstrate and (2) clear descriptions of performance across a continuum of quality. The book also outlines the difference between various kinds of rubrics, explains when using each type of rubric is appropriate, and highlights examples from all grade levels.
This book covers the fundamentals of differentiating instruction for students in an academically diverse classroom and provides additional guidelines and new strategies for how to go about it. It explores what differentiation is and why it is essential, how to set up the flexible and supportive learning environment that promotes success, how to manage a differentiated classroom, and how to plan lessons differentiated by readiness, interest, and learning profile.
Provides educators with ideas on matching instructional approaches to the readiness, interests, and talents of all students: learning centers, hands-on activities, contracts, and investigative projects. Describes ways of structuring lessons to provide "scaffolds" for the lesson content, the procedures used in learning, and the products of learning.
Intended to help teachers provide effective feedback to students. Focuses on feedback that comes from a teacher to a student and is based on student work.
"This book offers enhanced guidance for considering the effectiveness of properly crafted and individually tailored feedback on student work. It provides information on every aspect of feedback, including strategies to uplift and encourage students to persevere in their work; how to formulate and deliver feedback that both assesses learning and extends instruction; and when and how to use oral, written, and visual as well as individual, group, or whole-class feedback. "
Learn how to maximize "tough times" and "money issues" to help your school thrive with inexpensive, and time-efficient programs and initiatives. Topics include identifying stages of team development that lead to more productive and time-efficient meetings.
This book aids teachers and administrators in understanding the critical elements and nuances of assessment data and how that information can best be used to inform improvement efforts in the school or district.
Shows examples of what great teachers do to motivate reluctant learners without relying on elaborate rewards systems or creative tricks to reach students who actively or passively resist investing themselves in the classroom.
Covers the step by step process of what great teachers do to set a learning destination that's worth working toward and ensure that the path students take to get there will help them pass the big tests and become engaged learners, effective problem solvers, and critical thinkers.
This book presents a thoughtful and practical approach to achieving breakthrough success with linguistically and culturally diverse students who struggle in school. Strategies for setting high expectations, providing access to the core curriculum, using assessment to inform instruction, attending to language development--both English and academic, and creating a supportive classroom climate are also discussed.
Provides proactive learning support to enable teachers to give students the right kind of assistance and get those who are struggling back on track. Covers the steps of building a plan and provides all the strategies needed to support students before, during, and after instruction.
Provides a practical map to navigate some of today's most complicated instructional challenges. Identifies five critical keys to personalizing learning for students who have wildly different cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds.
This book guides educators at all levels in figuring out how to produce grades for single assignments and report cards that accurately communicate student achievement of learning goals. It explores topics that are fundamental to effective grading and learning practices, including acknowledging that all students can learn, supporting and motivating student effort and learning, designing and grading appropriate assessments, and implementing learning-focused grading policies.
This book is written for busy school leaders who want to foster learning and growth not only for students but also for teachers. Effective leadership is vital in creating a culture of collaboration, modeling continuous improvement, and developing enhanced engagement throughout the building.
Focuses on the real crux of teacher supervision: how learners are learning. Topics include how to make the right adjustments in the areas that have the most impact on student achievement: curriculum, instruction, assessment, and feedback practices.
Explains the four critical areas of teaching and describes how educators can use an approach that increases student success. Offers step-by-step instructions for developing a curriculum document, planning your instructional activities, choosing a set of classroom assessment tasks, and recording meaningful feedback on student performance.
This book focuses on relevant topics that face today's educational leaders,particularly those at the school level: teacher leaders, grade or departmentchairs, assistant principals, and principals. Each chapter weaves a narrative of a successful leader who embodies the characteristics that current research and theory have established as essential for success, examining a different topic while offering practical applications and ways
Provides practical options for handling the teachers' many tasks: from beginning a class to maintaining engagement, from motivating slackers to managing disrupters, from building efficient routines to cushioning student anxiety, and numerous other workable strategies.
Presents concepts on how to inspire students to learn, behave responsibly, and improve their relationships with themselves, other students, and teachers.
A guide for teachers to help their students come out as winners in a test-pressured environment and explains how to do that with a practical framework for teaching in the accountability age.
For instructional coaches, no two days are ever the same. This unique companion melds theory and practice to show how coaches can seamlessly integrate themselves into the fabric of the school and help teachers improve their practice from day one.
This book provides insight and demonstrates how educator-centered instructional coaching can make a difference in teacher learning, instructional practice, and student outcomes.
Explains how the combination of the Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design frameworks can ensure all students are learning at maximum levels. Describes how a curriculum built on the goal of student understanding, integrated with instructional approaches that emphasize reaching every learner, can provide teachers with more specific teaching targets and more flexible ways to reach them.
This guide provides educators with a clear structure and specific goals for a technology-infused classroom.
This book introduces the powerful FIT Teaching Tool, which harnesses the FIT Teaching approach and presents a detailed continuum of growth and leadership.
Provides a "how-to" for building a virtual classroom using interactive videoconferencing includes lessons and evaluation tools.
Explains how to have more influence in the classroom to get more power from what you say to your students every day and provides can't-fail strategies and 100 tips for talking to students more effectively.
Features an easy-to-follow guide for any educator, practicing or preservice, who wants to be an effective technology facilitator and/or educational leader.
This book offers lessons that educators at all levels can apply to teaching, assessing, counseling, and designing interventions for learners from all walks of life. It also offers real-life examples of challenging classroom situations, each with a detailed breakdown of how they were peacefully and non-punitively resolved and strategies for designing learning environments suited to the individual needs of students and reflective of their cultural backgrounds.
Explores what it means to foster health and safety for students by offering a look at the issues from many angles, addressing both physical and mental health and safety.
This collection of inspirational quotes provides daily motivation for teachers and administrators. Collected from a decade of work by renowned experts Robert Eaker, Rebecca DuFour, and Richard DuFour, this book will keep educators focused on the daily work that drives a PLC, recommit them to their chosen profession (and remind them why they chose it), and sustain their enthusiasm for the journey.
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.
This book is a guide for ensuring that your school provides the federally guaranteed "least restrictive environment" for students no matter the severity of the challenges they face.
A guide that covers everything needed to deal with time, space, materials, groups, and strategies in ways that balance content requirements with multiple pathways for learning. Explains how to lead a class that is differentiated to individual students' needs.
By focusing on what students learn rather than what they are taught, schools can redefine their mission and begin the transition to a professional learning community. After interviewing and observing principals, administrators, and teachers, the authors identify seven leadership practices that effective PLC leaders share, along with the techniques that have led them to sustainable success.
Explains how teachers and administrators can make sure change efforts lead to better results. Topics include effective planning models for change that include highly focused goals and action plans.
This book provides an overview of the reflective thinking and action-oriented steps necessary to launch a system of continuous professional learning, culture building, and program assessment that will allow differentiation to flourish in every classroom.
This book shows school administrators, principals, and other education leaders how to apply the author's model to the work of running schools and districts. It offers an overview of the case for simple, focused school and district leadership; examples of real schools and districts that have embraced focused leadership; and a practical implementation guide for ensuring focused leadership in schools and districts.
Encompasses immediate and practical considerations that promote using the Habits of Mind in classrooms and schools every day. Also, addresses the concern for creating a learning culture that considers the Habits of Mind as central to building a thoughtful community and world.
Through continuous work with educators, the authors have created a more powerful, practical resource for moving forward in the PLC process. This book is an action guide for closing the knowing-doing gap and transforming schools into PLCs. It also includes seven major additions that equip educators with essential tools for confronting challenges.
What is the explicit instructional strategy that supports the higher-level skills students need to meet the demands of the Common Core Standards? Here's a book that answers that question and provides you with the vision needed to help students perform cognitive behaviors necessary for college or career-readiness.
Explores how Lincoln's ability to persevere and lead despite adversity provides an inspirational model for educators struggling with today's challenges of accountability, diversity, political conflict, and economic hardship.
Provides educators with information on how to plan creative museum projects that target content standards and develop students' understanding of required subject matter.
This book situates learning targets in a theory of action that students, teachers, principals, and central-office administrators can use to unify their efforts to raise student achievement and create a culture of evidence-based, results-oriented practice.
This teacher-friendly guide offers everything needed to help students who are bored, frustrated, or under performing come alive to learning through the fundamental power of choice. It provides examples of choice in action, ideas to try with different students, and a step-by-step process to help plan and incorporate choice into your classroom.
Explains how negative attitudes toward math get established in the brain and what teachers can do to turn those attitudes around.
This book outlines eight keys--each a piece of a puzzle for transforming the K-12 education system of teaching and learning--to intentionally design tomorrow's schools so that today's learners are prepared for success . . . and stand ready to create new industries, find new cures, and solve world problems.
Explores the research on learning and describes how teachers can work backwards from learning goals to ensure all students reach their maximum potential. Also describes how to extend this learning-driven approach beyond the classroom to ensure that teacher supervision and professional development programs emphasize learner outcomes.
Featuring classroom examples, lesson imaging templates, and tips on how to start the process, this book helps teachers anticipate students' ideas and questions and stimulate deeper learning in science, math, engineering, and technology.
This book shines a spotlight on gamification, an instructional approach that's revolutionizing K-12 education. Students build knowledge through experimentation and then apply what they've learned to fuel further exploration at higher levels of understanding.
This book explains why ensuring high-quality reading instruction is one of school leaders' most important jobs and introduce their Literacy Classroom Visit (LCV) Model. Meticulously researched and refined through years of application in the field, the LCV Model enables administrators to evaluate and improve literacy instruction in their school or district.
This guide provides step -by-step instructions on how to blog, how to get ideas for your curriculum area, and understand how to manage blogging in the classroom.
This book explores how to turn students into flexible mathematical thinkers and problem solvers. It focuses on the following areas: making sense of math by fostering habits of mind that help students analyze, understand, and adapt to problems; addressing the mathematical building blocks necessary to include in effective math instruction; and turning teaching "upside down" by shifting how we teach, focusing on discussion and analysis as much as we focus on correct answers.
Provides educators with information that will ensure that state standards lead to higher student achievement. Describes how to sequence content and set up grading scales that help facilitate formative assessment and effective instruction. Provides steps for converting standards into guidelines that are more useful to classroom teachers.
This book provides a compelling vision for teacher growth that encourages and supports instructional expertise, along with nearly three dozen step-by-step protocols for working with teachers. These protocols present a powerful rationale for re-conceptualizing teacher evaluation by creating a balanced system of three equally important components: Reliable and valid evaluation, empowering and focused supervision, and meaningful and purposeful reflection.
Focus on developing people not just improving test scores. The authors examine how staffing decisions can strengthen professional learning communities and explore actions that can help school leaders safeguard their schools against complacency. Collect tips and strategies that every leader can adopt, and apply the professional development techniques that prove most useful.
Discusses some of the most powerful cultural differences that can lead to classroom conflict for many students and how educators can capitalize on these differences to make their classroom a harmonious, productive environment.
Provides an approach to classroom management that deals with accepting teenage students as they are and recognizing what they need: a connection with the curriculum; a sense of order; and most essentially, a sense that someone cares.
This book details the crucial role program evaluation serves in school success and how to implement meaningful evaluations that make a difference. It provides a road map of how to conduct comprehensive, system-wide evaluations of programs and processes; the tools needed to obtain usable, pertinent information; and how to use these data to expand teachers' and administrators' data-informed decision-making focus.
This book details the crucial role program evaluation serves in school success and how to implement meaningful evaluations that make a difference. It provides a road map of how to conduct comprehensive, system-wide evaluations of programs and processes; the tools needed to obtain usable, pertinent information; and how to use these data to expand teachers' and administrators' data-informed decision-making focus.
This book shows how to bring media literacy into the classroom--whether that classroom is English language arts, social studies, health, or any other subject--to teach students skills that enable them to become knowledgeable media consumers and producers.
Explains what problems are unique to the urban environment, why urban youth is more difficult to motivate, and how to replace ineffective approaches with methods that relate to these students' everyday experiences.
This book identifies small, specific adjustments to planning, teaching, and assessment practices that will support more effective learning in every student, every day, and help close the achievement gap on a classroom-by-classroom basis.
Describes how educators can collaborate with others to reverse poor motivation, reward student success, and realize higher achievement in even the most challenged school districts.
Setting data-informed, high-priority SMART goals is a critical step in school improvement that is widely acknowledged. However, goals themselves don?t drive improvement; they must be aligned to the school improvement process, curriculum, instruction, assessment practices, mandates, and professional development. Understand how to properly use the SMART goal process to effect change and achieve real school improvement.
Offers advice on what to do about the chronic achievement gap between black males and other student populations. Understand why lack of proficiency in reading, writing, and math among black males is a symptom of deeper problems that are generally ignored.
Demonstrates how multiple intelligences theory can be teamed with technology to produce curriculum that inspires students to learn.
Provides updates on multiple intelligences theory and its many applications to schools and classrooms. Topics include how to address common criticisms of the MI model and the success of international applications of MI theory.
Defines the responsibilities of district and school leaders in the effective use of technology in education.
Addresses the need for basic technology competence, and also incorporates the skills and knowledge that students require to learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly digital society.
This book focuses on five categories of special needs: learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, intellectual disabilities, and emotional and behavioral disorders.
In this book for school leaders, the author presents a new model for understanding teaching as a combination of skill and will and explains the best ways to support individual teachers' ongoing professional development. Real-life examples, practical tools, and strategies for managing time and energy demands will help you build your leadership capacity as you raise the level of instructional excellence throughout your school.
A guide that helps teachers develop a more fluid and automatic way to respond to students and deliver great teaching experiences.
This book explores how one of the most fundamental instructional strategies--questioning--can provide the proper scaffolding to deepen student thinking, understanding, and application of knowledge.
This collection of articles includes tips and strategies, reflections on the profession as a whole, and descriptions of practices that can make the teaching experience more effective and more rewarding.
This collection of articles covers what research says about the teaching of both reading and reading comprehension--from teaching phonics to improving fluency to tackling complex texts. It offers strategies for teaching informational texts as well as fiction. Most important, it also addresses how to inspire the love of reading.
This collection of articles pulls together some of the best pieces on formative assessment and feedback that will help educators understand how to best use the data they have at their fingertips.
This collection of articles brings together fifteen insightful and passionate pieces that will help you better understand how poverty affects learning and what educators can do to make a positive difference for each learner every day.
Provides ongoing advice and counsel on how to master the entire spectrum of duties that teacher leaders are expected to accomplish.
This book shows how educators can reclaim the curriculum by shifting the textbook from sole source to resource. Advice is also provided on using Common Core State Standards throughout the school and in the classroom.
This book presents a strategy for how educators can build effective partnerships with parents--especially those who typically have not been actively involved in their children's schooling. It includes case studies spanning the K-12 spectrum, and it explores ways to assist struggling students, collaborate on IEPs, use school-based events to engage parents in problem solving, and tap into community resources to work effectively with families of English language learners.
This book explains how to develop a collaborative, learning-focused culture and build trust among colleagues; offers strategies for participating in difficult conversations that yield useful feedback; clarifies how to develop, sustain, and evaluate peer coaching efforts; and showcases exemplary peer coaching practices used in real schools.
This book explores the role peer feedback plays in learning and teaching. It will help teachers gain an understanding of what meaningful feedback looks like; establish a student-led learning environment that supports risk taking and honest sharing; teach students to be adept peer strategists; develop cooperative student expert groups; and use technology to enhance collaboration, streamline the learning and revision process, and strengthen students' digital citizenship skills.
Discusses the six most pervasive problem areas in high school education today, and what schools are doing to connect with students, personalize learning, differentiate instruction, and make high school curriculum more relevant.
Focuses on topics of why games should be a part of education, featuring the availability of games in four core subjects and physical education, selecting and integrating games in school, and alternate perspectives on game-based learning.
In this book, the author details the steps and resources necessary for designing a comprehensive principal evaluation system that is based on sound research and established best practices.
Provides school principals with information on how to keep on top of the human relationships and dynamics at work in their schools.
Explains how to create the right circumstances for group learning so that students build on one another's understanding and end up knowing more than they would have working alone.
This book provides a framework for developing professional learning experiences that spark and maintain teacher motivation and lead to real changes in practice. It makes the case for a better approach--one that melds traditional PD structures with personalized learning. The author's three-stage professional development for learning (PDL) process covers critical aspects of planning, providing, and following up.
Provides an explanation of the theoretical bases of project-based learning and then demonstrates how technology may be effectively integrated.
Provides different protocols for facilitating PLC conversations and activities used to to examine student work, explore instructional practice, address problems, or engage your colleagues in discussion.
Students thrive when educators commit to proactively meeting their behavioral as well as academic needs. This book will help teachers and school leaders transform the research on behavior, response to intervention, and professional learning communities into practical strategies they can use to create a school culture and classroom climates in which learning is primed to occur.
Accessible language and compelling stories illustrate how RTI is most effective when built on the Professional Learning Communities at Work process. Written by award-winning educators from successful PLC schools, this book demonstrates how to create three tiers of interventions from basic to intensive to address student learning gaps. You will understand what a successful program looks like, and the many reproducible forms and activities will help your team understand how to make RTI work in your school.
Includes empirical studies of principal practice as linked to student achievement, case studies of principals, meta-analyses of principal effectiveness, and other reviews of research.
Focuses on cultivating teacher qualities that are most apt to raise student achievement. Establishes definitive benchmarks for top-flight teacher education and professional development programs. This approach also includes teachers who work with at-risk and high-ability students.
This work presents and analyzes the DNA of productive discussions--teacher-guided, small-group, and student-driven. It provides an in-depth exploration of questioning as the beating heart of thoughtful discussions as important components of classroom instruction that work in tandem to push learning forward and move students from passive participants to active meaning-makers.
Covers the newest and most popular technologies, along with discussions of the risks each might harbor and the types of behaviors that every child should learn.
Covers the instructional, management, and assessment strategies to help teachers be more effective at educating black students.
This expansion of Whatever It Takes sharpens the focus on the pyramid of interventions strategy. The authors examine case studies of schools and districts across North America to illustrate how PLC at Work is a sustainable and transferable process that ensures struggling students get the support they need to achieve. They address how to enrich and extend the learning of proficient students and explain how PLC intervention processes align with RTI legislation.
This books provides guidance and resources to help teachers communicate and collaborate with the families of Latino English Language Learners (ELLs). Practical tips and tools, including reproducible form letters in English and Spanish, are provided to help teachers solicit valuable information aboutstudents from their families, extend families' knowledge of how U.S. schools operate, and provide families with ideas for helping studen
This text explains the four keys to real engagement: clarity, context, challenge, and culture. The strategies provided for improving classroom assignments, assessments, and environments will help teachers create learning experiences that are rigorous, meaningful, and rewarding for their students and themselves.
In this book, teachers will learn why students need to be able to identify and solve authentic, project-worthy problems in their own communities and beyond; how to connect with real-world experts, allies, and audiences; and what practical, field-tested strategies are essential for planning, assessing, and using technology to support successful projects.
Explores the essential elements of a teacher leader framework that promotes deep implementation of effective teaching practices. Provides practical ways to support networks of teacher leaders at the school, district, and state levels.
Offers educators a guide for maximizing the benefits of project-based learning in today's technology-rich learning environment.
Explores how to enhance students' memory and test-taking abilities, based on brain research. Provides ways to captivate and hold students' attention and encourage their participation and progress.
Discusses how schools can exceed expectations, swiftly reduce achievement gaps, and enhance the lifetime learning of all students. Describes simple actions that can swiftly and substantially improve education and provides a set of structures and practices for improving instruction in any school.
This book describes four broad supports crucial to helping early-career teachers succeed and stay in the profession: comprehensive induction programs, supportive administrators, skilled mentors, and helpful colleagues. It offers practical, research-based strategies to help leaders provide these supports and create a culture of collaboration across the school.
This book will show all educators how standards-based grading can authentically reflect student progress and learning--and significantly improve both teaching and learning.
Covers the debate over whether homework is an essential component of rigorous schooling or a harmful practice. Topics include how to avoid the "homework trap" and "seven steps to building better relationships with parents about homework".
Features why Google Applications are the best free online learning tools available today. Topics include how students and educators can collaborate with Google Documents, how the forms application allows teachers to create instant-feedback quizzes, and how a literature class can take lit trips with Google Maps.
This 10th-anniversary sequel to the authors best-selling book Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement merges research, practice, and passion. The most extensive, practical, and authoritative PLC resource to date, it goes further than ever before into best practices for deep implementation, explores the commitment/consensus issue, and celebrates successes of educators who are making the journey.
This book provides the facts on what works, what makes a successful leader, what proper educational technology implementation looks like, and what cost savings to expect. Includes a vision of schools of the future, where student learning is self-directed and self-paced.
In this book, the author introduces and outlines the Results Only Learning Environment, a place that embraces the final result of learning rather than the traditional methods for arriving at that result. Learn how your students can take charge of their own achievement in an enjoyable, project-based, workshop setting that challenges them with real-world learning scenarios.
Explores how to use a news aggregator to harness the power of RSS for a variety of purposes, including classroom projects, professional development, and keeping students and parents informed.
Perhaps more than any other single initiative, response to intervention is likely to restructure how middle and high school teachers teach in a very profound way. This timely and targeted resource discusses the innovations of RTI, differentiated instruction, and instructional technologies. Based on numerous real-world case studies, this book explores solutions for the complex challenges the RTI implementation process brings.
Explore why intervention and support for struggling students in the early grades are essential to student success. Teachers and support personnel will discover how to implement RTI-based supports in the early grades and learn what this prevention looks like. Find practical, research-based strategies to seal the gaps in student learning in grades K-3, identify students who need intervention, and more.
Offers practical advice to help middle and high school students stay safe online by making better choices and minimizing their risks.
Offers practical advice to help middle and high school students stay safe online by making better choices and minimizing their risks. Updated to reflect today's advances in technology, this guide contains dozens of classroom-tested exercises and links to websites, documents, and resources.
This book offers practical advice and strategies that help you build positive energy to reinvigorate your school's culture and staff. It zeroes in on key school improvement efforts, including moving from the culture you have to the culture you want; using the school's culture to improve teaching, job satisfaction, and morale; maximizing the intentions of professional learning communities; and developing organizational habits that can contribute to positive change.
This book offers tools, strategies, and advice for defining, assessing, and ultimately transforming your school's culture into one that is positive, forward-looking, and actively working to enrich students' lives.
Explains critical leadership principles that every administrator needs to know including how school leaders can increase student achievement and which leadership practices have the biggest impact on school effectiveness.
Describes how to start with the school's mission and goals and develop a powerful school improvement plan focused on desired results. Explains how to use Understanding by Design's backward-design process to determine the evidence for the plan's success and to plan improvement steps in instruction and leadership roles. Provides action ideas for starting the school improvement process and keeping it going.
Emphasizes the importance of balance in creating school environments that are safe and productive. Provides educators, administrators, and IT staff the information they need to have constructive conversations about security challenges while still making sure students receive an effective, technology-infused education.
Students who are able to self-regulate are the ones who approach challenges with confidence, plan their learning tactics, maintain focus, work well with peers, monitor their progress, seek help when they need it, and adjust their approach for next time. In this resource, the authors present instructional strategies and specific ideas educators can implement in their classrooms to place all students on the path to positive, empowered
This book take readers through the step-by-step process of how to create, implement, and assess project based learning (PBL) using a classroom-tested framework. Also included are chapters for school leaders on implementing PBL system wide and the use of PBL in informal settings.
How can we find time to meet students' and teachers' needs, foster ingenuity and innovation, and apply best practices when so much is demanding our attention? In this resource, the author offers practical advice on how principals can make the most of their time to achieve real success.
The sequel to Pyramid Response to Intervention advocates that a successful RTI model begins by asking the right questions to create a fundamentally effective learning environment for every student. RTI is not a series of implementation steps, but rather a way of thinking. Understand why bureaucratic, paperwork-heavy, compliance-oriented, test-score-driven approaches fail. Then learn how to create a focused RTI model that works.
This books outlines the principles and practices that can be employed right now in schools to change the odds of meeting the needs of all students and providing a better education for students. Includes interventions that schools must perform to change the odds for students.
In this book, the authors identify and describe the 25 most common problems in curriculum unit design and recommend how to fix them--and avoid them when planning new units.
This book outlines why traditional homework causes dread and frustration for students; how flipped learning--completing the harder or more analytical aspects of learning in class as opposed to having students do it on their own--improves student learning; and how teachers can create flipped assignments that both engage students and advance student learning.
This book is packed with ideas for both new and veteran teachers of K-8 students, covering a variety of topics that are especially relevant to the first week of school. It provides critical information that includes arranging and navigating the classroom, setting basic expectations, communicating routines, and understanding your students' needs. You'll gain new insights for the first week of school and for a successful year for students, parents, and teachers.
This text 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.
Explains how to use the Process Learning Circle method to ensure your PLC advances the type of teacher learning that is essential to improving student achievement.
Provides educators with the information and resources they need to get their students podcasting, including tutorials, adaptable units, and a discussion of ethics and copyright considerations.
This book maps out a transformative model of personalization that puts students at the center and asks them to employ the set of dispositions for engagement and learning known as the Habits of Mind.
Research shows that inquiry-based instruction boosts students' critical thinking skills and promotes the creative problem solving needed for an energized learning environment. This guide helps hone the necessary skills to plan and implement inquiry-based lessons that engage math and science students.
This book explores how the special education teacher and the general education teacher work together to create a student's individualized education plan (IEP) towards each student meeting carefully crafted goals. It addresses five common challenges posed by IEPs: understanding the full scope of the teacher's role, doing critical prep work for IEP meetings, offering modifications and accommodations, contributing to the IEP team, and monitoring student progress.
Explores numerous summarization strategies, including all of the steps and examples educators need to start using summarization to improve students' comprehension and boost their long-term memory.
Provides information on how to transform a supervisory system into a performance-based model that connects to student achievement and teacher professional development.
Focuses on supporting students by differentiating instruction, using scaffolds and interventions, being inclusive and positive, and responding to 21st century learning challenges.
Provides a practical guide for educators who would like to use tablet PCs to instruct, communicate, and collaborate in the classroom.
Provides a leadership plan and action steps that will build on students' literacy skills and intervene with students who falter. Includes strategies to integrate literacy and learning across the content areas; support structures that involve teachers, administrators, parents, and community members in your literacy program; and examples of school environments that sustain literacy development.
Learn how to overcome budget cuts, lack of leadership, top-down mandates, and other obstacles to professional development. Topics include how to combine time, a motivational system, and teacher leadership to generate a schoolwide improvement effort.
This book presents the groundbreaking results of the Institute's half-decade of research, development, and practice: a simple but powerful model for personalizing students' learning experiences by building their levels of commitment, ownership, and independence.
This book provides tools to assess your current self-reflective tendencies, identify opportunities to reflect on your instruction, and begin to forge a path toward continuous growth and educational excellence.
This book lays out a framework for the "next generation" of teacher evaluation: a model focused primarily on helping educators develop and improve their practice. By taking into account multiple accurate, data-rich measures of teacher performance and student growth, the model ensures that all teachers receive fair, meaningful, and reliable evaluations.
Provides a foundation for developing and supporting highly committed teacher leaders. Including advice for administrators and practical tips for experienced and aspiring teacher leaders, this book presents a clear plan for ensuring that teacher leadership is a powerful force for school improvement.
This book demonstrates how to build productive teams and intentionally create an environment of professional engagement in your school by utilizing these four steps: establishing guidelines and protocols, managing and resolving conflicts, refining decision-making skills, and building team capacity.
Explains how proven coaching strategies can help teachers inspire students and boost their performance in any subject and grade level. Discusses why a coaching environment creates more student motivation and higher engagement, and provides the strategies and techniques that winning coaches use to help groups and individuals work more productively, overcome difficulties, and achieve meaningful and measurable goals.
This book focuses on ways educators can use the Pathways to Re-Engagement model to create strategies and transform underachieving boys into successful learners in the classroom. Presents four large-scale studies used to discover how boys learn best, and provides lesson plans, and anecdotes from real teachers of all grade levels.
Provides help to teachers, in every subject area, become expert teachers of English language learners (ELL).
This book focuses on creating a successful partnership while co-teaching within a classroom, and examines topics such as organization, engaging students with multiple perspectives, and responding to parental concerns. Provides guidance based on answering questions posed by real co-teachers, and is suitable for principles, teachers, paraprofessionals, and administrators.
This book details how to design, manage, and maintain an active classroom that balances autonomy and structure. It offers student-centered strategies on sorting, station teaching, and cooperative learning that will help teachers build on students' intellectual curiosity, self-efficacy, and sense of purpose.
This book seeks to help educators understand how to teach reading in their respective disciplines, choose the best reading strategies from the vast array available, and positively influence student learning.
In this book, the authors explain metacognition and how it equips students to meet today's rigorous education standards. They present a unique blend of useful metaphors, learning strategies, and instructional tips you can use to teach your students to be the boss of their brains.
This book explains how teachers can use reflection to help students decipher their own learning needs and engage in deep, thought-provoking discourse about progress.
This book shows how teachers can more purposefully integrate technology into instruction to facilitate the practice and mastery of each of the 4Cs (critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity) along with other learning objectives.
Provides educators with an understanding of how the brain processes language, emotion, and other stimuli. Includes brain research compatible techniques that help to increase students' motivation to read.
This guide provides a list of critical words students must know to be successful with the Common Core State Standards and any other standardized assessment they encounter.
This book outlines a comprehensive, collaborative approach to teaching that focuses on students' strengths and resiliency. It encourages educators to embrace teaching and school-wide practices that support and enhance the academic and social-emotional development of students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress.
Shows educators how to effectively use digital video in four core curriculum areas: science, social studies, English language arts, and math.
Covers why and how the effects of poverty have to be addressed in classroom teaching and school and district policy. Topics include what poverty does to children's brains and why students raised in poverty are especially subject to stressors that undermine school behavior and performance.
This publication helps educators use tablets for modeling, guided instruction, collaborative learning, independent learning, and formative assessment.
Explores how to improve student achievement and create a more effective classroom by applying brain research to teaching. Includes insights on how students are wired for learning and how their learning behaviors change as they mature.
Drilling down into 12 daily touchstones of great teaching, this book makes it easier for educators to stay focused on the hallmarks of effective instruction.
This publication shares real anecdotes and practical strategies that help educators transform any learning environment into a classroom where students can quickly tap their own initiative, draw from resources, and get help from their peers to learn new content.
Presents a model for ensuring quality teaching that balances the necessity of research-based data with the equally vital need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of individual students.
This book merges the idea of teamwork with the concept of an artisan-apprentice relationship; when newer members of the profession work alongside experts ("artisans"). Over time, the apprentices become artisans themselves and in turn share the art and craft of teaching with newer teachers.
This book provides a step-by-step guide for the implementation of Spider Web Discussion, covering everything from introducing the technique to creating rubrics for discussion self-assessment to the nuts and bolts of charting the conversations and using the data collected for formative assessment.
Features a collection of articles and commentary on the latest trends and topics in educational technology and leadership.
Explores learning settings, pedagogical tools, and instructional approaches that any school can adopt to inspire students of all ages to discover their passion for learning.
This book addresses a dilemma faced by many principals: how to function as learning leaders while fulfilling their evaluative and management duties. The answer? Incorporating instructional coaching techniques as an integral part of serious school improvement.
This book provides the best strategies to increase student engagement and achievement and prepare students for college and career.
Explains instructional approaches that meet the needs and interests of every student. Includes principles that guide a differentiated classroom; instructional strategies that make it easier to provide multiple learning paths for students; practical ways to give students options about how they learn required curriculum; and steps to get started with differentiation or take it to a higher level.
Includes common misconceptions about differentiation; nonnegotiables that are essential to the implementation of differentiated instruction; factors that contribute to failure to change classroom practice; leadership lessons for accomplishing the change process; tools for monitoring and evaluating the change toward differentiation; and characteristics of staff development practices that support differentiated instruction.
This book focuses on a four-step approach to formative assessment, explaining how the system of give-and-take between student and teacher promotes learning in the classroom. Uses real-life scenarios to demonstrate application of the steps and provide adjustable instruction techniques for any grade level.
For success in school and life, students need more than proficiency in academic subjects and good scores on tests. To truly thrive, students need to develop attributes that aren't typically measured on standardized tests. In this book, educators will learn how to foster the "Formative Five" success skills that today's students need, including : empathy; self-control; integrity; embracing diversity; and grit.
Contains strategies for a successful literacy coaching initiative including: roles and responsibilities of literacy coaches; keys to building positive collaboration among literacy coaches, support staff, and faculty members; fundamentals of adult learning that apply in a coaching relationship; ideas to help you monitor the effectiveness of your initiative; and ways to communicate effectively to students and fellow teachers.
Provides specific guidance for teacher educators, teachers, administrators, and others who seek to use the framework to improve their programs and practice. Includes tools for using the framework in teacher preparation, teacher recruitment and hiring, teacher mentoring and peer coaching, professional development, and teacher evaluation.
In this book, the author introduces the Teacher Intentionality Practice Scale (TIPS), a framework for both supporting and measuring effective teaching. Taken together, the framework's seven TIPs provide a research-based, classroom-tested guide to help teachers create coherent, connected lessons.
Provides research-based pathways that teachers can take, regardless of their experience, to grow professionally and aim for truly inspired teaching.
Provides a framework to help all English Language Learners (ELLs) reach their full potential. Topics include content reading strategies that help ELLs overcome the challenges of academic reading.
Provides school leadership actions and guideposts that will lead to higher student achievement.
This book explores an approach to teaching and learning that improves student motivation, knowledgeacquisition, retention, and academic success.
Provides a reliable blueprint and a set of strategies that are proven to work across a broad spectrum of students. Describes how to get students in every grade focused and ready to learn by developing lesson plans and grading practices that allow every student to experience academic success through sustained effort.
A guide intended to assist new teachers during the first days, weeks, and months of the first year of teaching, to ensure that they are ready for the challenges of the job, equipped with the background knowledge and support they will need for many years to come.
This book calls for the ground-up redevelopment of assessment in U.S. education. It maps out the adjustments in practice and culture necessary to generate both accurate accountability data and the specific evidence of individual mastery that will support sound instructional decision making and better learning in the classroom.
Offers focused, daily writing sessions that provide students with consistent, long-term engagement, teaching them to be more fluent in their writing. The author outlines this process and also describes what it looks like in the classroom, explains how to assess student work, and highlights several inspirations that motivate students to write.
This book looks at the power and promise of the teenage brain from an empathetic, strength-based perspective, and describes what middle and high school educators can do to make the most of their students' potential.
Presents detailed advice and ideas to provide assistive technology services to effectively and efficiently help students.
This book guides motivated school leaders through 50 self-reflection exercises designed to yield a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the work that they do.
This book explores the definition of leadership and including clear targets that support the ongoing growth and development of leaders. It enables principals to learn to capitalize on their leadership roles as visionary, instructional leader, engager, and learner and collaborator. It also offers 17 criteria of effective practice that allow leaders to focus on behaviors that have the greatest direct effect on the culture and status of learning and teaching.
This book focuses on strategies for educators to understand the purpose of every lesson within the classroom by examining topics such as the difference between standards, objectives, and purposes, the mastery of lesson content, and the motivation of students. Provides specific examples of assignments, purpose statements, and tests for multiple grade levels and content areas.
Provides teaching strategies for every grade and subject, with dozens of variations and steps and examples for how to implement them. Instructs teachers on how to choose the right strategy, matching strategy to instructional objectives.
This book takes readers on a reflective journey designed to reignite their passion for teaching. It provides teachers with ideas for strengthening student success in the classroom at all times and under all circumstances.
Provides a systematic structure and steps for conducting teacher interviews at district and school levels.
Provides a detailed introduction to the roles and functions performed by tech coordinators, the key issues they face, and the basic skills and qualifications needed to fulfill their responsibilities.
Written for both working technology coordinators and those preparing to enter the profession, this reference provides leaders with the information and resources they need to effectively manage school and district technology operations.
Features practical activities and exercises designed to assist and provide leadership in your organization.
This guide offers instructional modules on how to refine units created using Understanding by Design (UbD) and how to effectively review the units using self-assessment and peer review, along with observation and supervision.
This book focuses on the basic concepts behind the Understanding by Design approach used by educators to create classroom curriculum that focus on students' understanding of important ideas and working backwards from there. Contains eight modules that are based on a typical workshop presentation, which can also be studied out of sequence, intended for K-16 educators.
Takes into account how a teacher's heavy workload and busy lifestyle can lead to stress; features how to deal with that stress and how to take care of health issues.
This book focuses on how educators can use active learning strategies, known as Total Participation Techniques, within the classroom in order to engage K-12 students. Techniques are examined in depth and presented in four parts: overview, implementation instructions, student participation, and classroom personalization, with real-world examples and toolkits for all levels of learning.
This book provides detailed descriptions of the Total Participation Techniques (TPTs) with step-by-step instructions and includes new techniques to engage K-12 students in active learning as well as ways to adapt and personalize the techniques to fit your context and content. Techniques are presented in four parts: overview, implementation instructions, student participation, and classroom personalization, with real-world examples and toolkits for all levels of learning.
Explores how cell phones can be used as learning tools inside or outside of the classroom.
This book focuses on the strategy that educators can utilize in the information age to create a relevant learning experience and educational opportunity by placing students at the center of learning. Uses theory, practice and real-world experiences to illustrate the importance of student-teacher relationships in a K-18 learning environment.
Explains what formative assessment really is, and how to use this approach to improve teaching, learning, classroom climate, teacher professional development, and school performance.
This book examines formative assessment conducted in the classroom and how educators can plan and apply results in the real-world. Provides chapter-specific reflection questions that lay out practical models and guidance for all education levels.
Provides an overview of successful professional development programs that expand teachers' knowledge, skill, and confidence in using technology tools in teaching and learning environments, with the focus on improving teaching and learning rather than on the technology use.
Provides a blueprint for how to ensure professional development can improve student learning by focusing on, evidence of student learning, feedback on teacher and principal decisions, and depth of implementation.
Busy administrators will appreciate this quick read packed with immediate, accessible strategies. This book provides the framework for understanding dynamic relationships within a school culture and ensuring a positive environment that supports the changes necessary to improve learning for all students. The author explores many aspects of human behavior, social conditions, and history to reveal best practices for building healthy school cultures.
This book provides lessons on what schools do to help students succeed--and how you and your school can adopt the same practices--no matter what socioeconomic climate students live in.
Provides a framework for good design--of curriculum, assessment, and instruction--focused on developing and deepening understanding of important ideas. Explains how educators can design learning experiences that make it much more likely that students understand content and apply it in meaningful ways.
This book focuses on the new national Common Core standards and what educators need to know in order to strengthen learning and teaching methods within the classroom. Chapters focus on the national standards, including understanding, the benefits for students, concerns, and preparation for the 2014-2015 school year when students will assessed on the standards for the first time.
This book provides tips and processes that inspire or propel learning to help teachers design their curriculum and pedagogy.
This book offers concrete ways to identify student strengths and then build on them in your classroom or school throughout the year.
This book provides teachers with concrete strategies for achieving the worthy goal of "algebra for all" that will not be possible until "fractions for all" is a reality. It offers three fundamental reasons why it's imperative for us to take a closer look at how we teach fractions: fractions play a key role in students' feelings about mathematics; fractions are fundamental to school math and daily life; and fractions are foundational to success in algebra.
The purpose of this book is to explain how teachers and administrators can upgrade their schools' current curriculum and recalibrate instructional practices to embrace modern learning.
The book shows teachers how to analyze and process their schools' data in order to energize their teaching, advance their schools' instructional practices, and improve student outcomes.
RTI and formative assessment have the potential to positively impact student achievement. Understand the basics of RTI and its connection to formative assessment, and base instructional decisions on the results of effective formative assessment practices. Learn how to adjust instruction to increase levels of student understanding and achievement with the information, tools, and techniques presented in this practical guide.
Presents new educational tools that support research-based instruction, and learn new ways to use educational technologies, such as word processing and spreadsheet applications, multimedia, data collection tools, communication software, and the Internet.
Presents new educational tools that support research-based instruction, and learn new ways to use educational technologies, such as word processing and spreadsheet applications, multimedia, data collection tools, communication software, and the Internet.
Provides a comprehensive review of options for building an effective videoconferencing program, from initial planning to teacher training, implementation, and assessment.
Covers working with graphics files, creating slide shows, hyper linking multimedia, digital animation, and virtual reality.
This book attempts to challenge the assumptions that are rooted within the education community and bring clarity to aspects of the school reform movement. Presented in two parts, the first discusses the flawed ideas currently implemented in school systems, and the second relates how a revised strategy is the answer to many problems.
Explores the very best online collaborative tools available today (including blogs, wikis, and social networking) and Web 2.0 applications (Skype, Google Earth, Wordle, and more) that make a difference in education.
Provides an overview of the emerging Web 2.0 technologies and their use in the classroom and in professional development.
Covers the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach to help teachers through the steps of setting up multiple assessments, analyzing performance data, and responding to learning problems.
This book explores how the gap in measures of achievement between students in the United States and those in other countries can be reduced. It provides analysis of recent international assessment results, in-depth profiles of high-achieving education systems around the globe, strategies for aligning successful educational approaches from international systems to U.S. schools, and transformative ideas for cultivating a truly world-class system of schooling.
Explains how to make formative assessments a seamless and natural part of the teaching process and provides assessment strategies that can be used before, during, and after instruction to learning.
Provides an overview of effective online teaching and learning practices.
Provides information for schools and teachers on how to improve student achievement. Discusses which instructional strategies really work; why data is a critical component to school improvement; how important collegiality and professional development are; and what types of parental and community involvement make a difference.
This book offers practical strategies teachers can use to help reclaim and sustain energy and enthusiasm for teaching.
This book is a step-by-step walk through the behind-the-scenes intellectual work necessary to make instruction truly effective and help students learn deeply and meaningfully. Intended to assist teachers in learning how to translate standards into objectives, use objectives for the basis of assessment, develop learning objectives that incorporate targeted content and thinking skills, and pull objectives, assessments, and learning ac
To move forward in the school improvement process, school leaders must address the behaviors of difficult and resistant staff members while sending the message that a few people cannot halt change. This book will help school leaders understand how to prevent and address negative behaviors to ensure positive school change.
This book provides a mentor's guidance to steer new principals through the period of adjustment and set the foundation for a long and rewarding career. The topics you wish your graduate program had covered are covered here--directly, practically, and without the jargon.