Tune Up Your Teaching and Turn on Student Learning


Book Description

Teachers want their students to think, learn, and understand. Some teachers are more successful than others in achieving those goals. Two veteran educators provide a clear and detailed description of how to help teachers change their methods and raise the level of both thinking and learning in their classrooms.




The Learning Power Approach


Book Description

Become mind-fit for life! Learning is learnable! Educators can explicitly teach positive learning attitudes and habits of mind. Guy Claxton’s powerful resource will help teachers understand how ‘every lesson, every day’ shapes the way students see themselves as learners. This important work helps us notice ‘what lies beneath’ the surface of our teaching and attend closely to the way we shape dispositions and attitudes. Readers will find: • approaches focused on building character alongside knowledge acquisition • cognitive, social and neuroscientific supportive evidence • practical illustrations and strategies Written by a renowned cognitive scientist, this book offers a set of design principles for strengthening students’ learning muscles.




Improving Student Learning One Teacher at a Time


Book Description

In this second edition of Improving Student Learning One Teacher at a Time, Jane E. Pollock and Laura J. Tolone combine updated research and real-world stories to demonstrate how it takes only one teacher to make a difference in student performance. Their approach expands the classic three-part curriculum-instruction-assessment framework by adding one key ingredient: feedback. This "Big Four" approach offers an easy-to-follow process that helps teachers build better curriculum documents with * Curriculum standards that are clear and well-paced, and describe what students will learn. * Instruction based in research, from daily lessons to whole units of study. * Assessment that maximizes feedback and requires critical and creative thinking. * Feedback that tracks and reports individual student progress by standards. Pollock and Tolone demonstrate how consistent, timely feedback from multiple sources can help students monitor their own understanding and help teachers align assignments, quizzes, and tests more explicitly to the standards. The Big Four shifts the focus away from the basics of what makes a good teacher toward what makes good learning happen for every student every day.




Classrooms that Spark!


Book Description

Guide for teachers to keep the fires of learning burning bright year after year No matter how long they've been teaching all teachers need new ideas to keep their classrooms organized, their students engaged and motivated, and their lesson plans sharp. This second edition of the winner of the 2006 Teacher's Choice Award, offers invaluable guidance on major topics such as organization, student engagement, assessment, creating great lesson plans, teaching with technology, and classroom management and discipline. Written by two compassionate veteran teachers Contains more than 100 reproducible forms Offers classroom tested organizing tips, lesson plans, and assessments Includes suggestion for motivating students and ideas for motivating parents This is the ultimate guide for teachers who want to maintain their passion for teaching.




How to Support Struggling Students


Book Description

If we want our students to succeed, we cannot afford to leave to chance what happens when they do not learn. In this guide, Robyn R. Jackson and Claire Lambert take you step by step through the process of providing proactive and progressive learning support—what great teachers do to ensure that all students receive the right kind of assistance and to get those who are struggling back on track before they get frustrated and give up. Here, you'll learn how to * Support students before instruction through acceleration practices, including activating background knowledge, providing advance organizers, and focusing on key vocabulary. * Support students during instruction by distinguishing between productive and destructive struggle, establishing "red flags" to alert you when a student's learning is headed off course, and delivering targeted interventions that quickly put struggling students back on the path to mastery. * Support students after instruction by providing appropriate remediation for the few students who have not achieved mastery. * Create a comprehensive, progressive support plan tailored to your classroom content and the students you teach. About the series Every teacher can become a master teacher with the right kind of practice and support. Each how-to guide in the Mastering the Principles of Great Teaching series focuses on one of the seven mastery principles introduced in Robyn R. Jackson's best-selling Never Work Harder Than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching. The guides' self-assessments, worksheets, planning templates, process outlines, checklists, links to online resources, suggested activities, and prompts for reflection help teachers of all experience levels apply the principles to address everyday classroom challenges and build their overall mastery mindset.




Tuned in and Fired Up


Book Description

What can teachers do to inspire their students? In this book, Sam Intrator provides detailed portraits of powerful learning episodes in a high school classroom and suggests numerous practical ideas to help teachers cultivate their own seemingly magical learning moments.




Improving Student Learning One Principal at a Time


Book Description

This book's breakthrough approach to supervision, built on the Teaching Schema for Master Learners introduced in the ASCD best-seller Improving Student Learning One Teacher at a Time, is a simple way to help teachers make the right adjustments in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and feedback—the four areas of practice that make the most difference in how learners learn. Here you'll find clear, practical guidelines designed to complement and enhance your school's existing observation and evaluation models. Jane E. Pollock and Sharon M. Ford explain how to Focus classroom observations and feedback on the critical classroom decisions that promote meaningful, lasting learning. Guide teachers toward the most effective curriculum, teaching, assessment, and feedback strategies for each stage of the lesson. Support teachers' efforts to align the plan book and the grade book for better instructional decisions and higher student achievement. Along with these research-based recommendations, the book also features the voices of working administrators who share the difference this approach has made for them, their teachers, and their students. You too may find it's the tool you've been looking for to revitalize yourself as instructional leader, shift your focus from inspecting teaching to improving learning, and build a more positive and more successful school.




High-stakes Teaching


Book Description

Based upon the research of 45 interviews conducted in Texas and Arkansas, High-Stakes Teaching presents strategies that successfully blend child-centered and test-centered teaching into one focus, creating a consistently high-quality instructional environment. The teachers described offer their students an invitation to enter the realm of learning expectantly. Through their words, we visualize the educational scaffolding process, as students foster a love and an appreciation of critical thinking that promises to remain long after the last test question has been answered. Best practices emerge and are shared with the reader. Reflective questions and commentaries provide educators an opportunity to investigate their own philosophies of accountability testing and its place in the classroom. This study offers the support and guidelines necessary to break the cycle of "teaching to the test." Let each educator teach so that every child can become an engaged learner, an explorer, an individual who recognizes and respects the opportunities available from gaining a real education that is not merely a cookie-cutter mantra.




Making Good Teaching Great


Book Description

Every good teacher strives to be a great teacher - and this must-have book shows you how! It's filled with practical tips and strategies for connecting with your students in a meaningful and powerful way. Learn how to improve student learning with easy-to-implement daily activities designed to integrate seamlessly into any day of the school year. This is a readable, hands-on guide for both new and seasoned teachers - complete with "20-Day Reality Checks" so you can reflect on your progress and identify areas for improvement.




Teaching How to Learn


Book Description

Effective teachers not only pass on information, they teach students how to learn. This innovative guidebook offers proven methods to strengthen instruction and help K-12 students acquire successful learning strategies using the SOAR approach: Selecting key lesson ideas; Organizing information using comparative charts and other representations; Associating ideas to create meaningful, memorable connections; and Regulating and reinforcing learning through practice. Drawing from the latest research on the efficacy of these teaching methods, this resource presents: Detailed explanations for teaching each SOAR strategy, Guidelines for fostering student motivation and behavior self-management, Methods for embedding student learning techniques within content instruction to develop students' capacity to learn in any setting. With insightful examples and illustrations, Teaching How to Learn will be used again and again by teachers looking to transform themselves into A+ educators and their students into lifelong learners. Book jacket.