Veteran educator Allen Mendler organizes the discussion around four core challenges:Managing difficult students.Working with unappreciative and irritating adults.Making the best of an imperfect environment.Finding time to take top-notch care of yourself.When Teaching Gets Tough is there when you need help to reclaim and sustain your energy and enthusiasm for teaching. Written with a deep understanding of the issues that teachers face every day, the book also includes sections for administrators who want to help teachers stay at the top of their game.

    

    Here's the cool thing: poetry can get you there. It is inherently turbo-charged. Poets distill a novel's worth of content and emotion in twenty lines. The literary elements and devices you need to teach are all there, powerful and miniature as a Bonsai tree. Paul B. JaneczkoYou'd like to teach poetry with confidence and passion, but let's face it: poetry can be intimidating to both you and your students. Here is the book that takes the fear factor out of poetry and shows you how to use this powerful genre to spark student engagement and meet language arts requirements. Award-winning poet Paul B. Janeczko is the master for creating anthologies for pre-teen and adolescent readers, and here he's chosen 20 contemporary and classic selections with step-by-step, detailed lessons for investigating each poem from the inside out. Kids learn to become active readers of poetry, using graphic organizer worksheets to help them jump over their fear and dive into personal, smart, analytical responses. There's no better genre than poetry for helping students gain perspective on their own identities and their own worlds, and Paul provides a space on each reproducible poem for private thoughts, questions, feelings, and ideas. Your students will discover what each poem means to them.The 20 poems in this collection were chosen for their thought-provoking topics; compelling real-world themes that lead to conversation and collaboration in middle school classrooms. And by showing you how the poems and activities address the common core standards for English Language Arts (complete with a sample chart linking the poems to the standards), Paul provides a clear understanding of how you can get there using poetry.You can cultivate a passion for poetry in your classroom. Take the journey with Paul B. Janeczko and grow in confidence with your students, meeting some standards along the way.

    Her students learn to make connections between their lives, the books they read, the community leaders they meet, and the larger world. Black Ants and Buddhists  offers no easy answers, but it does include starting points for conversations about diversity and controversy in your classroom, as well as in the larger community. Students and teachers investigate problems and issues together, in a multicultural, antiracist classroom.

    To help teachers acquire a fuller understanding of the complexity of response to intervention designs, literacy researcher and best-selling author Dick Allington offers clear recommendations to guide classroom teachers in designing response to instruction (RtI) programs such that struggling readers will develop their reading proficiencies to match those of their achieving peers. Unlike any other book on the topic, Dick Allington provides a research-base that supports closing the reading achievement gap along with implications this has for designing RTI programs. In addition, Dick provides a comprehensive discussion of the factors that inhibit poor, disabled, and second-language learners from achieving and offers a number of research-based instructional strategies and routines for turning struggling readers into achieving readers. Teachers will be inspired and confident to design response to instruction programs! Take a look inside... Provides a complete review of what is critical to accelerating the development of struggling readers.Presents educators with a framework for how we might design response to intervention (RTI) programs such that struggling readers will develop their reading proficiencies to match those of their achieving peers.Features a complete analysis of response to intervention design (RTI) and offers a detailed framework for evaluating existing and future intervention efforts.Includes numerous websites that provide teacher-friendly information, strategies, and tools for accelerating reading development.

    In Intentional Talk: How to Structure and Lead Productive Mathematical Discussions , authors Elham Kazemi and Allison Hintz provide teachers with a framework for planning and facilitating purposeful math talks that move group discussions to the next level while achieving a mathematical goal.Through detailed vignettes from both primary and upper elementary classrooms, the authors provide a window into how teachers lead discussions and make important pedagogical decisions along the way. By creating equitable opportunities to share ideas, teachers can orient students to one another while enforcing that all students are sense makers and their ideas are valued. They examine students’ roles as both listeners and talkers, offering numerous strategies for improving student participation. Intentional Talk includes a collection of lesson planning templates in the appendix to help teachers apply the right structure to discussions in their own classrooms.

    Harness the students interest in film to help them engage critically with a range of media including visual and printed texts.

    But how do you work those skills into the curriculum? Learn how to use the content you already teach to challenge students to think critically, collaborate with others, solve new problems, and adapt to change across new learning contexts. Help students build the seven habitudes habits of disciplined decisions and specific attitudes they need to succeed."

    Through real-life stories of children and their families, this preeminent book provides students with a comprehensive experience in special education. Long noted for its focus on inclusion, families, and partnerships, Exceptional Lives: Special Education in Today's Schools, Fifth Edition, presents a realistic look at the workings of special education as future teachers, both general and special education, will need to know. The new fifth edition includes: increased coverage of families and collaboration; a broader range of tips and strategies for teachers and different learning environments; a stronger emphasis on the core standards from the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) and PRAXIS; and a brand-new, text-specific DVD of videos highlighting the people in the chapters and adults with disabilities that continues and extends the Turnbull's tradition of learning about special education through the real lives of real people living with disabilities.

    This expanded collection of writings and reflections offers practical guidance on how to navigate the school system, form rewarding relationships with colleagues, and connect in meaningful ways with students and families from all cultures and backgrounds.

    But that's easier said than done. Many books about cognitive theory introduce radical but impractical theories, failing to make the connection to the classroom. In "Small Teaching, " James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of modest but powerful changes that make a big difference-many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These strategies are designed to bridge the chasm between primary research and the classroom environment in a way that can be implemented by any faculty in any discipline, and even integrated into pre-existing teaching techniques. Learn, for example: How does one become good at retrieving knowledge from memory? How does making predictions now help us learn in the future? How do instructors instill fixed or growth mindsets in their students?Each chapter introduces a basic concept in cognitive theory, explains when and how it should be employed, and provides firm examples of how the intervention has been or could be used in a variety of disciplines. Small teaching techniques include brief classroom or online learning activities, one-time interventions, and small modifications in course design or communication with students.

    Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of race in America.

    Beers and Probst offer insights into how to create text dependent questioning in assisting students to develop greater reading comprehension skills.

    

    This completely updated 3rd edition offers practical solutions that emphasize relationship building, curriculum relevance, and academic success. The emphasis is on preventing problems by helping students to understand each other, work well together, and develop responsibility for their own actions, but the authors also include intervention strategies for handling common and severe problems in dignified ways.Filled with real-life examples and authentic teacher-student dialogues, Discipline with Dignity is a comprehensive and flexible system of prevention and intervention tools that shows how educators at all levels can --Be fair without necessarily treating every student the same way.--Customize the classroom to reflect today's highly diverse and inclusive student population.--Seek students' help in creating values-based rules and appropriate consequences. --Use humor appropriately and effectively to respond to abusive language.--Fine-tune strategies to resolve issues with chronically misbehaving students and "ringleaders" or bullies.This book is not simply a compendium of strategies for dealing with bad behavior. It is a guide to helping students see themselves in a different way, to changing the way they interact with the world. The strategies innate to this approach help students make informed choices to behave well. When they do, they become more attuned to learning and to understanding how to use what they learn to improve their lives and the lives of others--with dignity.