Book picks similar to
Nonfiction Matters: Reading, Writing, and Research in Grades 3-8 by Stephanie Harvey
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Grammar to Enrich & Enhance Writing
Constance Weaver - 2008
Born from the ideas and research in her much-loved Teaching Grammar in Context, and benefiting from the creativity of her colleague Jonathan Bush, this new resource goes even further to bring the best research, theory, and practices into the classroom. Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing is three helpful books in one. In the first part, Weaver outlines the latest theories, research, and principles that underlie high-quality grammar instruction for writing. She demonstrates that specific, effective grammar-teaching practices: address all of the 6 Traits of writing instructionemphasize depth, not breadthshould be positive, productive, and practical-not stodgy, correct, and limitingmust be incorporated throughout the writing process, not broken out in isolated units.In part two, Weaver links theory and practice. Her explicit, classroom-proven teaching ideas, strategies, and lessons address key subjects as diverse as helping students make better stylistic use of modifiers, incorporating grammar into revision, and mapping grammar instruction to the curriculum. Mostly in part three, she invites members of the field into a discussion of high-quality grammar instruction. Jeff Anderson (Mechanically Inclined)Rebecca Wheeler (Code-Switching), and other practicing teachers describe their teaching-how they model the vital role grammar plays in guiding students through the editing process, how they respond to student errors, how they help English Language Learners edit for conventional English, and how grammar supports code-switching among speakers of African American English. Like Weaver's, their ideas are ready for immediate classroom implementation. With all this, plus a brief primer on crucial grammatical concepts, Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing is what teachers have been waiting for: an up-to-date, ready-to-use, comprehensive resource for leading students to a better understanding of grammar as an aid to more purposeful, detailed, and sophisticated writing. To request this title as a Desk/Exam copy, click here.
Fires in the Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from High School Students
Kathleen Cushman - 2003
Now in paperback, Kathleen Cushman's groundbreaking book offers original insights into teaching teenagers in today's hard-pressed urban high schools from the point of view of the students themselves. It speaks to both new and established teachers, giving them firsthand information about who their students are and what they need to succeed.Students from across the country contributed perceptive and pragmatic answers to questions of how teachers can transcend the barriers of adolescent identity and culture to reach the diverse student body in today's urban schools. With the fresh and often surprising perspectives of youth, they tackle tough issues such as increasing engagement and motivation, teaching difficult academic material, reaching English-language learners, and creating a classroom culture where respect and success go hand in hand.
School Culture Rewired: How to Define Assess and Transform It
Steve Gruenert - 2015
In this groundbreaking book, education experts Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker offer 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. Drawing from decades of research on organizational cultures and school leadership, the authors provide everything you need to optimize both the culture and climate of your school, including:"Culture-busting" strategies to help teachers adopt positive attitudes, outlooks, and behaviors;A framework for pinpointing the type of culture you have, the type that you want, and the actions you need to take to bridge the two;Tips for hiring, training, and retaining teachers who will actively work to improve your school's culture; andInstructions on how to create and implement a successful School Culture Rewiring Team.Though often invisible to the naked eye, a school's culture influences everything that takes place under its roof. Whether your school is urban or rural, prosperous or struggling, School Culture Rewired is the ultimate guide to making sure that the culture in your school is guided first and foremost by what's best for your students
Experience and Education
John Dewey - 1938
Written more than two decades after Democracy and Education (Dewey's most comprehensive statement of his position in educational philosophy), this book demonstrates how Dewey reformulated his ideas as a result of his intervening experience with the progressive schools and in the light of the criticisms his theories had received.Analyzing both "traditional" and "progressive" education, Dr. Dewey here insists that neither the old nor the new education is adequate and that each is miseducative because neither of them applies the principles of a carefully developed philosophy of experience. Many pages of this volume illustrate Dr. Dewey's ideas for a philosophy of experience and its relation to education. He particularly urges that all teachers and educators looking for a new movement in education should think in terms of the deeper and larger issues of education rather than in terms of some divisive "ism" about education, even such an "ism" as "progressivism." His philosophy, here expressed in its most essential, most readable form, predicates an American educational system that respects all sources of experience, one that offers a true learning situation that is both historical and social, both orderly and dynamic.
No More Fake Reading: Merging the Classics with Independent Reading to Create Joyful, Lifelong Readers
Berit Gordon - 2017
In this groundbreaking book, Berit Gordon offers the complete solution, a blended model that combines the benefits of classic literature with the motivational power of choice reading. With the blended model, teachers lead close examinations of key passages from classic texts, guiding students to an understanding of important reading strategies they can transfer to their choice books. Teachers gain a platform for demonstrating the critical reading skills students so urgently require, and students thrive on reading what they want to read. In this research-backed book, Gordon leads you step by step to classroom success with the blended model, showing:The basics of getting your classroom library up and running How to build a blended curriculum for both fiction and non-fiction units, keeping relevant standards in mind Tips and resources to help with day-to-day planning Ideas for selecting class novel passages that provide essential cultural capital and bolster students' reading skills Strategies for bringing talk into your blended reading classroom How to reach the crucial learning goal of transfer A practical, user-friendly approach for assessing each student's progress No More Fake Reading gives you all the tools you need to put the blended model to work for your students and transform your classroom into a vibrant reading environment. Berit Gordon coaches teachers as they nurture lifelong readers and writers. Her path as an educator began in the classroom in the Dominican Republic before teaching in New York City public schools. She also taught at the Teachers College of Columbia University in English Education. She currently works as a literacy consultant in grades 3-12 and lives in Maplewood, New Jersey with her husband and three children.
Texts and Lessons for Teaching Literature: With 65 Fresh Mentor Texts from Dave Eggers, Nikki Giovanni, Pat Conroy, Jesus Colon, Tim O'Brien, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Many More
Nancy Steineke Harvey "Smokey" Daniels - 2013
The main difference is that our lessons put student curiosity and engagement first. -Harvey Smokey Daniels and Nancy SteinekeIn this highly anticipated follow-up to Texts and Lessons for Content-Area Reading, Harvey Smokey Daniels and Nancy Steineke share their powerful strategies for engaging students in challenging, meaningful reading of fiction and poetry using some of their favorite short, fresh texts-or, as they put it, full-strength adult literature that gives us English majors a run for our interpretive money- but is still intriguing enough to keep teen readers digging and thinking. Use the 37 innovative, step-by-step, common-core-correlated lessons with the reproducible texts provided, with selections from your literature textbook, or with your own best-loved texts to teach close reading skills and deep comprehension strategies. Give students opportunities to read and synthesize across texts with the 8 thematic text set lessons provided, or use the model unit outlines for using the lessons with The Giver, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Great Gatsby as springboards for planning your own novel studies. Better Together! Used together, Texts and Lessons for Teaching Literature and Texts and Lessons for Content-Area Reading give you all the lesson ideas you need for all text types. Save 15% when you buy them together in a Texts and Lessons Bundle.
The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers
Sheridan Blau - 2003
Through lively re-creations of actual workshops that he regularly conducts for students and teachers, Blau invites his readers to become active participants in workshops on such topics as:helping students read more difficult texts than they think they can readwhere interpretations come fromthe problem of background knowledge in teaching classic textshow to deal with competing and contradictory interpretationswhat's worth saying about a literary textbalancing respect for readers with respect for texts and intellectual authorityensuring that literary discussions are lively and productivehow to develop valuable and engaging writing assignments.Each workshop includes reflections on what transpired and a discussion of the workshop's rationale and outcomes in the larger context of an original and practice-based theory of literary competence and instruction.
A Writer Teaches Writing Revised
Donald M. Murray - 1968
Murray's A WRITER TEACHES WRITING has had a profound influence on composition theory and practice.
The Reflective Educator′s Guide to Classroom Research: Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn Through Practitioner Inquiry
Nancy Fichtman Dana - 2003
A how-to guide to classroom inquiry that takes educators through the research process step by step, answering each critical question from where do I begin? through publishing the results.
Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom
Daniel T. Willingham - 2009
Why is it that they can remember the smallest details from their favorite television program, yet miss the most obvious questions on their history test?Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has focused his acclaimed research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning and has a deep understanding of the daily challenges faced by classroom teachers. this book will help teachers improve their practice by explaining how they and their students think and learn—revealing the importance of story, emotion, memory, context, and routine in building knowledge and creating lasting learning experiences.In this breakthrough book, Willingham has distilled his knowledge of cognitive science into a set of nine principles that are easy to understand and have clear applications for the classroom. Some of examples of his surprising findings are:“Learning styles” don't exist The processes by which different children think and learn are more similar than different.Intelligence is malleable Intelligence contributes to school performance and children do differ, but intelligence can be increased through sustained hard work.You cannot develop “thinking skills” in the absence of facts We encourage students to think critically, not just memorize facts. However thinking skills depend on factual knowledge for their operation.Why Don't Students Like School is a basic primer for every teacher who wants to know how their brains and their students’ brains work and how that knowledge can help them hone their teaching skills.
Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings
Jeff Zwiers - 2011
Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas.In
Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings
authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas:Elaborating and ClarifyingSupporting Ideas with EvidenceBuilding On and/or Challenging IdeasParaphrasingSynthesizingThis book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following:Academic vocabulary and grammarCritical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and applicationLiteracy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizingAn academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual supportThe ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess.
Academic Conversations
offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.
The Growth Mindset Coach: A Teacher's Month-by-Month Handbook for Empowering Students to Achieve
Annie Brock - 2016
The Growth Mindset Coach provides all you need to foster a growth mindset classroom, including:A Month-by-Month ProgramResearch-Based ActivitiesHands-On Lesson PlansReal-Life Educator StoriesConstructive FeedbackSample Parent LettersStudies show that growth mindsets result in higher test scores, improved grades and more in-class involvement. When your students understand that their intelligence is not limited, they succeed like never before. With the tools in this book, you can motivate your students to believe in themselves and achieve anything.
Papers, Papers, Papers: An English Teacher's Survival Guide
Carol Jago - 2005
Guilt mounts. Students want to know when their papers will come back. Grading begins consuming all your energy, your weekends, your life.Grading papers is a fact of life, especially in English classrooms, and the paper load is a leading cause of teacher burnout. Fortunately, Carl Jago's here to help, and in Papers, Papers, Papers, she offers you advice honed from thirty-one years in the English classroom and forty-five thousand papers worth of grading. You'll not only get through stacks of papers, but you'll do so accurately, completely, and with the time you need to give each and every student in your classes the attention they deserve.Ever practical and always professional, Jago suggests techniques that can be implemented right away to turn your mountain of essays into a foothill. She covers every aspect of attentive grading, including:responding to student drafts commenting rather than correcting using scoring guides and rubrics for common expectations fostering improvement from one paper to the next effective peer- and self-editing suggestions for alternatives to essays. With all this and her Ten Tips for Handling the Paper Load, Carol Jago gives you everything you need to keep on top of student papers.
Learning Targets: Helping Students Aim for Understanding in Today's Lesson
Connie M. Moss - 2012
Moss and Susan M. Brookhart contend that improving student learning and achievement happens in the immediacy of an individual lesson--what they call today's lesson--or it doesn't happen at all.The key to making today's lesson meaningful? Learning targets. Written from students' point of view, a learning target describes a lesson-sized chunk of information and skills that students will come to know deeply. Each lesson's learning target connects to the next lesson's target, enabling students to master a coherent series of challenges that ultimately lead to important curricular standards.Drawing from the authors' extensive research and professional learning partnerships with classrooms, schools, and school districts, this practical 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. - Provides strategies for designing learning targets that promote higher-order thinking and foster student goal setting, self-assessment, and self-regulation. - Explains how to design a strong performance of understanding, an activity that produces evidence of students' progress toward the learning target. - Shows how to use learning targets to guide summative assessment and grading. Learning Targets also includes reproducible planning forms, a classroom walk-through guide, a lesson-planning process guide, and guides to teacher and student self-assessment.What students are actually doing during today's lesson is both the source of and the yardstick for school improvement efforts. By applying the insights in this book to your own work, you can improve your teaching expertise and dramatically empower all students as stakeholders in their own learning.
Breathing New Life Into Book Clubs: A Practical Guide for Teachers
Sonja Cherry-Paul - 2019
Managing classroom book clubs can be hard. Real hard. But honestly, is there any better way to get students vested in reading? When book clubs work, don't they create a culture of reading unlike anything else? One that brings out the very best in our students?With both infectious enthusiasm and a realistic perspective, Sonja and Dana take on teachers' doubts and concerns about book clubs, and build a compelling case for their value in every classroom. They provide all the nuts and bolts for creating and managing successful book clubs, including:Dozens of pitfalls and pathways minilessons that address common roadblocks Tips for using technology to enhance book club work for deeper student engagement Suggested book bins for book club work, organized by grade level and genre. Whether you're looking to breathe new life into book clubs or begin implementing them in your classroom, Sonja and Dana give you essential strategies to make book clubs work. Because book clubs, they write, are where students fall in love with reading.