Rather, other factors can be even more crucial such as identifying our passions and following through on our commitments.Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently bemoaned her lack of smarts, Duckworth describes her winding path through teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not genius, but a special blend of passion and long-term perseverance. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth created her own character lab and set out to test her theory.Here, she takes readers into the field to visit teachers working in some of the toughest schools, cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance. Finally, she shares what she's learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers; from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to the cartoon editor of The New Yorker to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll.Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that not talent or luck makes all the difference.

    Would you take it? -Debbie Miller and Barbara MossWe know children learn to read by reading. Is independent reading valuable enough to use precious classroom minutes on? Yes, writes Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss, but only if that time is purposeful.DEAR and SSR aren't enough. Research shows that independent reading must be accompanied by intentional instruction and conferring. Debbie and Barbara clear a path for you to take informed action that makes a big difference, with:a rationale for independent reading that's worth finding the time for research evidence on its effectiveness and instructional best practices a framework with 10 teaching tactics for starting and sustaining success. When we set children loose day after day with no focus or support, it can lead to fake reading and disengagement, write Debbie and Barbara. It's our job to equip children with the tools they need when we're not there. Read No More Independent Reading Without Support and find out how.About the Not This, But That Series No More Independent Reading Without Support is part of the Not This, But That series, edited by Nell K. Duke and Ellin Oliver Keene. It helps teachers examine common, ineffective classroom practices and replace them with practices supported by research and professional wisdom. In each book a practicing educator and an education researcher identify an ineffective practice; summarize what the research suggests about why; and detail research-based, proven practices to replace it and improve student learning. Read a sample chapter from No More Independent Reading Without Support.

    It is here that students brainstorm topics, play with leads and endings, tweak a new revision strategy, or test out a genre for the first time.In Notebook Know-How, Aimee Buckner provides the tools teachers need to make writers' notebooks an integral part of their writing programs. She also addresses many of the questions teachers ask when they start using notebooks with their students, including:How do I launch the notebook?What mini-lessons can be used throughout the year to help students become more skilled in keeping notebooks?How do I help students who are stuck in writing ruts with notebooks?How do I help students use their learning from notebooks for other writing?How do I organize notebooks so that the design is flexible, yet still allows students to access information easily?How can writers' notebooks help students become better readers? How do I assess notebooks?This compact guide is packed with lessons, tips, and samples of student writing to help teachers make the most of writers' notebooks, without sacrificing time needed for the rest of the literacy curriculum. In fact, Notebook Know-How shows how smart and focused use of writers' notebooks enhances and deepens literacy learning in both reading and writing for students in grades 3–8.

    Grounded in the latest neuroscience and behavioral research, and drawing widely from literature, The Enchanted Hour explains the dazzling cognitive and social-emotional benefits that await children, whatever their class, nationality or family background. But it’s not just about bedtime stories for little kids: Reading aloud consoles, uplifts and invigorates at every age, deepening the intellectual lives and emotional well-being of teenagers and adults, too.Meghan Cox Gurdon argues that this ancient practice is a fast-working antidote to the fractured attention spans, atomized families and unfulfilling ephemera of the tech era, helping to replenish what our devices are leaching away. For everyone, reading aloud engages the mind in complex narratives; for children, it’s an irreplaceable gift that builds vocabulary, fosters imagination, and kindles a lifelong appreciation of language, stories and pictures.Bringing together the latest scientific research, practical tips, and reading recommendations, The Enchanted Hour will both charm and galvanize, inspiring readers to share this invaluable, life-altering tradition with the people they love most.

    This book provides a research-based framework and practical strategies for vocabulary development with children from the earliest grades through high school. The authors emphasize instruction that offers rich information about words and their uses and enhances students' language comprehension and production. Teachers are guided in selecting words for instruction; developing student-friendly explanations of new words; creating meaningful learning activities; and getting students involved in thinking about, using, and noticing new words both within and outside the classroom. Many concrete examples, sample classroom dialogues, and exercises for teachers bring the material to life. Helpful appendices include suggestions for trade books that help children enlarge their vocabulary and/or have fun with different aspects of words.

    Cris Tovani is an accomplished teacher and staff developer who writes with verve and humor about the challenges of working with students at all levels of achievement—from those who have mastered the art of "fake reading" to college-bound juniors and seniors who struggle with the different demands of content-area textbooks and novels.Enter Cris' classroom, a place where students are continually learning new strategies for tackling difficult text. You will be taken step-by-step through practical, theory-based reading instruction that can be adapted for use in any subject area. The book features:anecdotes in each chapter about real kids with real universal problems. You will identify with these adolescents and will see how these problems can be solved;a thoughtful explanation of current theories of comprehension instruction and how they might be adapted for use with adolescents;a What Works section in each of the last seven chapters that offers simple ideas you can immediately employ in your classroom. The suggestions can be used in a variety of content areas and grade levels(6-12);teaching tips and ideas that benefit struggling readers as well as proficient and advanced readers;appendixes with reproducible materials that you can use in your classroom, including coding sheets, double entry diaries, and comprehension constructors.In a time when students need increasingly sophisticated reading skills, this book will provide support for teachers who want to incorporate comprehension instruction into their daily lesson plans without sacrificing content knowledge.

    This highly practical and accessible resource gives special and general education teachers the tools to implement explicit instruction in any grade level or content area. The authors are leading experts who provide clear guidelines for identifying key concepts, skills, and routines to teach; designing and delivering effective lessons; and giving students opportunities to practice and master new material. Sample lesson plans, lively examples, and reproducible checklists and teacher worksheets enhance the utility of the volume. Purchasers can also download and print the reproducible materials for repeated use. Video clips demonstrating the approach in real classrooms are available at the authors' website: www.explicitinstruction.org. See also related DVDs from Anita Archer: Golden Principles of Explicit Instruction; Active Participation: Getting Them All Engaged, Elementary Level; and Active Participation: Getting Them All Engaged, Secondary Level

    In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children, and that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading.The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres—fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry—accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre—what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?—and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.

    As a middle school teacher, Jeff Anderson also discovered that his students were not grasping the basics, and that it was preventing them from reaching their potential as writers. Jeff readily admits, “I am not a grammarian, nor am I punctilious about anything,” so he began researching and testing the ideas of scores of grammar experts in his classroom, gradually finding successful ways of integrating grammar instruction into writer's workshop.Mechanically Inclined is the culmination of years of experimentation that merges the best of writer's workshop elements with relevant theory about how and why skills should be taught. It connects theory about using grammar in context with practical instructional strategies, explains why kids often don't understand or apply grammar and mechanics correctly, focuses on attending to the “high payoff,” or most common errors in student writing, and shows how to carefully construct a workshop environment that can best support grammar and mechanics concepts. Jeff emphasizes four key elements in his teaching:short daily instruction in grammar and mechanics within writer's workshop;using high-quality mentor texts to teach grammar and mechanics in context;visual scaffolds, including wall charts, and visual cues that can be pasted into writer's notebooks;regular, short routines, like “express-lane edits,” that help students spot and correct errors automatically.Comprising an overview of the research-based context for grammar instruction, a series of over thirty detailed lessons, and an appendix of helpful forms and instructional tools, Mechanically Inclined is a boon to teachers regardless of their level of grammar-phobia. It shifts the negative, rule-plagued emphasis of much grammar instruction into one which celebrates the power and beauty these tools have in shaping all forms of writing.

    Instead, today's schools promote the false "gods" of economic utility, consumerism, or ethnic separatism and resentment. What alternative strategies can we use to instill our children with a sense of global citizenship, healthy intellectual skepticism, respect of America's traditions, and appreciation of its diversity? In answering this question, The End of Education restores meaning and common sense to the arena in which they are most urgently needed."Informal and clear...Postman's ideas about education are appealingly fresh."--New York Times Book Review

    Yet we still don't know what, precisely, makes a teacher great. Is it a matter of natural-born charisma? Or does exceptional teaching require something more? Building a Better Teacher introduces a new generation of educators exploring the intricate science underlying their art. A former principal studies the country s star teachers and discovers a set of common techniques that help children pay attention. Two math teachers videotape a year of lessons and develop an approach that has nine-year-olds writing sophisticated mathematical proofs. A former high school teacher works with a top English instructor to pinpoint the key interactions a teacher must foster to initiate a rich classroom discussion. Through their stories, and the hilarious and heartbreaking theater that unfolds in the classroom every day, Elizabeth Green takes us on a journey into the heart of a profession that impacts every child in America.What happens in the classroom of a great teacher? Opening with a moment-by-moment portrait of an everyday math lesson a drama of urgent decisions and artful maneuvers Building a Better Teacher demonstrates the unexpected complexity of teaching. Green focuses on the questions that really matter: How do we prepare teachers and what should they know before they enter the classroom? How does one get young minds to reason, conjecture, prove, and understand? What are the keys to good discipline? Incorporating new research from cognitive psychologists and education specialists as well as intrepid classroom entrepreneurs, Green provides a new way for parents to judge what their children need in the classroom and considers how to scale good ideas. Ultimately, Green discovers that good teaching is a skill. A skill that can be taught.A provocative and hopeful book, Building a Better Teacher shows that legendary teachers are more than inspiring; they are perhaps the greatest craftspeople of all."

    This anniversary paperback edition features a new introduction by Delpit as well as new framing essays by Herbert Kohl and Charles Payne.In a radical analysis of contemporary classrooms, MacArthur Award–winning author Lisa Delpit develops ideas about ways teachers can be better “cultural transmitters” in the classroom, where prejudice, stereotypes, and cultural assumptions breed ineffective education. Delpit suggests that many academic problems attributed to children of color are actually the result of miscommunication, as primarily white teachers and “other people’s children” struggle with the imbalance of power and the dynamics plaguing our system.A new classic among educators, Other People’s Children is a must-read for teachers, administrators, and parents striving to improve the quality of America’s education system.

    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.

    A first-hand account of the struggle with dyslexia--and an introduction to the Davis Method, a clear and simple plan for conquering it.

    Wiseman showed how girls of every background are profoundly influenced by their interactions with one another. Now, Wiseman has revised and updated her groundbreaking book for a new generation of girls and explores:•How girls’ experiences before adolescence impact their teen years, future relationships, and overall success•The different roles girls play in and outside of cliques as Queen Bees, Targets, and Bystanders, and how this defines how they and others are treated•Girls’ power plays–from fake apologies to fights over IM and text messages •Where boys fit into the equation of girl conflicts and how you can help your daughter better hold her own with the opposite sex•Checking your baggage–recognizing how your experiences impact the way you parent, and how to be sanely involved in your daughter’s difficult, yet common social conflictsPacked with insights about technology’s impact on Girl World and enlivened with the experiences of girls, boys, and parents, the book that inspired the hit movie Mean Girls offers concrete strategies to help you empower your daughter to be socially competent and treat herself with dignity.