Most young writers are not intimidated by personal narrative, fiction, or even poetry, but when they try to put together a "teaching book," report, or persuasive essay, they often feel anxious and frustrated.JoAnn Portalupi and Ralph Fletcher believe that young nonfiction writers supply plenty of passion, keen interest, and wonder. Teachers can provide concrete strategies to help students scaffold their ideas as they write in his challenging genre.Like the authors' best-selling Craft Lessons: Teaching Writing K-8, this book is divided into sections for K-2, 3-4, and middle school (grades 5-8) students. These divisions reflect various differences between emerging, competent, and fluent writers. In each section you'll find a generous collection of craft lessons directed at the genre that's most appropriate for that particular age. In the K-2 section, for example, a number of craft lessons focus on the all-about or concept book. In the 3-4 section there are several lessons on biography. In the 5-8 section a series of lessons addresses expository writing. Throughout the book each of the 80 lessons is presented on a single page in an easy-to-read format.Every lesson features three teaching guidelines:Discussion--A brief look at the reasons for teaching the particular element of craft specifically in a nonfiction context.How to Teach It--Concrete language showing exactly how a teacher might bring this craft element to students in writing conferences or a small-group setting.Resource Material--Specific book or text referred to in the craft lesson including trade books, or a piece of student writing in the Appendixes.This book will help students breathe voice into lifeless "dump-truck" writing and improve their nonfiction writing by making it clearer, more authoritative, and more organized. Nonfiction Craft Lessons gives teachers a wealth of practical strategies to help students grow into strong writers as they explore and explain the world around them.Be sure to look at the When Students Write videotapes too.

    According to Kafele, educators can achieve remarkable results by focusing on five key areas:* The teacher's attitude toward students* The teacher's relationship with students* The teacher's compassion for students* The learning environment* The cultural relevance of instructionReplete with practical strategies and illustrative anecdotes drawn from the author's 20-plus years as a teacher and principal in inner-city schools, Closing the Attitude Gap offers a wealth of lessons and valuable insights that educators at all levels can use to fire up their students' passion to learn.

    While the transition to standards-based practices may be challenging, it is essential for effective instruction and assessment. In this practical guide, the author outlines specific steps your team can take to transform grading and reporting schoolwide. Each chapter includes examples of grading dilemmas, vignettes from teachers and administrators, and ideas for bringing parents on board with change.

     -Lucy Calkins, Author of Units of Study for Teaching WritingHidden Gems will transform the way we read student work. -Thomas Newkirk, Author of Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad OnesYou don't get true, fire-in-the-belly energy for writing because you fear getting a bad grade, but because you have something to say and your own way of saying it. -Katherine BomerIf you're like Katherine Bomer, you've grown weary of searching for what's wrong in student writing, and you want better ways to the respond to pieces whose beauty and intelligence doesn't shine on the first read. Now she shares how she learned instead to search-sometimes near the surface, sometimes deep beneath-to find, celebrate, and teach from writers' Hidden Gems.My hope is that as teachers we can respond to all students' writing with astonished, appreciative, awe-struck eyes, writes Katherine. Through protocols, sample assessments, and demonstrations with actual student work, she shows how to bring the brilliant facets of your writers to the surface as you:spot hidden stylistic gems in writing that is unconventional or vernacular uncover content and organizational gems even when you don't find the subject matter engaging or significant respond by naming and celebrating writers' gems instead of hunting for mistakes give lasting compliments using the inspiring language of published writers that motivate students to keep writing, revising, and polishing their gems. Accept Katherine Bomer's invitation to read work by young, unseasoned writers the way we would inquire our way into a poem by Nikki Giovanni, Jimmy Santiago Baca, or Naomi Shihab Nye and to notice the quirky brilliance and humor, the heartbreaking honesty, and surreal beauty in even the slightest bits of writing. You'll soon discover that student writers often perform remarkable feats in the craft of writing, and that you can achieve remarkable results with them when you uncover theirHidden Gems.

    The framework may be used for many purposes, but its full value is realized as the foundation for professional conversations among practitioners as they seek to enhance their skill in the complex task of teaching. The framework may be used as the foundation of a school's or district's recruitment and hiring, mentoring, coaching, professional development, and teacher evaluation processes, thus linking all those activities together and helping teachers become more thoughtful practitioners.The actions teachers can take to improve student learning are clearly identified and fall under four domains of teaching responsibility: Planning and Preparation, the School Environment, Instruction, and Professional Responsibilities. Within the domains are 22 components and 76 descriptive elements that further refine our understanding of what teaching is all about. The framework defines four levels of performance (Unsatisfactory, Basic, Proficient, and Distinguished) for each element, providing a valuable tool that all teachers can use.This second edition has been revised and updated and also includes frameworks for school specialists, such as school nurses, counselors, library and media specialists, and instructional coaches. Comprehensive, clear, and applicable to teaching across the K-12 spectrum, the framework for teaching described in this book is based on the PRAXIS III: Classroom Performance Assessment criteria developed by Educational Testing Service and is compatible with INTASC standards.

    They will free you to love your job, build effortless and influential relationships with your students, and enable you to become a happier, calmer, and more confident teacher. You will learn: -Simple strategies that make classroom management a lot easier. -Exactly (step-by-step) how to handle difficult students. -How to create a classroom your students will love coming to every day. -How to build behavior-changing rapport and influence with even the most difficult students. -How to get your students to treat each other with respect and kindness. -How to praise in a way that inspires, uplifts, and motivates. -How to build maturity and independence. -How you can know your students will behave instead of just hoping they will. -How to become a teacher that fellow teachers, parents, and students respect and admire. -How to love your class, and have them love you right back. -And much more . . .

    If you are a high school teacher or a kindergarten teacher, the seven steps in The Wild Card will give you the knowledge and the confidence to bring creative teaching strategies into your classroom.You'll learn: Why the deck is not stacked against you, no matter what kind of hand you've been dealt Why you should never listen to the Joker How to identify the "Ace up your sleeve" and use it to create classroom magic How to apply the "Rules of Rigor" in order to fuse creativity with learning How to become the "Wild Card" that changes the game for your students

    All of the authors in this book know what classrooms are like. This means that authenticity and integrity pervade every chapter in the book. Teachers will immediately sense this authenticity on their way to realizing that the book offers an endless supply of useful suggestions."-From the Coda by P. David PearsonFor those of us who teach comprehension strategies, Comprehension Going Forward is as near to the ultimate PD experience as we can get. Imagine a professional learning community where you could sit in as...Ellin Keene and Debbie Miller swap best practicesStephanie Harvey and Harvey "Smokey" Daniels compare instruction across the gradesAnne Goudvis and Tanny McGregor share ways to infuse comprehension into every subject areaCris Tovani and Nancy Commins apply the strategies to help struggling readers, English learners, and special-needs students. In Comprehension Going Forward, you'll meet up with 17 leading practitioners and researchers for an energetic, personal, and frequently irreverent conversation on what great comprehension instruction looks like, what an amazing range of applications it has for all students, and what we can do better. Not only do figures such as Susan Zimmerman and P. David Pearson include their own chapters, but, like any exciting conversation, they point out their favorite parts of one another's chapters-highlighting discussion topics for teacher study groups along the way. Read Comprehension Going Forward and RSVP to a get-together that no one who teaches reading will want to miss. Enter this powerful, lively conversation about how we can improve all readers' comprehension today and join some of your favorite authors as they reach for a tomorrow where every child reads with deep understanding."Each author takes the comprehension strategies as a starting point, and then reaches out toward a different set of applications, extensions, and practices. But everyone is connected by the research base on comprehension instruction and by our common goal: to provide every child in America with an "All-Access Pass" to literacy."-From the editor's introduction by Harvey "Smokey" Daniels

    His book, Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gapaddresses the adolescent shift black males face and the societal experiences unique to them that can hinder academic progress.With an authentic and honest voice, Tatum bridges the connections among theory, instruction, and professional development to create a roadmap for better literacy achievement. He presents practical suggestions for providing reading strategy instruction and assessment that is explicit, meaningful, and culturally responsive, as well as guidelines for selecting and discussing nonfiction and fiction texts with black males.The author's first-hand insights provide middle school and high school teachers, reading specialists, and administrators with new perspectives to help schools move collectively toward the essential goal of literacy achievement for all.

    Marshall proposes a broader framework for supervision and evaluation that enlists teachers in improving the performance of all students. Emphasizing trust-building and teamwork, Marshall's innovative, four-part framework shifts the focus from periodically evaluating teaching to continuously analyzing learning. This book offers school principals a guide for implementing Marshall's framework and shows how to make frequent, informal classroom visits followed by candid feedback to each teacher; work with teacher teams to plan thoughtful curriculum units rather than focusing on individual lessons; get teachers as teams involved in low-stakes analysis of interim assessment results to fine-tune their teaching and help struggling students; and use compact rubrics for summative teacher evaluation.This vital resource also includes extensive tools and advice for managing time as well as ideas for using supervision and evaluation practices to foster teacher professional development.

     Cris Tovani Twenty-five years after Donald Graves popularized workshop teaching, the concept is widely implemented but not always deeply understood. That Workshop Book changes all that. It shows a new generation of teachers how the systems, structures, routines, and rituals that support successful workshops combine with thinking, planning, and conferring to drive students growth, inform assessment and instruction, and increase teachers professional satisfaction. And it shows those already using the workshop how to increase its instructional power by seeing its big ideas and its component parts in fresh, dynamic ways. In That Workshop Book, Samantha Bennett, a veteran instructional coach, takes you on a tour of six classrooms from first grade through eighth grade to see the techniques and thought processes master teachers use to make their workshops work. In each class she offers tangible evidence of these teachers practices, demonstrating how they listen to students and use that information to build lessons that propel children into deeper thinking. She documents these teachers moves for you with: classroom observations in the form of coaching emails from Bennett to each with commentary that highlights the important practices seen in each workshop transcripts of minilessons, worktimes, and debriefs specific, explicit reflection by each teacher about their workshop examples of student work produced in the workshop and over time student reflections on their development as readers, writers, thinkers, and learners. Youll come to understand firsthand how the setup of the workshop allows students the breathing room to think deeply about ideas, topics, and resources. Youll also see how it creates a framework within which you can not only listen in as children express what they learn but also think deeply yourself about how best to use the information you gather for subsequent instruction. Bennett even demonstrates how the workshop can be flexible enough to fit any learning situation and how to solve common problems as they arise. Benefit from the wisdom of one of the countrys foremost staff developers. Step inside workshop classrooms where teachers and students work side by sidewhere students develop literacy skills through a combination of doing what readers and writers do and purposeful, sensitive interactions with their teacher. Visit workshops where teachers learn about their students, use careful one-to-one assessment to inform their teaching, and reflect on their own practice as well. Then enter the best workshop classroom of allthe one youll be ready and excited to launch when you read That Workshop Book.

    Now this new edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook imparts the benefits, rewards, and importance of reading aloud to children of a new generation. Supported by delightful anecdotes as well as the latest research, The Read-Aloud Handbook offers proven techniques and strategies—and the reasoning behind them—for helping children discover the pleasures of reading and setting them on the road to becoming lifelong readers.

    The way to do this, argue authors Bena Kallick and Allison Zmuda, is to increase the say students have in their own learning and prepare them to navigate complexities they face both inside and beyond school. This means rethinking traditional teacher and student roles and re-examining goal setting, lesson planning, assessment, and feedback practices. It means establishing classrooms that prioritizeVoice--Involving students in "the what" and "the how" of learning and equipping them to be stewards of their own education.Co-creation--Guiding students to identify the challenges and concepts they want to explore and outline the actions they will take.Social construction--Having students work with others to theorize, pursue common goals, build products, and generate performances.Self-discovery--Teaching students to reflect on their own developing skills and knowledge so that they will acquire new understandings of themselves and how they learn.Based on their exciting work in the field, Kallick and Zmuda map 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. They share the perspectives of educators engaged in this work; highlight the habits that empower students to pursue aspirations, investigate problems, design solutions, chase curiosities, and create performances; and provide tools and recommendations for adjusting classroom practices to facilitate learning that is self-directed, dynamic, sometimes messy, and always meaningful.

    QRI-5

    Authors Ruth Parker and Cathy Humphreys introduce  Making Number Talks Matter: Developing Mathematical Practices and Deepening Understanding, Grades 3-10 , taking the readers into classrooms where their Number Talks routines are taught.Parker and Humphreys apply their 15 minute lessons to inspire and initiate math talks. Through vignettes in the book, you'll meet other teachers learning how to listen closely to students and how to prompt them into figuring out solutions to problems. You will learn how to make on-the-spot decisions, continually advancing and deepening the conversation.  Making Number Talks Matter  includes:Sample Problems: Making Number Talks Matter is filled with a range of Number Talks problems, 10-15 minute warm-up routines that lend themselves to mental math and comparison of strategiesNavigating Rough Spots: Learn how to create a safe environment for tricky, problematic, or challenging student discussions that can arise when talking through problems and sharing ideasResponding to Mistakes: Ways to handle misconceptions and mathematical errors that come up during the course of Number Talk conversations Making Number Talks Matter  is filled with teaching tips for honoring student contributions while still correcting errors, and teaching concepts while nudging independent thinking. Through daily practice and open conversation, you can build a solid foundation for the study of mathematics and make Number Talks Matter.