The Fluent Reader


Timothy V. Rasinski - 2003
    It opens with a clear research-based rationale for teaching oral reading, word recognition, fluency, and comprehension. From there, Rasinski provides the strategies themselves - read aloud, repeated reading, performance reading, and many more. The strategies are fun, easy to implement, and -- most important -- effective in helping children read with ease, confidence, and understanding.Praise for The Fluent Reader:"What I find remarkable about The Fluent Reader is the way Timothy Rasinski leads us from the theoretical to the practical...I suspect that teachers who read this book will be quick to take the ideas and apply them in their classrooms." ---From the foreword by James Hoffman, University of Texas at Austin

Literacy Is Not Enough: 21st Century Fluencies for the Digital Age


Lee Crockett - 2011
    If students are to thrive in their academic and 21st century careers, then independent and creative thinking hold the highest currency. The authors explain in detail how to add these new components of literacy:Solution Fluency Information Fluency Creativity Fluency Collaboration Fluency Students must master a completely different set of skills to succeed in a culture of technology-driven automation, abundance, and access to global labor markets. The authors present an effective framework for integrating comprehensive literacy or fluency into the traditional curriculum.

Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone)


Elizabeth Green - 2014
    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."

How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing


Paul J. Silvia - 2007
    Writing is hard work and can be difficult to wedge into a frenetic academic schedule.This revised and updated edition of Paul Silvia's popular guide provides practical, light-hearted advice to help academics overcome common barriers and become productive writers. Silvia's expert tips have been updated to apply to a wide variety of disciplines, and this edition has a new chapter devoted to grant and fellowship writing.

Mosaic of Thought: Teaching Comprehension in a Reader's Workshop


Ellin Oliver Keene - 1997
    "Mosaic of Thought "chronicles that journey, which ultimately led the authors to elaborate on eight cognitive processes identified in comprehension research and used by successful readers. These serve as models for the strategies offered in this book - strategies intended to help children become more flexible, adaptive, independent, and engaged readers."Mosaic" proposes a new instructional paradigm focused on in-depth, explicit instruction in the strategies used by proficient readers. The authors take us beyond the traditional classroom into the literature based, workshop-oriented classrooms. Through vivid portraits of these remarkable environments (all participants in the Denver-based Reading Project of the Public Education & Business Coalition), we see how explicit instruction looks in dynamic, literature-rich readers' workshops. As the students connect to background knowledge, create sensory images, ask questions, draw inferences, determine what's important, synthesize ideas, and solve problems at the word and text level, they are able to construct a rich mosaic of meaning.Straightforward and jargon-free, "Mosaic of Thought" has relevance to all literature-based classrooms, regardless of level. It offers practical tools for inservice teachers, as well as essential methods instruction for preservice teachers at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Indeed, anyone interested in literacy will benefit from the authors' challenge to rediscover the thought processes that inform our own comprehension.

Teaching Children to Care: Classroom Management for Ethical and Academic Growth, K-8


Ruth Sidney Charney - 1992
    She wants children to learn how to care for themselves, their fellow students, their environment, and their work. Her book is loaded with practical wisdom. Using Charney's positive approach to classroom management will make the whole school day go better."- Nel Noddings, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, and author of CaringThis definitive work about classroom management will show teachers how to turn their vision of respectful, friendly, academically rigorous classrooms into reality.The new edition includes:More information on teaching middle-school studentsAdditional strategies for helping children with challenging behaviorUpdated stories and examples from real classrooms."Teaching Children to Care offers educators a practical guide to one of the most effective social and emotional learning programs I know of. The Responsive Classroom approach creates an ideal environment for learning—a pioneering program every teacher should know about."- Daniel Goleman, Author of Emotional Intelligence"I spent one whole summer reading Teaching Children to Care. It was like a rebirth for me. This book helped direct my professional development. After reading it, I had a path to follow. I now look forward to rereading this book each August to refresh and reinforce my ability to effectively manage a social curriculum in my classroom."- Gail Zimmerman, second-grade teacher, Jackson Mann Elementary School, Boston, MA

Best Practice: Bringing Standards to Life in America's Classrooms


Steven Zemelman - 2012
    But what does quality mean? What does it look like in real classrooms? It looks like the teaching in this book. -Steven Zemelman, Harvey Smokey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde Best Practice is back, and with it Steve Zemelman, Smokey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde invite you to greet today's most important educational challenges with proven, state-of-the-art teaching. Linguistic diversity, technology, Common Core, high-stakes testing-no matter the hurdle, Best Practice teaching supports powerful learning across our profession. Best Practice , Fourth Edition, is the ultimate guide to teaching excellence. Its framework of seven Best Practice Structures and cutting-edge implementation strategies are proven across the grades and subject areas. BP4 creates common ground for teachers, leaders, and principals by recommending practices drawn from the latest scientific research, professional consensus, and the innovative classrooms of exemplary teachers.BP4 puts top-quality teaching at the fingertips of individual practitioners by sharing real-life instructional scenes that define classroom excellence, increase learning, and improve students' life opportunities. It's also more valuable than ever to PLCs and school reform initiatives thanks to:plans and strategies for exceeding state and Common Core Standards cohesive principles and common language that strengthen professional collaboration classroom vignettes that show teachers and kids at work chapters on reading, writing, math, science, and social studies that support unified instructional goals special attention to technology in the classroom, special education, ELLs, struggling readers, and the arts. This new educational era demands highly-effective, high-quality instruction that makes a difference for students. Fortunately with Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde's help every educator can be a world-class, life-changing teacher-a Best Practice teacher.

Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers


Tom Romano - 2000
    It is a multilayered, multivoiced literary experience. Genres of narrative thinking require writers to make an imaginative leap, melding the factual with the imaginative. Writers cant just tell. They must show. They must make their topics palpable. They must penetrate experience. Multigenre papers enable their authors to do that. Blending Genre, Altering Style is the first book to address the practicalities of helping students compose multigenre papers. Romano discusses genres, subgenres, writing strategies, and stylistic maneuvers that students can use in their own multigenre papers. Each idea is supported with actual student writing, including five full-length multigenre papers that demonstrate the possibilities of a multigenre approach to writing. There are also discussions of writing poetry, fiction, and dialogue, in which readers will discover how students can create genres out of indelible moments, crucial processes, and important matters in the lives of the subject under inquiry. One chapter alone is devoted to helping writers create unity and coherence in their papers.Imbued with Romanos passion for teaching, Blending Genre, Altering Style is an invaluable reference for any inservice or preservice English language arts teacher. The only prerequisite is a desire to help students write.

You're Going to Love This Kid!: Teaching Children with Autism in the Inclusive Classroom


Paula Kluth - 2003
    Including first-person accounts that give readers insight into the experience of having autism, it shows educators how to adapt their classrooms to support student participation in classwork, school routines, and social activities. It combines relevant research with lessons learned from the author's teaching experience to give readers specific, creative ideas for: understanding the attitudes, values and actions hat support inclusive schooling; connecting, communicating, and collaborating effectively with families; enhancing literacy by adapting reading materials, using visuals, and tapping in to student interests; planning challenging, multidimensional lessons that encourage all students to participate and help students reach their individual goals; support student behaviour in sensitive, positive ways; fostering friendships and social relationships between students with and without autism; and adapting the physical environment for students with autism who may have heightened sensitivity to factors like temperature, sounds, and smells.

The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial


Susan Eaton - 2007
    An award-winning journalist, Eaton spent four years at Simpson-Waverly Elementary School, an all-minority school in Hartford, Connecticut. Located in the poorest city in the wealthiest state in the nation, it is a glaring example of the great racial and economic divide found in almost every major urban center across the country.The Children in Room E4 is the compelling story of one student, one classroom, and one indomitable teacher, Ms. Luddy. In the midst of Band-Aid reforms and hotshot superintendents with empty promises, drug dealers and street gangs, Ms. Luddy's star student, Jeremy, and his fellow classmates face tremendous challenges both inside and outside of a school cut off from mainstream America.Meanwhile, across town, a team of civil rights lawyers fight an intrepid battle to end the de facto segregation that beleaguers Jeremy's school and hundreds of others across America.From inside the classroom and the courtroom, Eaton reveals the unsettling truths about an education system that leaves millions of children behind and gives voice to those who strive against overwhelming odds for a better future.

The Fundamental 5: The Formula for Quality Instruction


Sean Cain - 2011
    The Fundamental Five: The Formula for Quality Instruction, shares with teachers and school leaders the five practices that every teacher can, and should, use to dramatically improve instuctional rigor and relevance, and student performance.

Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner


Pérsida Himmele - 2011
    Total Participation Techniques presents dozens of ways to engage K 12 students in active learning and allow them to demonstrate the depth of their knowledge and understanding.

Holding on to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones: Six Literacy Principles Worth Fighting for


Thomas Newkirk - 2009
    Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones is my new favorite book about how to live as a teacher. Finishing it, I experienced what I can only describe as a state of grace-moved, renewed, and grateful that a mind like Tom Newkirk's has been intrigued by classroom matters for almost forty years now. Nancie Atwell Author of In the Middle, Second EditionClassic Newkirk: direct, incisive, and brimming with wisdom. Harvey Smokey Daniels Coauthor of Comprehension & CollaborationThis book is one of the best teacher books ever. I'll be giving copies of it to lots of teacher friends as we find our way back to trusting what we know about kids, about learning, and about teaching writing. -Gretchen Bernabei Author of Reviving the EssayHolding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones is for every teacher who has struggled under top-down mandates, who ever had to slavishly follow the script of a reading lesson, who ever felt that tests were driving instruction. It is for those whose good, humane, and sensitive ways of teaching literacy are threatened by rigid, mechanical programs. It is for teachers who feel they are losing control of their daily work.Hear a podcast, where Tom Newkirk and Nancie Atwell discuss teaching principles worth fighthing for.In Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones, Tom Newkirk eloquently defends teaching against the cult of efficiency that turns classrooms into assembly lines of knowledge. Newkirk goes beyond diagnosing the problem to present six ideas worth fighting for. These transformative practices gently but firmly return instructional decisions to where they belong: with you, our teachers. Newkirk shows how to:increase your instructional emphasis on writing to reflect the reality that producing text is more important than ever help students access deep knowledge and expand their thinking through time to write freely build strong connections between school learning and the real world by teaching with popular culture propel the development of reading skills by helping students discover the pleasure of reading provide the time and space for meaningful, long-lasting teaching and learning by uncluttering the curriculum spark professional growth and avoid stagnation by discussing failure and uncertainty with colleagues. Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones is affirming, not argumentative. It celebrates the humanity and unpredictability of teaching with Newkirk's blend of humor, passion, and warmth. Let it inspire a search for the things in your teaching that are most worth holding on to.

Information Power


Association for Educational Communication - 1998
    This volume aims to help readers respond proactively and help to lead the way to collaborative learning in schools.

Content Area Reading: Literacy and Learning Across the Curriculum


Richard T. Vacca - 1981
    Reading, writing, speaking, and listening processes to learn subject matter across the curriculum. Content Area Reading.