Essential Research Methods for Social Work


Allen Rubin - 2006
    Illustrations and examples throughout show you how you can apply research to practice. Studying is made easy with a book-specific website that provides you with tutorial quizzes and links to additional related concepts. Outlines, introductions, boxes, chapter endings with main points, review questions and exercises, and internet exercises provide you with the information and practice you need to succeed in this course.

Saving the School: The True Story of a Principal, a Teacher, a Coach, a Bunch of Kids and a Year in the Crosshairs of Education Reform


Michael Brick - 2012
    Anabel Garza: No school board would have put her forward as a model principal. Pregnant and alone at sixteen, widowed by twenty-five, Anabel got along teaching English to Mexican immigrants, raising her son, and taking night school classes.But then no model candidate would have taken the job at John H. Reagan High School. Once known to sports fans across Texas as the great champion Big Blue, Reagan was collapsing. The kids were failing the standardized tests, failing on the basketball court, failing even to show up. Teenage pregnancy was endemic. If the test scores and attendance did not improve, the school was set to close at the end of the 2009-10 school year.Anabel took the assignment. Her first work was triage. She cruised the malls for dropouts. She fired ten teachers, including one who produced a ruler to bemoan the distance from the parking lot to her classroom door. She listened to angry lectures from union officials and angrier ones from black ministers. She kept going. She tailored each student's tutoring to the standardized tests. The numbers started to come up.But with the state education commissioner threatening to close the school, the real work began. Anabel set out to re-create the high school she remembered, with plays and dances, yearbooks and clubs, teachers who brought books alive and crowded bleachers to cheer on the basketball team. She reached out to the middle schools, the neighborhoods, and the churches. She gave good teachers free rein. She mixed love and expectations.The circumstances facing Reagan High are playing out all over the country. The get-tough crowd of education reformers, led by Obama's secretary of education, are redoubling their efforts to replace public schools with charter companies. But what happens when the centerpiece of a community is threatened? And what happens when one person just won't quit?For the first time, we can tally the costs of rankings and scores. In this powerful rejoinder to the prevailing winds of American education policy, Michael Brick examines the do-or-die year at Reagan High. Compelling, character-driven narrative journalism, Saving the School pays an overdue tribute to the great American high school and to the people inside.

The Next Step in Guided Reading: Focused Assessments and Targeted Lessons for Helping Every Student Become a Better Reader


Jan Richardson - 2009
    Richardson has identified the essential components of an effective guided reading lesson: targeted assessments, data analysis that pinpoints specific strategies students need, and the use of guided writing to support the reading process. Best of all, Richardson provides detailed lessons for readers at all grade levels and at all reading stages from emergent through proficient. For use with Grades K-8.

Teaching Science with Interactive Notebooks


Kellie Marcarelli - 2010
    Packed with student examples, this detailed guide explains the unique features that make interactive notebooks more effective tools than conventional notebooks for science classrooms. This resource:Describes the nuts and bolts of implementing interactive notebooks, including execution, time management, and grading Uses the 5E Learning Cycle as the framework for science instruction Emphasizes the importance of writing in science and provides strategies for modeling effective writing Explores strategies to encourage collaborative student inquiry and foster whole-class discussions

Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties


David A Kilpatrick - 2015
    It provides a detailed discussion of the nature and causes of reading difficulties, which will help develop the knowledge and confidence needed to accurately assess why a student is struggling. Readers will learn a framework for organizing testing results from current assessment batteries such as the WJ-IV, KTEA-3, and CTOPP-2. Case studies illustrate each of the concepts covered. A thorough discussion is provided on the assessment of phonics skills, phonological awareness, word recognition, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Formatted for easy reading as well as quick reference, the text includes bullet points, icons, callout boxes, and other design elements to call attention to important information.Although a substantial amount of research has shown that most reading difficulties can be prevented or corrected, standard reading remediation efforts have proven largely ineffective. School psychologists are routinely called upon to evaluate students with reading difficulties and to make recommendations to address such difficulties. This book provides an overview of the best assessment and intervention techniques, backed by the most current research findings.Bridge the gap between research and practice Accurately assess the reason(s) why a student struggles in reading Improve reading skills using the most highly effective evidence-based techniques Reading may well be the most important thing students are taught during their school careers. It is a skill they will use every day of their lives; one that will dictate, in part, later life success. Struggling students need help now, and Essentials of Understanding and Assessing Reading Difficulties shows how to get these students on track.

Rapid Instructional Design: Learning ID Fast and Right


George M. Piskurich - 2000
    It offers a no-nonsense walk through all the steps in the instructional design process and each step is explained in language that is conversational and easy to understand. This new edition addresses such topics as learning analysis, return on investment, and designing asynchronous and synchronous e-learning, as well as a wealth of illustrative examples of storyboards and professional commentary and case studies from professionals in the field.

Riffs and Reciprocities: Prose Pairs


Stephen Dunn - 1998
    The resulting pairs cover such subjects as "Scruples/Saints," "Hypocrisy/Precision," and "Anger/Generosity." The wisdom and startling turns we've come to expect from Dunn are everywhere in the ninety miniatures (forty-five pairs) that comprise this volume.

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 Highly Engaged Classroom


Robert J. Marzano - 2010
    A basic premise of The Highly Engaged Classroom is that student engagement happens as a result of a teacher's careful planning and execution of specific strategies. In other words, student engagement is not serendipitous. This book was designed as a self-study text that provides an in-depth understanding of how to generate high levels of attention and engagement. Engagement is obviously a central aspect of effective teaching. Using the suggestions presented in this book, every teacher can create a classroom environment in which engagement is the norm instead of the exception.

Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America


Jay Mathews - 2009
    They did that—and more. In their early twenties, by sheer force of talent and determination never to take no for an answer, they created a wildly successful fifth-grade experience that would grow into the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which today includes sixty-six schools in nineteen states and the District of Columbia. KIPP schools incorporate what Feinberg and Levin learned from America's best, most charismatic teachers: lessons need to be lively; school days need to be longer (the KIPP day is nine and a half hours); the completion of homework has to be sacrosanct (KIPP teachers are available by telephone day and night). Chants, songs, and slogans such as "Work hard, be nice" energize the program. Illuminating the ups and downs of the KIPP founders and their students, Mathews gives us something quite rare: a hopeful book about education.

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.

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.

The Essential 55 Workbook: Essential 55 Workbook


Ron Clark - 2004
    Ron Clark's The Essential 55 took the country by storm, selling over over one million copies. Now he provides a new edition of the companion workbook with fresh exercises for teachers and parents to transform any child into a successful student. The Essential 55 Workbook is full of easy-to-do lessons to help you reinforce The Essential 55 rules that every child should know. With a series of self-tests, exercises, and questionnaires, The Essential 55 Workbook allows you to adapt Ron Clark's successful tools to your own situation. With determination, discipline, and regular rewards, the children you stick by will be the children you come to admire.

Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response


Jennifer Fletcher - 2015
    Students need to know how writers’ and speakers’ choices are shaped by elements of the rhetorical situation, including audience, occasion, and purpose. In Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response , Jennifer Fletcher provides teachers with engaging classroom activities, writing prompts, graphic organizers, and student samples to help students at all levels read, write, listen, speak, and think rhetorically. Fletcher believes that, with appropriate scaffolding and encouragement, all students can learn a rhetorical approach to argument and gain access to rigorous academic content. Teaching Arguments opens the door and helps them pay closer attention to the acts of meaning around them, to notice persuasive strategies that might not be apparent at first glance. When we analyze and develop arguments, we have to consider more than just the printed words on the page. We have to evaluate multiple perspectives; the tension between belief and doubt; the interplay of reason, character, and emotion; the dynamics of occasion, audience, and purpose; and how our own identities shape what we read and write. Rhetoric teaches us how to do these things. Teaching Arguments will help students learn to move beyond a superficial response to texts so they can analyze and craft sophisticated, persuasive arguments—a major cornerstone for being not just college-and career-ready but ready for the challenges of the world.

The CR Way: Using the Secrets of Calorie Restriction for a Longer, Healthier Life


Paul Mcglothin - 2008
    By following Calorie Restriction, a revolutionary diet that provides the body with fewer calories than is traditionally required, people are getting dramatic benefits. Now, with The CR Way, you too can slow the aging process; protect against cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes; and increase your energy and mental capabilities. And, if needed, you'll lose weight and keep it off.Paul McGlothin and Meredith Averill, leaders of the Calorie Restriction Society, provide quick and easy menus and recipes so delicious that you will wonder why you ever wanted to eat more than you need. And for those who want some of the benefits without sacrificing all the calories, the authors will show you how to plan a diet that works for you. Groundbreaking and controversial, The CR Way is your key to a happier, healthier life.