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.

    In Preparing Instructional Objectives, you'll learn the characteristics of well-stated objectives, how to derive suitable objectives, and how to write objectives to match the instructional results you are seeking to achieve.

     Twenty minutes a day is all you need, and within 100 teaching days your child will be reading on a solid second-grade reading level. It’s a sensible, easy-to-follow, and enjoyable way to help your child gain the essential skills of reading. Everything you need is here—no paste, no scissors, no flash cards, no complicated directions—just you and your child learning together. One hundred lessons, fully illustrated and color-coded for clarity, give your child the basic and more advanced skills needed to become a good reader.

    It covers the rationale and research on the major models of teaching and applies the models by using scenarios and examples of instructional materials. Because it deals with the major psychological and philosophical approaches to teaching and schooling, Models of Teaching provides a direct link between educational foundations and student teaching. Therefore, the book can provide substantial support to programs taking a reflective teaching or constructivist approach.

    This complex, contested intersection has led to censorship and worse-alarm, irrationality, and a failure to examine our ways of teaching, particularly teaching literacy to boys. In this book Tom Newkirk takes an up-close and personal look at elementary boys and their relationship to sports, movies, video games, and other venues of popular culture. Unlike the alarmists, he sees these media not as enemies of literacy, but as resources for literacy.Through a series of extraordinary interviews, Newkirk listens to young boys, and girls, who describe the pleasure they take in popular culture. They explain the ways in which they use visual narratives in their writing. They even defend their use of violence in their work. Newkirk disproves the simplistic stereotype of boys who are primed to imitate the violence they see. He shows that, rather than mimic, boys most often transform, recombine, and participate in story lines, and resist, mock, and discern the unreality of icons of popular culture.Using a mixture of memoir, research project, cultural analysis, and critique of published findings, Newkirk encourages schools to ask questions about what counts as literacy in boys and what doesn't, to allow in their literacy programs boys' diverse tastes, values, and learning styles. In other words, if we want boys to join the literacy club, then we have to invite them in with genres of their own choosing.

    Keeping themorganized can be a challenge, but an organized classroom is essential and allows students and the teacher to fully focus on learning by eliminating distractions. Organized Teacher, Happy Classroom provides practical, proven methods for maintaining an organized classroom throughout the entire school year.Inside you’ll find:• Strategies for managing students’ papers, curriculum material, and essential paperwork• Time management tips to maximize your instruction time and lesson planning• Organizing systems you can teach your students to improve self reliance andaccountability• Checklists for starting and ending the year well organized• Helpful forms and templates you can use in your classroom• Plans for arranging a classroom that promotes positive student participation• Support to simplify your classroom• Efficient storage solutions for all teacher and student materialsWhether you teach primary, intermediate, middle school or high school, this bookwill help you organize your time, paperwork, and classroom spaces.

    

    In sharing lessons, anecdotes, and cautionary tales from his own experiences revamping assessment procedures in the classroom, Dueck offers a variety of practical strategies for ensuring that grades measure what students know without punishing them for factors outside their control; critically examining the fairness and effectiveness of grading homework assignments; designing and distributing unit plans that make assessment criteria crystal-clear to students; creating a flexible and modular retesting system so that students can improve their scores on individual sections of important tests.Grading Smarter, Not Harder is brimming with reproducible forms, templates, and real-life examples of grading solutions developed to allow students every opportunity to demonstrate their learning. Written with abundant humor and heart, this book is a must-read for all teachers who want their grades to contribute to, rather than hinder, their students' success.

    Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children—Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus—Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem.From Zora’s proud individuality to Marcus’s open willfulness, from Sean’s struggle with authority to Lucas’s tenacious imagination, comes profound insight—for educators and parents alike—into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child’s path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age.Shalaby’s empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands—despite good intentions—work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.

    Essential reading for those preparing ALL students to think critically, write well, and succeed academically in both high school and college. Jim Burke, Author of The English Teacher's Companion and What's the Big Idea?Argument writing can be difficult to teach, but it may be the most important set of skills we teach in English. According to the National Common Core Standards, by the end of high school, students should be able to write arguments to support claims with clear reason and relevant evidence-and they should be able to do so well.Designed for middle and high school students, the activities in this book will enable students to write strong arguments and evaluate the arguments of others. When they are through, students will be able, as the Common Core Standards ask, to Delineate and evaluate [an] argument and specific claims...including the validity of the reasoning [and] the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence. Developed by George Hillocks, Jr. and others in diverse inner city classrooms in Chicago, students are easily engaged in the lively problem-solving approach detailed in this book.Teaching Argument Writing begins with how to teach simple arguments and moves onto those that are more complex, showing step-by-step how to teach students to write and evaluate:arguments of fact arguments of judgment arguments of policy Student handouts, activities, and models of classroom discussions are provided to help you bring these methods to your classroom. Among other things, Hillocks guides you through teaching your students:how judgments are made in the real world how to make literary judgments based on criteria how to develop and support criteria for arguments.

    -Kathy Collins and Matt GloverWhat do we see when young children interact with books before they can read the words?Kathy Collins and Matt Glover see real reading, characterized by purposeful meaning-making and opportunities for reading growth and language development."One of our biggest hopes," write Kathy and Matt, "is to help you see and value all of the powerful work young children do as readers." With I Am Reading you'll see that fostering what little ones do before they can read the words is important early instruction.Kathy and Matt show how to nurture, nudge, and instruct young readers to make meaning in any text, whether or not they are reading the words. They share: observation guides for children reading any kind of book specific descriptions of language and independence development sample reading conferences and whole-class minilessons suggestions for creating reading opportunities in preschool and reading workshops in K-1 action plans to get you going 25 online video clips of children making meaning and teachers supporting them.I Am Reading pairs two important voices in early literacy to remind us that we're teaching children, not reading levels. "In the rush toward ever higher reading levels in the early years," write Kathy and Matt, "we may fail to value the strategy use and high-level thinking children do before they are reading conventionally." Join Kathy and Matt and look anew at your young readers so you can provide the kind of support that gets them off to a great start.

    She easily connects to them through her conversational style, empathy, case studies and a strong belief in their power to succeed. She shares strategies for learning through graphics and activities that ensure their active engagement. She fully understands the importance of readability as she fills the text with questions. This book explodes with energy and passion and should be on every student's bookshelf. -Martha E. Casazza, Educational Consultant, TRPPAssociates, CLADEA Founding Fellow"Much can be gained from this book by both students and instructors in all fields. My biggest take-away is the author's insistence, 'Now hear this: All students are capable of excelling'. This book shows how."--Reflective TeachingMaybe this is a reflection on just how big of a nerd I am, but this is the book that I wish I had when I was in college, or even in high school, to understand that I could have a little bit more control over my brain, and harness [its] power in a good direction. It would be really good for a first-year student seminar, a class that focused on study skills, or a tutoring center.--Kathryn (Katie) Linder, Research Director for Ecampus, Oregon State University

    This practical resource shows teachers how to be effective and have a life! Author and educator Maia Heyck-Merlin explores the key habits of Together Teachers?how they plan ahead, organize work and their classrooms, and how they spend their limited free time. The end goal is always strong outcomes for their students. So what does Together, or Together Enough, look like? To some teachers it might mean neat filing systems. To others it might mean using time efficiently to get more done in fewer minutes. Regardless, Together Teachers all rely on the same skills. In six parts, the book clearly lays out these essential skills. Heyck-Merlin walks the reader through how to establish simple yet successful organizational systems. There are concrete steps that every teacher can implement to achieve greater stability and success in their classrooms and in their lives. Contains templates and tutorials to create and customize a personal organizational system and includes a companion website: www.thetogetherteacher.com Recommends various electronic or online tools to make a teacher's school day (and life!) more efficient and productive Includes a Reader's Guide, a great professional development resource; teachers will answer reflection questions, make notes about habits, and select tools that best match individual needs and preferences

    When we take children's key strengths and immerse them in an intellectually invigorating, emotionally nurturing, literature-rich community, we grow "super readers"—avid readers who consume texts with passion, understanding, and a critical eye.Organized around the 7 Strengths inherent in super readers (belonging, curiosity, friendship, kindness, confidence, courage, and hope), this powerful resource helps children:• Develop reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills • Learn comprehension strategies• Build a robust vocabulary• Deepen analytical prowess and an ability to talk and write about text• Develop empathy, a strong identity as a reader, and an expanded understanding of the worldFeaturing stirring reading and writing lessons, robust assessment tools, ready-to-share Family Guides, and embedded videos that illuminate the 7 strengths and more, Every Child a Super Reader shows teachers, parents, caregivers, and out-of-school providers why reading is the ultimate super power, opening a world of possible for every student.

    KEY TOPIC: Features lesson plans and teaching strategies for the classroom teacher. MARKET: Written for K-12 teachers working with English language learners.