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.

    The book establishes the top ten conditions for making engaged classroom reading possible for students at all levels and provides the practical support and structures necessary for achieving them.

    Each chapter includes:how to introduce the station;innovative ways to use materials;what to model to guarantee independence;how to troubleshoot;assessment and accountability ideas;how the station supports student achievement on state tests;reflection questions for professional development.The extensive appendix includes time-saving tools such as management board icons, graphic organizers, task cards, and recommended Web sites and children's literature.

    Writing thieves read widely, dive deeply into texts, and steal bits and pieces from great texts as models for their own writing. Ruth Culham admits to being a writing thief-and she wants you and your students to become writing thieves, too! A major part of becoming a writing thief is finding the right mentor texts to share with students. Within this book, discover more than 90 excellent mentor texts, along with straight-forward activities that incorporate the traits of writing across informational, narrative, and argument modes. Chapters also include brief essays from beloved writing thieves such as Lester Laminack, David L. Harrison, Lisa Yee, Nicola Davies, Ralph Fletcher, Toni Buzzeo, Lola Schaefer, and Kate Messner, detailing the reading that has influenced their own writing. Ruth's beloved easy-going style and friendly tone make this a book you'll turn to again and again as you guide your students to reach their full potential as deep, thoughtful readers and great writers. There's a writing thief in each of us when we learn how to read with a writer's eye!

    For Katie Wood Ray, this foundational idea is also the beginning of an important way of approaching rigorous writing instruction.In Study Driven Ray shows you that encouraging students to read closely can improve the effectiveness of your writing instruction. Detailing her own method for utilizing the popular mentor-texts approach, Ray helps you immerse children in a close study of published texts that supports their learning, leads them to a better understanding of the traits of good writing, and motivates them to become more accomplished writers.Ray shows you how to set up your writing workshop to facilitate close study. From grounded understandings to informed practice to supportive resources, she demonstrates:how to find a rich variety of texts that give students a clear vision of the writing you want them to do how to strategically select texts to support whole-class learning as well as individual choice how your teaching language gives structure to curriculum development and student learning how good planning turns curricular standards and objectives into sensible units of study why depth can be a more practical and effective curricular goal than breadth in writing instruction Study Driven also gives you the ideas and resources for thirty units of study, ranging from genres to punctuation and appropriate across grade levels.Get students into the habit of studying what they read to help them plan their writing. Give them examples of real-world texts as well as the structure, the space, the time, and the guidance to change and grow as writers. Give yourself Study Driven and find out how.

    With hard-hitting information and a touch of comic relief, Berliner, Glass, and their Associates separate fact from fiction in this comprehensive look at modern education reform. They explain how the mythical failure of public education has been created and perpetuated in large part by political and economic interests that stand to gain from its destruction. They also expose a rapidly expanding variety of organizations and media that intentionally misrepresent facts. Many of these organizations suggest that their goal is unbiased service in the public interest when, in fact, they represent narrow political and financial interests. Where appropriate, the authors name the promoters of these deceptions and point out how they are served by encouraging false beliefs.This provocative book features short essays on important topics to provide every elected representative, school administrator, school board member, teacher, parent, and concerned citizen with much food for thought, as well as reliable knowledge from authoritative sources.

    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.

    Eye-opening even for experienced faculty and administrators, this book reveals how the traditional college culture can actually pose obstacles to students' success, and suggests strategies for effectively explaining academic expectations.

    You'll learn how to...Use your own reading identity to create powerful reading experiences for all studentsEmpower your students and their reading experience by focusing on your physical classroom environmentCreate and maintain an enticing, well-organized, easy-to-use classroom library;Build a learning community filled with choice and student ownership; andGuide students to further develop their own reading identity to cement them as life-long, invested readers.Throughout the book, Pernille opens up about her own trials and errors as a teacher and what she's learned along the way. She also shares a wide variety of practical tools that you can use in your own classroom, including a reader profile sheet, conferring sheet, classroom library letter to parents, and much more. These tools are available in the book and as eResources on our website (www.routledge.com/9781138958647)--to help you build your own classroom of passionate readers.

    At the center of this prospect are the children of immigrants, who make up one fifth of America's youth. This book, written by the codirectors of the largest ongoing longitudinal study of immigrant children and their families, offers a clear, broad, interdisciplinary view of who these children are and what their future might hold.For immigrant children, the authors write, it is the best of times and the worst. These children are more likely than any previous generation of immigrants to end up in Ivy League universities--or unschooled, on parole, or in prison. Most arrive as motivated students, respectful of authority and quick to learn English. Yet, at the same time, many face huge obstacles to success, such as poverty, prejudice, the trauma of immigration itself, and exposure to the materialistic, hedonistic world of their native-born peers.The authors vividly describe how forces within and outside the family shape these children's developing sense of identity and their ambivalent relationship with their adopted country. Their book demonstrates how Americanization, long an immigrant ideal, has, in a nation so diverse and full of contradictions, become ever harder to define, let alone achieve.

    

    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.

    Pez dispensers. Nerf balls. When we give students junk to reward reading, we are focusing their intention away from the act of reading and from their own independence as readers. Instead, we can create classrooms where reading is seen as its own reward. In this book, esteemed researcher Linda Gambrell provides a research-based context for cultivating children's intrinsic motivation to read and identifies three essential principles, the ARC of motivation:access: giving kids a wealth of reading materials and opportunities to discuss texts relevance: offering high interest, moderately challenging and authentic reading experiences choice: allowing students to self-select texts and reading activities What exactly do those principles look like in action? Reading specialist and researcher Barbara Marinak shares the strategies and techniques that make a difference for student readers' motivation, turning disengaged readers into passionate ones. Pizza and Pez dispensers are short lived, Linda and Barbara write, but confident and empowered readers are likely to remain motivated for life.

    This book goes well beyond the noise on learning space design that focuses on pretty Pinterest classrooms and moves towards a more sophisticated conversation about how learning spaces support and drive brain-friendly learning. SPACE is a beautifully designed book that respects that reading and learning can happen in a visually appealing way. Hare and Dillon walk educators through a series of questions and ideas on how learning spaces can support collaboration, creation, showcasing learning, and a learner's need for quiet. In addition to nudging thinking forward, SPACE provides practical design tips and uses images and testimonials for hacking learning spaces on a realistic budget. This book is designed to motivate, grow capacity, and energize educators to begin shifting their learning spaces to support modern learning for all students.

    Veteran educator Allen Mendler organizes the discussion around four core challenges:Managing difficult students.Working with unappreciative and irritating adults.Making the best of an imperfect environment.Finding time to take top-notch care of yourself.When Teaching Gets Tough is there when you need help to reclaim and sustain your energy and enthusiasm for teaching. Written with a deep understanding of the issues that teachers face every day, the book also includes sections for administrators who want to help teachers stay at the top of their game.