Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students


Thomas G. Gunning - 1999
    The Sixth Edition of Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students continues to be one of the most comprehensive, practical texts on the market, and includes a new focus on higher-level literacy practices. Written by distinguished author Tom Gunning, Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students provides readers with step-by-step guidance for teaching reading and writing, including sample lessons for virtually every major literacy skill/strategy. Reflecting the author's ongoing extensive hands-on work with schools coping with the demands of No Child Left Behind, the Sixth edition includes teaching tips and materials that are more practical, more realistic, more effective, and more extensive than ever. With its careful balance between the theory and the practice, the book always gives readers the theories behind the methods, encouraging them to choose, adapt, and construct their own approaches as they create a balanced program of literacy instruction. learners, struggling readers and writers, and special needs students, Creating Literacy for All Students, Sixth Edition, looks at developing higher-level literacy requirements for reading and writing, including those stemming from No Child Left Behind regulations and high-stakes tests. The new edition stresses effective steps for closing the gap between the reading, writing, discussion, and thinking skills as mandated by No Child Left Behind and Reading First

Fact vs. Fiction: Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in the Age of Fake News


Jennifer Lagarde - 2018
    When these issues are coupled with the "fake news" industry that intentionally spreads false stories designed to go viral, educators are left facing a new and challenging landscape. This book will help them address these new realities. Fact vs. Fiction provides educators with tools and resources to help students discern fact from fiction in the information they access not only at school, but on the devices they carry in their pockets and backpacks.

Teaching with Poverty in Mind: What Being Poor Does to Kids' Brains and What Schools Can Do About It


Eric Jensen - 2009
    A brain that is susceptible to adverse environmental effects is equally susceptible to the positive effects of rich, balanced learning environments and caring relationships that build students' resilience, self-esteem, and character.Drawing from research, experience, and real school success stories, Teaching with Poverty in Mind reveals* What poverty is and how it affects students in school;* What drives change both at the macro level (within schools and districts) and at the micro level (inside a student's brain);* Effective strategies from those who have succeeded and ways to replicate those best practices at your own school; and* How to engage the resources necessary to make change happen.Too often, we talk about change while maintaining a culture of excuses. We can do better. Although no magic bullet can offset the grave challenges faced daily by disadvantaged children, this timely resource shines a spotlight on what matters most, providing an inspiring and practical guide for enriching the minds and lives of all your students.

Real Revision: Authors' Strategies to Share with Student Writers


Kate Messner - 2011
    In Real Revision, award-winning author and teacher Kate Messner demystifies the revision process for teachers and students alike and provides tried-and-true revision strategies, field tested by students' favorite authors. Kate takes us on a behind-the-scenes look at how more than thirty-five authors—including Julie Berry, Watt Key, Loree Griffin Burns , Jane Yolen, Lisa Schroeder, Suzanne Selfors, Eric Luper, Danette Haworth, and Kathi Appelt—revise their works, often many times over, before they appear on library and bookstore shelves. Using successful strategies from her own classroom, Kate teaches how authors use research, brainstorming, and planning as revision tools; how they revise to add detail and make characters stronger; and how students can use those same techniques for all kinds of writing in the classroom. Real Revision features dozens of reproducible “mentor author” pages, with quotes from the authors about their revision processes, and includes related classroom-ready activities.For any teacher who wants to produce strong real-world writers, Real Revision will infuse the classroom with new energy as students use mentor authors as models for their own revision and writing.

Dream Class: How To Transform Any Group Of Students Into The Class You've Always Wanted


Michael Linsin - 2009
    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 . . .

The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School


Neil Postman - 1995
    Instead, today's schools promote the false "gods" of economic utility, consumerism, or ethnic separatism and resentment. What alternative strategies can we use to instill our children with a sense of global citizenship, healthy intellectual skepticism, respect of America's traditions, and appreciation of its diversity? In answering this question, The End of Education restores meaning and common sense to the arena in which they are most urgently needed."Informal and clear...Postman's ideas about education are appealingly fresh."--New York Times Book Review

The Girls in the Back of the Class


LouAnne Johnson - 1995
    Teacher LouAnne Johnson, the petite ex-Marine of Dangerous Minds, was their last chance. The boys, like handsome Latino Julio Escovar, expected to end up in jail. The girls, like regal, golden-skinned Simoa, often mysteriously disappeared. But not in LouAnne Johnson's class.Risking her life, and her heart, LouAnne cajoled, bribed, and loved these teens. She went out on tough urban streets to track down Simoa, she faced a dangerously angry father to get pretty, talented Araceli into art school, and she fought drug pushers, trouble-making dropouts, and burned-out teachers to leave her kids alone. Her goal was to get her kids to graduation. Her method? Believe in them...until they believed in themselves.

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Education


Tony Little - 2015
    One of the most progressive and imaginative people in British education today he has hitherto kept a low profile. This book accompanies a three part television series to be screened on BBC 2 but differs from it significantly.There is a crisis in the British education system. Year on year GCSE and A Level pupils post better exam results, with more students achieving top grades. Yet business leaders and employers complain bitterly that our schools are not producing people fit for purpose. What we have become is a nation 'Over schooled and under educated'. Far from being locked in an ivory tower, a bastion of privilege, Mr Little has used his time as a teacher and headmaster to get to grips with fundamental questions concerning education. He wants to produce people fit to work in the modern world. How do children absorb information? What kind of people does society need? What is education for? Not only is the author one of the great reforming headmasters of our time but he has planted Academies in the East end of London, founded a state boarding school near Windsor and yet is a passionate advocate of single sex schools.This book is not a text book for colleges of education- it is a book to enlighten the teaching profession and just as much for anxious parents. The book is simply arranged under topics such as authority, expectations, progress, self-confidence, sex, crises and creativity.Tony Little thinks it is time to ask some fundamental questions, and to make brave decisions about how we make our schools and our schoolchildren fit for purpose.

The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language


Mark Forsyth - 2011
    It's an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language, taking in monks and monkeys, film buffs and buffaloes, and explaining precisely what the Rolling Stones have to do with gardening.

Literacy in American Lives


Deborah Brandt - 1997
    The book demonstrates what sharply rising standards for literacy have meant to successive generations of Americans and how--as students, workers, parents, and citizens--they have responded to rapid changes in the meaning and methods of literacy learning in their society. Drawing on more than 80 life histories of Americans from all walks of life, the book addresses critical questions facing public education at the start of the twenty-first century.

Teaching Argument Writing, Grades 6-12: Supporting Claims with Relevant Evidence and Clear Reasoning


George Hillocks Jr. - 2011
    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.

The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers


Sheridan Blau - 2003
    Through lively re-creations of actual workshops that he regularly conducts for students and teachers, Blau invites his readers to become active participants in workshops on such topics as:helping students read more difficult texts than they think they can readwhere interpretations come fromthe problem of background knowledge in teaching classic textshow to deal with competing and contradictory interpretationswhat's worth saying about a literary textbalancing respect for readers with respect for texts and intellectual authorityensuring that literary discussions are lively and productivehow to develop valuable and engaging writing assignments.Each workshop includes reflections on what transpired and a discussion of the workshop's rationale and outcomes in the larger context of an original and practice-based theory of literary competence and instruction.

The New Kings of Nonfiction


Ira GlassMichael Pollan - 2007
    

You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing


John Scalzi - 2007
    and ad copy, corporate brochures and Web site headlines, too. His wide range of experience informs this collection of essays on writing and the writing life, taken from his popular personal Web site, The Whatever. Whether providing practical advice, discussing writing and writers or observing the state of the writing world, Scalzi lays it out in a sharp, no-nonsense way that assumes you want the lay of the land, without all the huggy-squeezy hand-holding. Notes on the writing life, unvarnished views of writers and books and (yes) even some practical advice: It's all here.

The Writer's Toolbox: Creative Games and Exercises for Inspiring the 'Write' Side of Your Brain (Writing Prompts, Writer Gifts, Writing Kit Gifts)


Jamie Cat Callan - 2007
    Sixty exercise sticks: First Sentences, Non Sequiturs, and Last Straws will get stories off the ground, 60 cards fuel creative descriptions and four spinner palettes will ignite unexpected plot twists. For any aspiring writer, this kit is the perfect first step on the path to literary greatness!Inspires writers with creative prompts and samplesGets writers in the right headspace to let creativity flowFeatures 60 writing exercises and other creative gamesMake those days and nights of struggling to create writing ideas go away without having to bury yourself in more books with Writer's Toolbox, which makes for the perfect gift for writers.