A contemporary companion to City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, this new and timely collection has been compiled by four of the country's most prominent urban educators. Contributors including Sandra Cisneros, Jonathan Kozol, Sapphire, and Patricia J. Williams provide some of the best writing on life in city schools and neighborhoods. Young people and practicing teachers, poets and scholars, social critics and journalists offer unique takes on topics ranging from culturally relevant teaching and scripted curricula to the criminalization of youth, gentrification, and the inequities of school funding.In the words of Sonia Nieto, City Kids, City Schools "challenge[s] the conventional wisdom of what it means to teach in urban schools."

    If online learning has not already rocked your local school, then it will soon. Michael Horn and his" Disrupting Class" collaborators made that prediction in 2008 when they calculated that by 2019, 50% of high school courses would be online in some form or fashion. Years later, that prediction continues to appear accurate, if not conservative. People may debate the timing, but the more important question is how to channel the indisputable emergence of online learning across elementary, middle, and high schools into a positive force that makes life better for students and their teachers. How can leaders unlock the benefits of online learning and mitigate the risks? Five years after the first publication of" Disrupting Class," the field is ready for a companion guide that provides the "how to" guidance for which educators are clamoring. "Blended: The Field Guide" "to Disrupting Class" will help leaders, teachers, and other stakeholders interested in a more student-centered system understand how to begin. It provides a step-by-step framework, responsive to the frequently asked questions from education leaders who are trying to implement blended learning. The goal is for every reader to have the necessary expertise to go forth with confidence and build the next generation of K-12 learning environments.

    Offering practical guidance for literacy educators, curriculum development specialists, and other education professionals and policy makers, this volume considers how we can most effectively improve the quality and content of reading and writing instruction. Leading researchers and practitioners address the eight principles of best practice, providing the most current information on how to enhance students' ability to construct meaning from text independently, draw upon texts to build conceptual understanding, effectively communicate ideas orally and in writing, and develop an intrinsic desire to read and write. This timely book blends state-of-the-art theory and research with workable suggestions based on extensive hands-on experience in the field.

    This book shows you how and gives you hundreds of lesson-planning ideas and strategies for every grade level and subject. Discover new educational tools that support research-based instruction, and learn ways to use technologies you already know to * Create and use advance organizers and nonlinguistic representations * Help students take notes, summarize content, and make comparisons * Engage students in cooperative learning * Help students generate and test hypotheses * Support students in practicing new skills and doing homework * Reinforce students? efforts through formative assessment and feedback Getting this guide ensures you always know when to use educational technologies, which ones are best for a learning task, and how they help students use new learning strategies.

    Gholdy E. Muhammad presents a four-layered equity framework—one that is grounded in history and restores excellence in literacy education. This framework, which she names, Historically Responsive Literacy, was derived from the study of literacy development within 19th-century Black literacy societies. The framework is essential and universal for all students, especially youth of color, who traditionally have been marginalized in learning standards, school policies, and classroom practices. The equity framework will help educators teach and lead toward the following learning goals or pursuits:  Identity Development—Helping youth to make sense of themselves and othersSkill Development— Developing proficiencies across the academic disciplinesIntellectual Development—Gaining knowledge and becoming smarterCriticality—Learning and developing the ability to read texts (including print and social contexts) to understand power, equity, and anti-oppression When these four learning pursuits are taught together—through the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework, all students receive profound opportunities for personal, intellectual, and academic success. Muhammad provides probing, self-reflective questions for teachers, leaders, and teacher educators as well as sample culturally and historically responsive sample plans and text sets across grades and content areas. In this book, Muhammad presents practical approaches to cultivate the genius in students and within teachers.

    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.

    You don't even have to be able to draw. Just put the child before the chart.Marjorie Martinelli and Kristine Mraz Listen to an interview with Marjorie and Kristi, the Chartchums, on Education Talk Radio.Commercially available charts leave you hanging? Want the secret to jump-off-the-wall charts that stick with kids? Trust Smarter Charts.Did you ever want to know:What do great charts look like? How many is too many? Where are the best places for them in my classroom? How long do I keep them? How do I know if they are working? Then you'll want to meet Marjorie Martinelli and Kristine Mraz, the Chartchums. They struggled with the same questions, and Smarter Charts shares not only the answers, but the best practices they've discovered as well. Amp up the power of your charts with tips on design and language, instructional use, and self-assessment. Even better, discover surprising strategies that deepen engagement, strengthen retention, and heighten independence-all by involving students in chart making.Packed with full-color sample charts from real classrooms, Smarter Charts shares simple, brain-based strategies proven to make your classroom an even more active, effective space for literacy instruction and classroom management.

    In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules--such as the five-paragraph essay--designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.In Why They Can't Write, Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.

    These practices are "visible" because their purpose is clear, they are implemented at the right moment in a student's learning, and their effect is tangible.Through dozens of classroom scenarios, learn how to use the right approach at the right time for surface, deep, and transfer learning and which routines are most effective at each phase of learning.

    What's more, she shows how in this practical resource book.Gibbons begins with a strong theoretical underpinning for her practice, drawing on a functional model of language, sociocultural theories of learning, and current research on second-language development. After supporting her view that the regular curriculum offers the best language-learning environment for young ESL students, Gibbons demonstrates the ways in which content areas provide a context for the teaching of English, from speaking and listening to reading and writing. These in turn are treated not as discrete skills, but as ones that can also be integrated in the learning of diverse subjects. Gibbons illustrates this with a wide range of teaching and learning activities across the curriculum, supplemented with programming and assessment formats and checklists.Language learning is not a simple linear process, but involves the ongoing development of skills for a range of purposes. Gibbons sees this development as largely the result of the social contexts and interactions in which learning occurs. By focusing on the ways in which teachers can "scaffold" language and learning in the content areas, she takes a holistic approach-one that appreciates the struggle of students learning a new language, while simultaneously developing subject knowledge in it, and the challenge for teachers to address these needs.Given today's culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, ESL students can no longer be thought of as a group apart from the mainstream-they are. the mainstream. This book describes the ways to ensure that ESL learners become full members of the school community with the language and content skills they need for success.

    If you are a high school teacher or a kindergarten teacher, the seven steps in The Wild Card will give you the knowledge and the confidence to bring creative teaching strategies into your classroom.You'll learn: Why the deck is not stacked against you, no matter what kind of hand you've been dealt Why you should never listen to the Joker How to identify the "Ace up your sleeve" and use it to create classroom magic How to apply the "Rules of Rigor" in order to fuse creativity with learning How to become the "Wild Card" that changes the game for your students

     This companion volume focuses on spelling and vocabulary knowledge that grow primarily through processes of derivation. Designed for elementary educators' use as part of a reading curriculum where derivational relations is covered.

    Diane Ravitch—former assistant secretary of education and a leader in the drive to create a national curriculum—examines her career in education reform and repudiates positions that she once staunchly advocated. Drawing on over forty years of research and experience, Ravitch critiques today’s most popular ideas for restructuring schools, including privatization, standardized testing, punitive accountability, and the feckless multiplication of charter schools. She shows conclusively why the business model is not an appropriate way to improve schools. Using examples from major cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, and San Diego, Ravitch makes the case that public education today is in peril. Ravitch includes clear prescriptions for improving America’s schools:*Leave decisions about schools to educators, not politicians or businessmen*Devise a truly national curriculum that sets out what children in every grade should be learning*Expect charter schools to educate the kids who need help the most, not to compete with public schools*Pay teachers a fair wage for their work, not “merit pay” based on deeply flawed and unreliable test scores*Encourage family involvement in education from an early ageThe Death and Life of the Great American School System is more than just an analysis of the state of play of the American education system. It is a must-read for any stakeholder in the future of American schooling.

    Read about: accidentally showing topless dancers in an educational video about Paris making students “rent” their seats to teach them real-world budgeting rescuing an injured child on a field trip and then being surrounded by state troopers as a suspected pedophile helping a second grade student write letters to her soldier father and watching their tearful reunion giving an award for academic achievement to a student who is headed for prison hitting a 9-year-old bike rider and years later having him in class making up math raps for inner city students and 94 more great stories!

    Useful reading for teachers who are eager to find stimulating ways to engage students' interests and boost academic performance, this volume outlines the principles of social emotional learning (SEL) that educators can follow to help all students to achieve in the math and science classroom.