Georgia HeardHumanity and warmth are the cornerstones of quality nonfiction writing. But how can students create them in genres that at first seem more informational than intimate? In Finding the Heart of Nonfiction, Georgia Heard shows how mentor texts can help students read for seven essential craft tools and then use them to create inviting nonfiction that keeps readers' interest.Lyrical and practical, Finding the Heart of Nonfiction describes how to choose mentor texts, use them, and mine them for exemplary instruction. Between these suggestions and the instructional ideas, Georgia shows how students can write nonfiction that informs and inspires. You'll find thoughtful, immediately useful support as you:introduce nonfiction with her handpicked, reproducible mentor texts get students writing with the instructional ideas in Georgia's Try This sections familiarize writers with nonfiction craft and text features connect nonfiction work to the Common Core State Standards collect mentor texts tailored to your students. My hope, writes Georgia, is that you and your students will be inspired by the mentor texts I've chosen-but also inspired to seek out your own mentor texts and continue to explore the world through nonfiction. Trust Finding the Heart of Nonfiction and help your students write with purpose, voice, and passion.Preview the book. Download and read a sample chapter.

    Written by an all-around tech guru and the coauthor of Windows 8.1 For Seniors For Dummies, it cuts through confusing jargon and covers just what you need to know: navigating the interface with a mouse or a touchscreen, customizing the desktop, managing printers and other external devices, setting up and connecting to simple networks, and storing files in the Cloud. Plus, you'll find helpful instructions on sending and receiving email, uploading, editing, and downloading pictures, listening to music, playing games, and so much more.Whether you're upgrading to the new Windows 10 operating system with the hopes of keeping in touch with loved ones via webcam or instant messenger, viewing videos, or simply making your life more organized and streamlined, all the guidance you need to make the most of Windows 10 is at your fingertips.Customize the desktop and set up a simple network Connect with family and friends online Work with apps like a pro Safely protect your data, your computer, and your identity With large-print format for text, figures, and drawings, there's no easier way to get up and running on the new Windows operating system than with Windows 10 For Seniors For Dummies.

    Achieving success in this more challenging world requires knowing many more words. 100 Words Every Middle Schooler Should Know helps students in grades 6 to 8 (ages 11-14) to express themselves with distinction and get the most out of school.The 100 words are varied and interesting, ranging from verbs like muster and replenish to nouns like havoc and restitution to adjectives like apprehensive and imperious. Knowing these words enables students to express themselves with greater clarity and subtlety. Each word has a definition and a pronunciation and appears with at least one quotation—a moving or dramatic passage—taken from a book that middle schoolers are assigned in the classroom or enjoy reading on their own.Both classic and contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction are represented. Among the authors are young adult favorites and award-winners such as Kate Di Camillo, Russell Freedman, Neil Gaiman, E.L. Konigsberg, Lois Lowry, Walter Dean Myers, Katherine Paterson, J. K. Rowling, and Gary Soto. Readers can see for themselves that the words are used by the very best writers in the very best books. It stands to reason that they will see them again and again in higher grades and throughout their lives.100 Words Every Middle Schooler Should Know helps students to gain useful knowledge and prepares them to step into a broader world.

    This expanded collection of writings and reflections offers practical guidance on how to navigate the school system, form rewarding relationships with colleagues, and connect in meaningful ways with students and families from all cultures and backgrounds.

    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 this expanded series, Killgallon presents the same proven methodology but offers all-new writing exercises for middle school, high school, and college students.Unlike traditional grammar books that emphasize sentence analysis, these worktexts asks students to imitate the sentence styles of professional writers, making the sentence composing process enjoyable and challenging. Killgallon teaches subliminally, nontechnically-the ways real writers compose their sentences, the ways students subsequently intuit within their own writing.Designed to produce sentence maturity and variety, the worktexts offer extensive practice in four sentence-manipulating techniques: sentence unscrambling, sentence imitating, sentence combining, and sentence expanding. It's demonstrably true that Sentence Composing can work anywhere--in any school, with any student.

    A simple conceptual framework of Jiu Jitsu for beginners seeking to use Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a vehicle for personal development.

    Noddings argues that such emphasis shortchanges not only the noncollege-bound whose interests are almost ignored, but even those who are preparing for college. The latter receive schooling for the head but little for the heart and soul. Noddings counteracts this condition, insisting that our aim should be to encourage the growth of competent, caring, loving and lovable persons, a moral priority that our educational system ignores. She argues that liberal education dictates what areas of pedagogy are socially acceptable - ignoring a student's wider range of abilities - and undervalues skills, attitudes and capacities traditionally associated with women. Contrarily, it is precisely the competence for caring, Nodding posits, that will prepare our students for the environment of the school, the world of work, the realm of ideas, and ultimately, for each other.

    Michael G. Thompson, coauthor of Raising CainEmbarrassment. None of us escape it. Especially as kids, in school. How might our fear of failure, of not living up to expectations, be holding us back? How can our fear of embarrassment affect how we learn, how we teach, and how we live? Tom Newkirk argues that this emotional underlife, this subterranean domain of emotion, failure, and embarrassment, keeps too many students and teachers silent, hesitant, and afraid. I am absolutely convinced, Tom writes, that embarrassment is not only the true enemy of learning, but of so many other actions we could take to better ourselves. In this groundbreaking exploration, Newkirk offers practices and strategies that help kids and teachers alike develop a more resilient approach to embarrassment. I contend that if we can take on a topic like embarrassment and shame, we can come to a richer, more honest, more enabling sense of who we are and what we can do, he explains. So let's do battle. Let's name and identify the enemy that can haunt our days, disturb our sleep, put barriers up to learning, and drain joy from our lives-and maybe we can also learn how to rearrange some things in our own head so that we can be more generous toward ourselves.

    The contributors represent a wide range of professions including Vanguard Group founder John Bogle, MoveOn.org cofounder Joan Blades, several members of Congress, Christian activist Brian McLaren, business guru Peter Senge, and many other leaders from business, medicine, education, nonprofits, law, politics and government, and religion. In their reflections, these leaders explore how they have been inspired by poets such as T.S. Eliot, Mary Oliver, William Stafford, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Robert Frost, Rumi, May Sarton, Wallace Stevens, Wendell Berry, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Leading from Within is perhaps the most soulful treatment of leadership ever composed. Leadership is first an inner quest, and there is absolutely no better place to explore your inner territory than in the pages of this book. This is an evocative work of art; do yourself an immense favor, and engage with these amazing and diverse leaders and their poems.--Jim Kouzes, coauthor of the bestselling The Leadership Challenge and A Leader's LegacyLeading from Within makes brilliant use of the world's great poets to inspire us to lead with our hearts as well as our heads. It calls to the deeper purpose and meaning within all of us to use our gifts to serve others.--Bill George, author, True North: Discover Your Authentic LeadershipThis is a superb collection of poems and deeply personal reflections from a wide range of real leaders. It is a gift to all of us who believe in bringing our hearts to our work. --Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)The entries in this wonderful anthology are a joy to read and all the more interesting because of their special meaning to the leaders who recommended them. It is a book that every nonprofit leader should place among those they draw upon for inspiration every day.--Diana Aviv, president and CEO, Independent SectorLeading from Within offers a candid view straight into the heart and soul of leaders striving to do good and effective work in the world. The poems and commentaries remind us that leadership is always deeply personal and chock-full of dilemmas that must be addressed by creativity, passion, imagination, and courage.--Jeff Swartz, president and CEO, Timberland

    All of the authors in this book know what classrooms are like. This means that authenticity and integrity pervade every chapter in the book. Teachers will immediately sense this authenticity on their way to realizing that the book offers an endless supply of useful suggestions."-From the Coda by P. David PearsonFor those of us who teach comprehension strategies, Comprehension Going Forward is as near to the ultimate PD experience as we can get. Imagine a professional learning community where you could sit in as...Ellin Keene and Debbie Miller swap best practicesStephanie Harvey and Harvey "Smokey" Daniels compare instruction across the gradesAnne Goudvis and Tanny McGregor share ways to infuse comprehension into every subject areaCris Tovani and Nancy Commins apply the strategies to help struggling readers, English learners, and special-needs students. In Comprehension Going Forward, you'll meet up with 17 leading practitioners and researchers for an energetic, personal, and frequently irreverent conversation on what great comprehension instruction looks like, what an amazing range of applications it has for all students, and what we can do better. Not only do figures such as Susan Zimmerman and P. David Pearson include their own chapters, but, like any exciting conversation, they point out their favorite parts of one another's chapters-highlighting discussion topics for teacher study groups along the way. Read Comprehension Going Forward and RSVP to a get-together that no one who teaches reading will want to miss. Enter this powerful, lively conversation about how we can improve all readers' comprehension today and join some of your favorite authors as they reach for a tomorrow where every child reads with deep understanding."Each author takes the comprehension strategies as a starting point, and then reaches out toward a different set of applications, extensions, and practices. But everyone is connected by the research base on comprehension instruction and by our common goal: to provide every child in America with an "All-Access Pass" to literacy."-From the editor's introduction by Harvey "Smokey" Daniels

    This book combines educational research with examples of how retrieval practice can work inside and outside of the classroom.Filled with evidence-informed ideas to support all teachers and leaders across Primary and Secondary. Retrieval practice is a vital element of the science of learning. Understanding how children learn is essential for all educators from NQTs to more experienced teachers and senior leaders.The educational research is presented in a format which is accessible, useful and informative and will help inform educators about cutting-edge research in a comprehensive, clear and applicable way. The practical resources are adaptable and ready to be implemented in any classroom to support and enhance teaching, learning and long term memory.

    Beck--an experienced educator who knows what works--this concise volume provides a wealth of practical ideas for building children's decoding skills by teaching letter-sound relationships, blending, word building, and multisyllable words. Straightforward and accessible, the strategies presented for explicit, systematic phonics instruction are ideal for use in primary-grade classrooms or with older students who are having difficulties. Many specific examples bring the instructional procedures to life while elucidating their underlying rationale; appendices include reproducible curriculum materials.

    To truly thrive, students need to develop attributes that aren't typically measured on standardized tests. In this lively, engaging book by veteran school leader Thomas R. Hoerr, educators will learn how to foster the "Formative Five" success skills that today's students need, includingEmpathy: learning to see the world through others' perspectives.Self-control: cultivating the abilities to focus and delay self-gratification.Integrity: recognizing right from wrong and practicing ethical behavior.Embracing diversity: recognizing and appreciating human differences.Grit: persevering in the face of challenge.When educators engage students in understanding and developing these five skills, they change mindsets and raise expectations for student learning. As an added benefit, they see significant improvements in school and classroom culture. With specific suggestions and strategies, The Formative Five will help teachers, principals, and anyone else who has a stake in education prepare their students--and themselves--for a future in which the only constant will be change.

    The authors use multiple sources, including biographies and dialogues, to increase student interest and involvement with the material, and encourage students to regard becoming a teacher a positive challenge.