Energize Research Reading and Writing: Fresh Strategies to Spark Interest, Develop Independence, and Meet Key Common Core Standards, Grades 4-8


Christopher Lehman - 2012
    Christopher LehmanSit down with Christopher Lehman as he shares the strategies he has used to make research reading and writing real and motivating for students. Chris draws on his experience with the Reading and Writing Project and as co-author of Pathways to the Common Core to help you tailor your instruction to your students' needs, get to the heart of the Common Core State Standards, and, most importantly, challenge your students to become driven, inquisitive thinkers who can meet the demands of school and life in the 21st century.Energize Research Reading and Writing provides a menu of fresh, classroom-tested strategies for teaching research across all contents as well as:at-a-glance guides for differentiation-ways to ramp up strategies for experienced researchers and ways to make them accessible for emerging researchers samples of grade level language for each strategy and tips for content-area teachers ideas for using the strategies to build plans for the short and long research projects that the CCSS requires a quick-reference chart that links each strategy to the CCSS so you can quickly turn to the strategies that aim to align with a particular standard. Use this book as a complete research unit plan or as a source for targeted strategies. Energize Research Reading and Writing has all the tools you need to transform your students into engaged and independent researchers.

Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement


Stephanie Harvey - 2007
    In this revised and expanded edition, Stephanie and Anne have added twenty completely new comprehension lessons, extending the scope of the book and exploring the central role that activating background knowledge plays in understanding. Another major addition is the inclusion of a section on content literacy which describes how to apply comprehension strategies flexibly across the curriculum. The new edition is organized around four sections:Part I highlights what comprehension is and how to teach it, including the principles that guide practice, a review of recent research, and a new section on assessment. A new chapter, Tools for Active Literacy: The Nuts and Bolts of Comprehension Instruction, describes ways to engage students in purposeful talk through interactive read alouds, guided discussion and written response.Part II contains lessons and practices for teaching comprehension. A new first chapter emphasizes the importance of teaching students to monitor their understanding before focusing on specific strategies. Five lessons on monitoring provide a sound basis for launching comprehension instruction. At the end of each strategy chapter, the authors outline learning goals and ways to assess students' thinking, sharing examples of student work, and offering suggestions for differentiating instruction.Part III, Comprehension Across the Curriculum is new. Comprehension strategies are essential for content-area reading, where information can be challenging, and presented in unfamiliar formats. This section includes chapters on social studies and science reading, topic study research, textbook reading and the genre of test reading.Part IV shows that kids need books they can sink their teeth into and the updated appendix section recommends a rich diet of fiction and nonfiction, short text, kid's magazines, websites and journals that will assist teachers as they plan and design comprehension instructionThrough its focus on instruction that is responsive to kids' interests and learning needs, the first edition of Strategies That Work helped transform comprehension instruction for teachers across the country. For them, this new edition will be a welcome extension of that work. Those coming to it for the first time will find a current and essential resource. When readers use these strategies, they enjoy a more complete, thoughtful reading experience. Engagement is the goal. When kids are engaged in their reading they enhance their understanding, acquire knowledge, and learn from and remember what they read. And best yet, they will want to read more!

A Teacher's Guide to Writing Conferences: The Classroom Essentials Series


Carl Anderson - 2018
    With clear and accessible language, Carl guides you through the three main parts of a writing conference, and shows you the teaching moves and intentional language that can be used in each one. He helps you understand: - how to get started with conferring, or improve your existing conferences - how to use conferences to meet the diverse needs of your student writers - how to fit conferences into your busy writing workshop schedule. More than 25 videos bring the content to life, while Teacher Tips, Q&A's, and Recommended Reading lists provide everything you need to help you become a better writing teacher.

After the End: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision


Barry Lane - 1992
    He encourages both teachers and students to enjoy a sense of discovery and surprise in their writing, as well as to examine and explore their own distinct revising styles."After" "THE END" revises our concept of revision, illustrating it as a constant inventive search for new possibilities and divergent meanings, rather than mere correction or what students wearily refer to as "redoing." For students in upper elementary to secondary school and beyond, and for every teacher looking to develop a common language of craft in the classroom, "After ""THE END" is a book of practical ideas and applications that inspire the reader to put it down and put it to use.

Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read and Write


Patricia Marr Cunningham - 1994
    Pat Cunningham's and Dick Allington's clear and friendly writing style emphasizes the importance of promoting the integration of phonics and literature-based process writing and reading instruction to enhance ALL students' learning and reading skills. It clarifies concepts, defines key terms, and offers just the right balance of research and practical coverage to make the content complete without being overwhelming. This affordable book helps teachers engage ALL children in meaning-centered reading by fostering powerful decoding and comprehension strategies and implementing a balanced reading program. Classrooms That Work identifies and explores five components: real reading and writing, guided reading, guided writing, decoding/spelling, and word/word knowledge. The Fourth Edition is filled with workable, practical strategies and activities to use in the classroom. offering a modern, applied approach to 'traditional' reading topics and an in-depth look at areas of reading instruction not covered by other books (e.g. Chapters 9, 10 & 11 describe a sample day in a Building Blocks kindergarten, a sample day in a Four Blocks primary classroom and a sample week in a Big Blocks intermediate classroom, respectively. Combined, these chapters show how all of the important components of a balanced literacy programs can be integrated.) The flexibility gained by using this comprehensive approach gives instructors the opportunity to tailor course coverage and topic sequence making this a perfect book to be used in reading and language arts methods courses.

Text Complexity: Raising Rigor in Reading


Douglas Fisher - 2012
    This book focuses on the quantitative and qualitative factors of text complexity as well as the ways in which readers can be matched with texts and tasks. Examine how close readings of complex texts scaffold students understanding and allow them to develop the skills necessary to read like a detective.

Read Write Teach: Choice and Challenge in the Reading-Writing Workshop


Linda Rief - 2014
    In ReadWriteTeach, Linda offers the what, how, and why of a year's worth of reading and writing for middle and high school students with a framework that is as flexible as it is comprehensive....This book isn't a compilation of tear-out reproducibles designed to help us replicate Linda's practices, writes Maja Wilson in the foreword. Instead, it's the most powerful gift that a master teacher can give us: the story of her thinking and feeling as she teaches. Linda's insights and beliefs are woven throughout a comprehensive overview of best literacy practices, which include:essentials in the reading-writing workshop grounding our choices in our beliefs getting to know ourselves and our students as readers and writers. Students' voices, through examples of their writing, drawing, and thinking, resonate throughout the book and characterize the thoughtful readers, writers, and citizens of the world that they become under Linda's guidance.Online companion resources include all of the handouts that Linda uses in her own classroom. Download a free sample chapter!

Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School (Hack Learning #3)


Starr Sackstein - 2015
    Now, you can easily stop reducing students to a number, letter, or any label that misrepresents learning and assessment in education. Now, you can help children see the value in every single assignment. Today, you can make assessment a rich, ongoing conversation that inspires learning for the sake of learning, rather than as a punishment or a reward. All you have to do is go gradeless. Throw out your grade book tomorrow! In Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School, award-winning teacher and world-renowned formative assessment expert Starr Sackstein unravels one of education's oldest mysteries: how to assess learning without grades -- even in a school that uses numbers, letters, GPAs, and report cards. While many educators can only muse about the possibility of a world without grades, teachers like Sackstein are reimagining education. In this unique, eagerly-anticipated book, Sackstein shows you exactly how to create a remarkable no-grades classroom like hers, a vibrant place where students grow, share, thrive, and become independent learners who never ask, "What's this worth?" Learn what formative assessment really looks like. Summative assessment is typically an end-of-unit exam or standardized test, but what is formative assessment? Many teachers struggle with the concept. Hacking Assessment not only explains what formative assessment is, it provides blueprints for implementation and examples from educators around the world, who use this strategy successfully every day. Read It and You Can Take These Actions Immediately: Shift everyone's mindset away from grades Track student progress without a grade book Communicate learning to all stakeholders in real time Maximize time while providing meaningful feedback Teach students to reflect and "self-grade" Deliver feedback in a digital world Create e-portfolios and cloud-based learning archives Inspire Students to share their work openly This is not your average assessment book Hacking Assessment won't bore you with outdated research or unrealistic strategies. In her captivating, conversational style, Sackstein provides practical ideas woven into a user-friendly success guide with actionable steps for creating an amazing conversation about learning that does not require a traditional grade. Each chapter is neatly wrapped in this simple Hack Learning Series formula: The Problem (an assessment issue that plagues education) The Hack (a ridiculously easy solution that you've likely never considered) What You Can Do Tomorrow (no waiting necessary) Blueprint for Full Implementation (a step-by-step action plan for capacity building) The Hack in Action (yes, someone has actually done this)

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.

Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers


Tom Romano - 2000
    It is a multilayered, multivoiced literary experience. Genres of narrative thinking require writers to make an imaginative leap, melding the factual with the imaginative. Writers cant just tell. They must show. They must make their topics palpable. They must penetrate experience. Multigenre papers enable their authors to do that. Blending Genre, Altering Style is the first book to address the practicalities of helping students compose multigenre papers. Romano discusses genres, subgenres, writing strategies, and stylistic maneuvers that students can use in their own multigenre papers. Each idea is supported with actual student writing, including five full-length multigenre papers that demonstrate the possibilities of a multigenre approach to writing. There are also discussions of writing poetry, fiction, and dialogue, in which readers will discover how students can create genres out of indelible moments, crucial processes, and important matters in the lives of the subject under inquiry. One chapter alone is devoted to helping writers create unity and coherence in their papers.Imbued with Romanos passion for teaching, Blending Genre, Altering Style is an invaluable reference for any inservice or preservice English language arts teacher. The only prerequisite is a desire to help students write.

Comprehension Going Forward: Where We Are / What's Next


Ellin Oliver KeeneHarvey Daniels - 2011
    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

Thrive: 5 Ways to (Re)Invigorate Your Teaching


Meenoo Rami - 2014
    In Thrive, Meenoo shares the five strategies that helped her become a confident, connected teacher. From how to find mentors and build networks, both online and off, to advocating for yourself and empowering your students, Thrive shows new and veteran teachers alike how to overcome the challenges and meet the demands of our profession. Praise for Thrive "Whether you are entering your first year of teaching or your 40th, Thrive feels as if it were written just for you. At a time in our profession when many of us are feeling stretched thin, Meenoo Rami offers strategies to reignite our passions and rediscover why we chose to teach." -Christopher Lehman, coauthor of Falling in Love with Close Reading "Teaching is a profession that eats its young. Meenoo Rami offers guidelines for surviving the challenges of the classroom as well as the faculty room." -Carol Jago, author, teacher, and past president of NCTE "Thrive includes a mosaic of dynamic teacher voices from many grade levels and content areas. Reading their stories deepened my thinking about the immense untapped potential of our profession. Meenoo Rami's vision of teaching and learning can sustain us all." -Penny Kittle, author of Book Love Join the conversation on Twitter at #edthrive. SAVE on a book study bundle! 15% off 15 copies.

Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry Out Instructional Units


Peter Smagorinsky - 2007
    Its week-by-week suggestions for in- and out-of-class activities support students as they learn to design units for use in their first classrooms.Peter Smagorinsky, the leading scholar and researcher of his generation in the field of English education, shows English teachers how to turn every hour of classroom instruction into an authentic and powerful learning experience in his inspiring new book, Teaching English by Design. It's a wonderful book and represents a challenge to all of us to teach better than we usually do. Sheridan Blau Author of The Literature WorkshopPeter Smagorinsky, a highly respected figure in English Education, here offers new teachers principled and practical ways of authoring curriculum, even in traditional settings. Randy Bomer Author of Time for MeaningMany books on English/language arts instruction describe the teaching of units, but how many of them actually show how to create the units, make them meaningful to students, and use them to support your curriculum from September to June? Teaching English by Design does it all. It helps avoid a fragmentary curriculum by providing the rationale and the process for not only teaching well but also for producing integrated units that encourage students to deepen their thinking across the school year.Teaching English by Design is two books in one: a primer for teaching secondary English and a comprehensive guide to creating and using four to six-week instructional units. Peter Smagorinsky shares important insight about students, how they learn, and what kinds of classrooms support their achievement in reading and writing. Then he uses those findings to open up the key ideas of unit design to every teacher. Smagorinsky's units are organized around key concepts in English, such as: reading strategies writing strategies genres periods, regions, and movements in literature themes the works of a significant author. From original idea to construction, to implementation and beyond, Smagorinsky's practical advice supports teachers in extending, connecting, and integrating their units to increase the cohesion and power of the curriculum.Incorporating curricular theory, educational psychology, and fourteen years of high school teaching experience, Peter Smagorinsky's advice is both theoretically sound and grounded in the daily realities of today's teacher. Complemented by a wealth of web-based illustrations, Teaching English by Design is the ideal resource for preservice teachers as well as those in the classroom who want to take charge of their curriculum and find new energy in it.

That Workshop Book: New Systems and Structures for Classrooms That Read, Write, and Think


Samantha Bennett - 2007
     Cris Tovani Twenty-five years after Donald Graves popularized workshop teaching, the concept is widely implemented but not always deeply understood. That Workshop Book changes all that. It shows a new generation of teachers how the systems, structures, routines, and rituals that support successful workshops combine with thinking, planning, and conferring to drive students growth, inform assessment and instruction, and increase teachers professional satisfaction. And it shows those already using the workshop how to increase its instructional power by seeing its big ideas and its component parts in fresh, dynamic ways. In That Workshop Book, Samantha Bennett, a veteran instructional coach, takes you on a tour of six classrooms from first grade through eighth grade to see the techniques and thought processes master teachers use to make their workshops work. In each class she offers tangible evidence of these teachers practices, demonstrating how they listen to students and use that information to build lessons that propel children into deeper thinking. She documents these teachers moves for you with: classroom observations in the form of coaching emails from Bennett to each with commentary that highlights the important practices seen in each workshop transcripts of minilessons, worktimes, and debriefs specific, explicit reflection by each teacher about their workshop examples of student work produced in the workshop and over time student reflections on their development as readers, writers, thinkers, and learners. Youll come to understand firsthand how the setup of the workshop allows students the breathing room to think deeply about ideas, topics, and resources. Youll also see how it creates a framework within which you can not only listen in as children express what they learn but also think deeply yourself about how best to use the information you gather for subsequent instruction. Bennett even demonstrates how the workshop can be flexible enough to fit any learning situation and how to solve common problems as they arise. Benefit from the wisdom of one of the countrys foremost staff developers. Step inside workshop classrooms where teachers and students work side by sidewhere students develop literacy skills through a combination of doing what readers and writers do and purposeful, sensitive interactions with their teacher. Visit workshops where teachers learn about their students, use careful one-to-one assessment to inform their teaching, and reflect on their own practice as well. Then enter the best workshop classroom of allthe one youll be ready and excited to launch when you read That Workshop Book.

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.