then, by golly, stick a tiara on your head and go teach something!" Do you wish that you had the chance to sit down with a seasoned homeschooling veteran over a cup of tea and ask every question that comes to mind? Mother of seven and twelve year homeschooling veteran Rebecca Frech is the common-sense voice of experience and reassurance that you've been hoping to find. Teaching in Your Tiara is a soup-to-nuts homeschooling book that walks you through the first years - deciding that home education is right for your family, choosing the right curriculum, understanding learning styles, not raising socially awkward kids, maintaining your own identity, and more. Whether you're the parent who's already committed to homeschooling or you're just dipping your toe into the pool of consideration, this book is for you! Rebecca's logic, honesty, and humor will leave you both amused and well-informed about the realities of homeschooling and what it could mean for your family.

    Katz Coauthor of "Young Investigators: The Project Approach in the Early Years" By the time they reach preschool or kindergarten, young children are already writers. They don't have much experience, but they're filled with stories to tell and ideas to express - they want to show the world what they know and see. All they need is a nurturing teacher like you to recognize the writer at work within them. All you need to help them is "Already Ready." Taking an exciting, new approach to working with our youngest students, "Already Ready "shows you how, by respecting children as writers, engaged in bookmaking, you can gently nudge them toward a lifetime of joyful writing. Katie Wood Ray and Matt Glover guide you through fundamental concepts of early writing. Providing numerous, helpful examples of early writing - complete with transcriptions - they demonstrate how to: make sense of children's writing and interpret how they represent sounds, ideas, and images see important developmental signs in writers that you can use to help them grow further recognize the thinking young children engage in and discover that it's the "same" thinking more experienced writers use to craft purposeful, thoughtful pieces. Then Ray and Glover show you how little ones can develop powerful understandings about: texts and their characteristics the writing process what it means to be a "writer." You'll learn how to support your writers' quest to make meaning, as they grow their abilities and refine their thinking about writing through teaching strategies such as: reading aloud working side by side with writers sharing children's writing. Writing is just one part of a busy early childhood classroom, but even in little doses, a nurturing approach can work wonders and help children connect the natural writer inside them to a life of expressing themselves on paper. Find that approach, share it with your students, and you'll discover that you don't have to get students ready to write - they're "Already Ready.

    Pose the same question to students and many will use words like "boring", "useless", and even "humiliating". In  Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You'd Had , author Tracy Zager helps teachers close this gap by making math class more like mathematics. Tracy has spent years working with highly skilled math teachers in a diverse range of settings and grades. You'll find this book jam-packed with new ideas from these vibrant classrooms.  How to Teach Student-Centered Mathematics: Zager outlines a problem-solving approach to mathematics for elementary and middle school educators looking for new ways to inspire student learningBig Ideas, Practical Application: This math book contains dozens of practical and accessible teaching techniques that focus on fundamental math concepts, including strategies that simulate connection of big ideas; rich tasks that encourage students to wonder, generalize, hypothesize, and persevere; and routines to teach students how to collaborateKey Topics for Elementary and Middle School Teachers:  Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You'd Had  offers fresh perspectives on common challenges, from formative assessment to classroom management for elementary and middle school teachersAll teachers can move towards increasingly authentic and delightful mathematics teaching and learning. This important book helps develop instructional techniques that will make the math classes we teach so much better than the math classes we took.

    One essential role librarians play is that of a leader who works collaboratively to build relationships, mold culture and climate, and advocate for the needs of students and the community. In this book, a librarian and an education leader team up to reflect on the librarian's ability to build connections in two ways. First, they discuss the benefits of bringing the outside world into the library through the use of social media, videoconferencing and other tools that allow librarians to partner with others. Then they expand upon these connections by addressing how librarians can lead in the greater educational community by sharing resources and strategies, and partnering with school leaders to tell the story of the school community. Through this book, librarians will discover the influence they can have on the school community as the library becomes the heart of the school, a place where problems are solved, content is explored, connections are made and discovery happens.

    A born and bred New Yorker, former City Councilmember, and "charter czarina," Moskowitz has taken on powerful unions and politicians to establish and grow her astonishingly effective and popular charter school program in four of the city’s five boroughs.In this unabashedly candid memoir, Moskowitz tells of how she became a forward-thinking education entrepreneur and her fight to establish nearly three dozen schools—activism that has made her into one of the most polarizing figures in New York City and beyond. Now, having established a remarkable, even unprecedented, track record for guiding the city’s most disadvantaged children to high academic performance, Moskowitz addresses the battles she has won and lost, writing candidly about the people who seek to undermine her work—most notably New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio—and celebrating the powerful allies who have aided her cause, including former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo.Moskowitz’s insightful memoir is a deeply felt personal story and an impassioned call to action that bluntly identifies failing policies and the alarmingly powerful forces arrayed against improving an education system that is both deeply dysfunctional and prejudiced. The Education of Eva Moskowitz is sure to galvanize supporters, enrage her opponents, generate headlines, and urgently impact the national conversation on education.

    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.

    Grounded in historical essays, the volume provides context for the growing field of curriculum studies, reflects upon the trends that have dominated the field, and samples the best of current scholarship. This thoughtful combination of essays provides a survey of the field coupled with concrete examples of innovative curriculum, and an examination of contemporary topics like HIV/AIDS education and multicultural education.

    Joel Klein, an accomplished lawyer completely outside of the education establishment, was selected to lead this ambitious, unprecedented campaign. Lessons of Hope is Klein’s inside account of his eight-year mission of improvement: demanding accountability; eliminating political favoritism; and battling a powerful teachers’ union that seemed determined to protect the worst in its ranks. Klein’s initiative resulted in more school choice, higher graduation rates, and improved test scores. The New York City model is now seen as a national blueprint for meaningful school reform. But the journey was not easy. Klein faced resistance and conflict at every turn.Lessons of Hope serves as a guide to the problems plaguing public education and how they can be solved. At its core lies Klein’s personal story: his humble upbringing in Brooklyn and Queens and the essential role that outstanding public school teachers played in nurturing his success. Provocative and illuminating, Lessons of Hope is essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of American public education.

    Rick Wormeli offers the latest research and common sense thinking that teachers and administrators seek when it comes to assessment and grading in differentiated classes. Filled with real examples and “gray” areas that middle and high school educators will easily recognize, Rick tackles important and sometimes controversial assessment and grading issues constructively. The book covers high-level concepts, ranging from “rationale for differentiating assessment and grading” to “understanding mastery” as well as the nitty-gritty details of grading and assessment, such as:whether to incorporate effort, attendance, and behavior into academic grades;whether to grade homework;setting up grade books and report cards to reflect differentiated practices;principles of successful assessment;how to create useful and fair test questions, including how to grade such prompts efficiently;whether to allow students to re-do assessments for full credit.This thorough and practical guide also includes a special section for teacher leaders that explores ways to support colleagues as they move toward successful assessment and grading practices for differentiated classrooms.

    He loved football, disdained schoolwork, and seemed headed for a factory job in his hometown—until a maverick philosophy teacher turned his life around.When Frank Lears, a small, nervous man wearing a moth-eaten suit, arrived at Medford fresh from Harvard University, his students pegged him as an easy target. Lears was unfazed by their spitballs and classroom antics. He shook things up, trading tired textbooks for Kesey and Camus, and provoking his class with questions about authority, conformity, civil rights, and the Vietnam War. He rearranged seats and joined in a ferocious snowball fight with Edmundson and his football crew. Lears’s impassioned attempts to get these kids to think for themselves provided Mark Edmundson with exactly the push he needed to break away from the lockstep life of Medford High. Written with verve and candor, Teacher is Edmundson’s heartfelt tribute to the man who changed the course of his life.

    Sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately, rubrics are commonly misunderstood and misused.The good news is that when rubrics are created and used correctly, they are strong tools that support and enhance classroom instruction and student learning. In this comprehensive guide, author Susan M. Brookhart identifies two essential components of effective rubrics: (1) criteria that relate to the learning (not the tasks) that students are being asked to demonstrate and (2) clear descriptions of performance across a continuum of quality. She outlines the difference between various kinds of rubrics (for example, general versus task-specific, and analytic versus holistic), explains when using each type of rubric is appropriate, and highlights examples from all grade levels and assorted content areas. In addition, Brookhart addresses* Common misconceptions about rubrics;* Important differences between rubrics and other assessment tools such as checklists and rating scales, and when such alternatives can be useful; and* How to use rubrics for formative assessment and grading, including standards-based grading and report card grades.Intended for educators who are already familiar with rubrics as well as those who are not, this book is a complete resource for writing effective rubrics and for choosing wisely from among the many rubrics that are available on the Internet and from other sources. And it makes the case that rubrics, when used appropriately, can improve outcomes by helping teachers teach and helping students learn.

    Once they are mastered, these skills allow reduced adult supervision.

    Focusing on the role of managers within an organization, the volume emphasizes the development of computer-based Information Systems to support an organization's objectives and strategic plans. Focusing on the Systems Concepts, the Systems Approach is implemented throughout the text. The volume covers essential concepts such as using information technology to engage in electronic commerce, and information resources such as database management systems, information security, ethical implications of information technology and decision support systems with projects to challenge users at all levels of competence. For those involved in Management Information Systems.

    Classroom management aide for teachers

    Managing classroom book clubs can be hard. Real hard. But honestly, is there any better way to get students vested in reading? When book clubs work, don't they create a culture of reading unlike anything else? One that brings out the very best in our students?With both infectious enthusiasm and a realistic perspective, Sonja and Dana take on teachers' doubts and concerns about book clubs, and build a compelling case for their value in every classroom. They provide all the nuts and bolts for creating and managing successful book clubs, including:Dozens of pitfalls and pathways minilessons that address common roadblocks Tips for using technology to enhance book club work for deeper student engagement Suggested book bins for book club work, organized by grade level and genre. Whether you're looking to breathe new life into book clubs or begin implementing them in your classroom, Sonja and Dana give you essential strategies to make book clubs work. Because book clubs, they write, are where students fall in love with reading.