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.

    This collection of templates, design tools, examples, and exercises helps you give all staff members a firm grasp of key UbD principles, includingHow to use backward design to align curriculum with assessment and instruction.Why to focus curriculum on the big ideas in your content standards.Which learning activities are more apt to enable students to achieve desired results.Give staff members at all levels clear action steps they need in every stage of the UbD process, including Drafting curriculum units based on essential questions.Creating performance tasks and rubrics for assessing student understanding in any subject.Organizing, sequencing, and guiding classroom learning experiences.Included are steps for conducting a peer review of unit designs plus process steps to guide your implementation of UbD systemwide.

    But you will also see a high degree of variability among classrooms—much higher than in most other industrialized countries. Today we are asking schools to do something they have never done before—educate all students to high levels—yet we don’t know how to do that in every classroom for every child.Inspired by the medical-rounds model used by physicians, the authors have pioneered a new form of professional learning known as instructional rounds networks. Through this process, educators develop a shared practice of observing, discussing, and analyzing learning and teaching.

    Information accessibility grows while attention spans shrink. Media is king and yet teachers are expected to effectively harness it for learning while also managing the distractions technology tools bring. Keeping up with the times while keeping time-wasters and senseless screen staring down is new and difficult territory for the most seasoned educator.Don't fear the devices! In the willing teacher's hands, this is a new and welcome age to harness for exponential learning. It is a frontier where technology equipped teachers learn alongside students and utilize current tools to maximize collaboration, creativity, and communication in relevant ways. Classroom Management in the Digital Age guides and supports established and transitioning device-rich classrooms, providing practical strategy to novice and expert educators K-12. Update your own operating system for the digital age by Getting attention from those device focused facesEstablishing procedures for daily class routines that harness the power of technology toolsCultivating a culture of student ownership and responsibilityDeveloping routines that increase on-task behavior and lessen teacher anxietyCommunicating with parents on best practices and consistent school to home behaviorsDecreasing distraction with simple, helpful tipsLetting go of being the expert and taking charge by partnering in learningClassroom Management in the Digital Age offers teachers competency and confidence. If you have devices in your classroom already or if you're moving towards implementing tablets, iPads, Chromebooks, or any other device, Classroom Management in the Digital Age will partner with you in creating relevant classrooms where learning rules.

    Marzano, Tony Frontier, and David Livingston show school and district-level administrators how to set the priorities and support the practices that will help all teachers become expert teachers. Their five-part framework is based on what research tells us about how expertise develops. When these five conditions are attended to in a systematic way, teachers do improve their skills:* A well-articulated knowledge base for teaching* Opportunities for teachers to practice specific strategies or behaviors and to receive feedback* Opportunities for teachers to observe and discuss expertise* Clear criteria for success and help constructing professional growth and development plans* Recognition of the different stages of development progressing toward expertise.The focus is on developing a collegial atmosphere in which teachers can freely share effective practices with each other, observe one another's classrooms, and receive focused feedback on their teaching strategies. The constructive dynamics of this approach always keep in sight the aim of enhancing students' well-being and achievement. As the authors note, The ultimate criterion for expert performance in the classroom is student achievement. Anything else misses the point.

    It's filled with specific teaching ideas for helping children in kindergarten through Grade 3 who are having difficulty in reading and writing.We want these young students to think and behave like effective readers who not only solve words skillfully but comprehend deeply and read fluently. To achieve our goal, we need to place them in situations in which they can succeed and then provide powerful teaching. Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas offer numerous examples and descriptions of instruction that can help initially struggling readers become strategic readers. When Readers Struggle: Teaching That Works focuses on small-group intervention and individual interactions during reading and writing. Pinnell and Fountas also illustrate how to closely observe readers to make the best possible teaching decisions for them as well as how to support struggling readers in whole-class settings.Find immediately usable answers to your questions about struggling readers from educators you trust. Read Pinnell and Fountas's When Readers Struggle: Teaching That Works and find teaching that works for struggling readers.

    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.

    

    It is my hope to help you find those books. More importantly, I hope to help you guide students to the next great book and the one after that. That is the purpose of Reading Ladders. Because it is not sufficient to find just one book for each reader. -Teri LesesneI finished the Twilight Series-now what?With Reading Ladders, the answer to a question like this can become the first rung on a student's climb to greater engagement with books, to full independence, and beyond to a lifetime of passionate reading.The goal of reading ladders, writes Teri Lesesne, is to slowly move students from where they are to where we would like them to be. With reading ladders you start with the authors, genres, or subjects your readers like then connect them to book after book-each a little more complex or challenging than the last. Teri not only shares ready-to-go ladders, but her suggestions will help you:select books to create your own reading ladders build a classroom library that supports every student's needs use reading ladders to bolster content-area knowledge and build independence assess where students are at and how far they've climbed.If we are about creating lifetime readers and not just readers who can utilize phonological awareness and context clues to bubble in answers on a state test, writes Teri Lesesne, then we need to help our students form lasting relationships with books and authors and genres and formats. Use Reading Ladders, help your students start their climb, and guide them to new heights in reading.

    Stephen R. Covey illustrates how his principles of leadership can be applied to children of all ages. In today’s world, we are inundated with information about who to be, what to do, and how to live. But what if there was a way to learn not just what to think about, but how to think? A program that taught young people how to manage priorities, focus on goals, and be a positive influence in their schools?The Leader in Me is that program. In this bestseller, Stephen R. Covey took the 7 Habits that have already changed the lives of millions of readers and showed that even young children can use them as they develop. These habits are being adapted by schools around the country in leadership programs, most famously at the A.B Combs Elementary school in Raleigh. Not only do the programs work, but they work better than anyone could have imagined. This book is full of examples of how the students blossom under the program—from the classroom that decided to form a support group for one of their classmates who had behavioral problems to the fourth grader who overcame his fear of public speaking and took his class to see him compete in a national story telling competition.Perfect for individuals and corporations alike, The Leader in Me shows how easy it is to incorporate these skills into daily life so kids of all ages can be more effective, goal-oriented, and successful.

    

    A story or narrative centered around a hero 2. Spectacular; impressive; memorable. If learning is not memorable, should it even be considered learning? For too long, traditional education has used outdated practices to deliver complex and well-intended content to students with very little hope of that subject matter being retained. It often looks like this: Lectures are given --->Students write the information down ---> Students take a test on that information ---> Information is discarded from the brain ---> Repeat. In the The Epic Classroom, Trevor Muir presents a project based learning method that uses the power of storytelling and brain science to give educators practical and proven practices to achieve real student engagement. In return, learning that is permanent and memorable. Any teacher, in any subject area, and in any grade level can use the story-centered project based learning framework of The Epic Classroom to transform their classrooms into settings where students are engaged, challenged, and transformed. In this book you will discover - How to increase student engagement - How to plan and execute effective high quality project based learning experiences- Specific strategies for leading engaged students - Outlines and tools to plan, manage, and assess projects - Methods to increase academic performance in students.

    In this latest and most important collaboration, Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan show how the quality of teaching is captured in a compelling new idea: the professional capital of every teacher working together in every school. Speaking out against policies that result in a teaching force that is inexperienced, inexpensive, and exhausted in short order, these two world authorities--who know teaching and leadership inside out--set out a groundbreaking new agenda to transform the future of teaching and public education.Ideas-driven, evidence-based, and strategically powerful, Professional Capital combats the tired arguments and stereotypes of teachers and teaching and shows us how to change them by demanding more of the teaching profession and more from the systems that support it. This is a book that no one connected with schools can afford to ignore.Book Features: A powerful and practical solution to what ails American schools. Action guidelines for all groups--individual teachers, administrators, schools and districts, state and federal leaders. A next-generation update of core themes from the authors' bestselling book, What's Worth Fighting for in Your School?

    Two classrooms. One school year.180 Days represents the collaboration of two master teachers-Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle-over an entire school year: planning, teaching, and reflecting within their own and each other's classrooms in California and New Hampshire. Inspired by a teacher's question, "How do you fit it all in?" they identified and prioritized the daily, essential, belief-based practices that are worth spending time on. They asked, "Who will these students be as readers and writers after a year under our care?"What we make time for matters: what we plan, how we revise our plans while teaching, and how we reflect and decide what's next. The decision-making in the moment is the most essential work of teaching, and it's the ongoing study of the adolescents in front of us that has the greatest impact on our thinking. With both the demands of time and the complexity of diverse students in mind, Kelly and Penny mapped out a year of engaging literacy practices aligned to their core beliefs about what matters most. They share their insights on managing time and tasks and offer teaching strategies for engaging students in both whole class and independent work. Video clips of Kelly and Penny teaching in each other's classrooms bring this year to life and show you what a steadfast commitment to belief-based instruction looks like in action. 180 Days. Make every moment matter. Teach fearlessly. Empower all students to live literate lives.

    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!