In the spirit of Studs Terkel's Working, Bill Smoot interviews master teachers in fields ranging from K--12 and higher education to the arts, trades and professions, sports, and politics. The result suggests a dinner party where the most fascinating teachers in America discuss their various styles as well as what makes their work meaningful to them. What is it that passes between the best teachers and their students to make learning happen? What are the keys to teaching the joys of literature, shooting a basketball, alligator wrestling, or how to survive one's first year in the U.S. Congress? Smoot's insightful questions elicit thought-provoking reflections about teaching as a calling and its aims, frustrations, and satisfactions.
Conversations with America's Best Teachers provides in-depth interviews with 18 National Teacher of the Year Award winners and finalists as they offer practical advice to all K-12 teachers and parents. These amazing teachers discuss how they deal with issues such as classroom management, increasing parental involvement, dealing with apathetic or defiant students, how to handle the first days of class, and much more. Also included are the 10 commonalities found in nearly every great teacher with detailed descriptions of how each of the featured teachers practices them each day in their own classrooms. Whether you're a new teacher, an experienced veteran, a school administrator, or the parent of a K-12 student, this book is for you.
Conversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.
In Teaching Particulars, Helaine Smith engages her students, grammar school through twelfth grade—and any avid reader—in the questions that great literature evokes. Included are chapters on Homer and Genesis; plays by Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Beckett; poems by Jonson, Donne, Coleridge, Browning, Hopkins, Yeats, Bishop, Hecht, Dove, and Lowell; essays by Baldwin, Lamb, and White; and fiction by Flannery O’Connor, Dickens, Joyce, Poe, Tolstoy, Mann, and Kafka. Whether Helaine Smith is talking to young or older students, she shows how any devoted reader can uncover all sorts of subtle beauty and meaning by reading closely and by assuming that virtually every word and phrase of a great text is deliberate. The question-and-answer form of these jargon-free dialogues creates the feeling of a vibrant classroom where learning and delight are the watchwords. “After her forty years of teaching, Smith’s keen understanding of the literary canon makes her the perfect candidate to write this humorous and insightful book." —Foreword Reviews "Teaching Particulars is an exemplary series of literary conversations by a master teacher on a great variety of important, life-shaping books. The guidance is unfailingly humane, the essays thoughtfully presented by someone who cares as much for the written word as she does about her classroom and her subject matter. Her commentary on Hecht’s ‘Rites and Ceremonies,’ the poet’s complex response to Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ ranks among the very best anywhere, as is true for her reading of Hecht’s ‘Devotions of a Painter,’ which has the further advantage of illuminating that work in light of Elizabeth Bishop’s profound meditation on painting in her ‘Poem.’ Reading Teaching Particulars makes me wish that all of my students could have had Helaine Smith as their teacher.” —Jonathan F. S. Post, Distinguished Professor of English and former Chair of the Department, UCLA “There’s simply nothing else like Teaching Particulars, a book packed with so much wisdom and practical advice about teaching literature that every instructor of grades 6 to 12—and of college classes, too—will want to get a copy right now. Even if you’re not a teacher, I highly recommend it. The love of books pulses through every page Helaine Smith writes, and her passion is infectious. She opens our eyes to the pleasures of reading in a way that few critics can, and she does it all in a book whose style is both elegant and friendly.” —David Mikics, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English, University of Houston, and author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age “Teaching Particulars is a bounteous resource for all teachers, as well as a pleasure just to curl up with and read away.” —Susan J. Wolfson, Professor of English, Princeton University “Helaine Smith is a genius of a teacher: witty, imaginative, precise, intuitive, and gracefully learned. Now anyone who opens her Teaching Particulars can have the rare privilege of learning from her how to read, in the truest sense. It’s never too late to be startled into delight by the power of language, and that is the experience offered on every page of this book. It’s a book not only for the schoolroom, but for the school of life.”—Rosanna Warren, Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor, The Committee on Social Thought, The University of Chicago
In this long-awaited volume, Regie Routman continues the discussion she began in the best-selling Invitations and further explores the full universe of an effective language arts and literacy program across the curriculum.
In The Art of Listening, Anthony Arnone interviews 13 of the top cello teachers of our time, sharing valuable insights about performing, teaching, music, and life. While almost every other aspect of twenty-first-century life has been changed by technological advancements, the art of playing and teaching the cello has largely remained the same. Our instruments are still made exactly the same way and much of what we learn is passed on by demonstration and word of mouth from generation to generation. We are as much historians of music as we are teachers of the instrument. The teaching lineage in the classical music world has formed a family tree of sorts with a select number of iconic names at the top of the tree, such as Pablo Casals, Gregor Piatigorsky, and Leonard Rose. A large percentage of professional cellists working today studied with these giants of the cello world, or with their students. In addition to discussing the impact of these masters and their personal experience as their students, the renowned cellists interviewed in this book touch on a variety of topics from teaching philosophies to how technology has changed classical music.
Improve teaching practice through powerful professional conversations! Move beyond isolated teaching, passive observations, and ineffective workshops to be the leader who engages staff and affirms the value of reflective and informal professional discussions. Launch meaningful conversations and a powerful team of teachers who understand how students learn, what motivates them, and how to implement that research in the classroom. Good leaders know that sharing, discussing, and examining teaching practices and student work improves student learning through professional examination, inquiry, and growth. Educators who harness the power of informal professional conversation invite teachers to do the intellectual work needed to connect with students and boost achievement. The second edition of this powerful book includes: A new chapter guiding conversations to align with new state standards Outlines for specific conversation skills needed to initiate and succeed Mental maps, sample topics, and conversation activities Read Talk About Teaching! and build a culture of understanding, respect, and empathy that encourages your team to reach for new possibilities. "This is a great resource for leaders who regularly facilitate conversations with teachers. I use it in my graduate class in supervision and strongly recommend that students keep this book as a resource for the future." Diane Canino Rispoli, Clinical Professor of Educational Leadership and former school leader Syracuse University, Syracuse NY "The book’s major strength is that it combines a discussion of what constitutes good teaching and how to conduct productive professional conversations. This book would be an excellent resource for supervisors and principals." M. Susan Bolte, Principal Providence Elementary, Aubrey, TX
In this well-seasoned book, charismatic educator Anita Moultrie Turner shows new teachers, veteran teachers, and staff developers how to blend 11 essential ingredients into effective and productive classrooms where all students can succeed. Easy to read and hard to put down, this Recipe for Great Teaching features: - Classroom stories, quotations, and tasty servings of educational wit and wisdom - Strategies for building effective learning environments - Techniques for successful curriculum planning - Methods for engaging all students in learning - Ways of working with colleagues and the community This inspiring resource offers enticing and delicious ways to spice up your teaching and your students' learning.
Kentucky and Kentuckians are full of stories, which may be why so many present-day writers have Kentucky roots. Whether they left and returned, like Wendell Berry and Bobbie Ann Mason, or adopted Kentucky as home, like James Still and Jim Wayne Miller, or grew up and left for good, like Michael Dorris and Barbara Kingsolver, they have one connection: Kentucky has influenced their writing and their lives. L. Elisabeth Beattie explores this influence in twenty intimate interviews. Conversations with Kentucky Writers was more than three years in the making, as Beattie traveled across the state and beyond to capture oral histories on tape. Her exhaustive knowledge of these authors helped her draw out personal revelations about their work, their lives, and the nature of writing. When Still concludes his interview with "I believe I've told you more than anybody," he could be speaking for any of Beattie's subjects. Aspiring writers will learn that Mason submitted twenty stories to the New Yorker before one was accepted, and that Still wrote articles for Sunday school magazines. There's plenty of advice: Dorris tells budding authors to get real jobs, keep journals, and read everything, even cereal boxes, and Marsha Norman reminds playwrights that "it is not the business of the theater to provide writers with a living." Kingsolver advises, "Read good stuff and write bad stuff until eventually what you're writing begins to approximate what you're reading." Beattie's collection includes striking self-portraits of such writers as Sue Grafton, Leon Driskell, James Baker Hall, Fenton Johnson, George Ella Lyon, Taylor McCafferty, Ed McClanahan, Sena Naslund, Chris Offutt, Lee Pennington, and Betty Layman Receveur.What most distinguishes these moving conversations from other author interviews is their focus on creativity, on the teaching of writing, and on the authors' strong sense of place.As Wade Hall writes in his foreword, all twenty writers recognize that their works have been significantly influenced by their "Kentucky experience." This collection offers insights into Kentucky's rich and flowering literary heritage.
In Classroom Conversations, two generations of educators—a mother and daughter—point us to the great thinkers who have shaped their beliefs and practices in education, and who continue to influence teachers today. Nineteen essays by educators from Dewey to Delpit offer parents and new educators an education degree in a nutshell. The Milettas frame these touchstone texts with commentary explaining why these writers resonate for them, sharing not only the personal meanings they have derived from the selections but why these writings have endured in the field over time. Brief biographies set each author in context for the lay reader. As educational fads and jargon come and go, parents and teachers alike will appreciate and find value in the wisdom distilled here. Classroom Conversations will help experienced teachers find renewed meaning in these seminal essays and will help younger teachers discover just how important the work they do can be. For parents, the book will inform and enrich their understanding of their children's educational experience.
