Understanding by Design
Understanding by Design

Author: Grant P. Wiggins

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1416600353

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What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

Handbook on Personalized Learning for States, Districts, and Schools
Handbook on Personalized Learning for States, Districts, and Schools

Author: Marilyn Murphy

Publisher: IAP

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1681235897

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The recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) presents new opportunities and greater flexibility in efforts to personalize learning for all children. The Handbook on Personalized Learning for States, Districts, and Schools provides insight and guidance on maximizing that new flexibility. Produced by the Center on Innovations in Learning (CIL), one of seven national content centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education, this volume suggests how teachers can enhance personalized learning by cultivating relationships with students and their families to better understand a child’s learning and motivation. Personalized learning also encourages the development of students’ metacognitive, social, and emotional competencies, thereby fostering students’ self?direction in their own education, one aimed at mastery of knowledge and skills and readiness for career and college. Chapters address topics across the landscape of personalized learning, including co?designing instruction and learning pathways with students; variation in the time, place, and pace of learning, including flipped and blended classrooms; and using technology to manage and analyze the learning process. The Handbook’s chapters include Action Principles to guide states, districts, and schools in personalizing learning.

In Teachers' Hands
In Teachers' Hands

Author: Richard J. Stiggins

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1992-01-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9780791409312

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This book marks the starting point of a profound shift in assessment priorities, detailing the results of a decade-long program of research on classroom assessment environments. It demonstrates how important sound classroom assessments are to student well-being, and provides insights into the complex demands of day-to-day classroom assessment on teachers who have been taught little about assessment in their training programs. As a nation, we spend billions of dollars on educational assessment, including hundreds of millions for international and national assessments, and additional hundreds of millions for statewide testing programs. On top of these, the standardized tests that form the basis of district-wide testing programs represent a billion dollar industry. If we total all of these expensive highly-visible, politically-important assessments, we still account for less than one percent of all the assessments conducted in America's schools. The other 99 percent are conducted by teachers in their classrooms on a moment-to-moment, day-to-day, and week-to-week basis. Paradoxically, virtually all of our national, state, and local assessment resources are being devoted to research and development for large-scale assessments. This book provides specific action programs for improving the quality of the other 99 percent--the assessments that really drive what students learn and how they feel about it.

Dialogue and Difference in a Teacher Education Program
Dialogue and Difference in a Teacher Education Program

Author: Marilyn Johnston-Parsons

Publisher: IAP

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1617357677

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This book is a longitudinal study of a 10-year experimental teacher education program. Follow-up studies and writing continued for 6 years after the program closed. This case study describes a search for effective and socially just practices within a long-term reform initiative intended to prepare teachers for urban schools. The program was run through a Professional Development School--a collaboration between a university program and a diverse group of practicing teachers; and the book was written collaboratively by many of the participants—faculty, mentor teachers, doctoral students, and teacher candidates/graduates. There are few longitudinal studies of teacher education programs, especially ones that focus on what was learned and told by those who did the learning. The narratives here are rich, diverse, and multivocal. They capture the complexity of a reform initiative conducted within a democratic context. It’s difficult, messy and as varied as is democracy itself. The program was framed by a sociocultural perspective and the focus was on learning through difference. Dialogue across difference, which is more than just talk, was both the method for doing research and the means for learning. The program described here began in the ferment of teacher education reform in the early 1990s, responding to the critics of the mid-1980s; and this account of it is finished at a time when teacher education is again under attack from a different direction. Criticized earlier for being too progressive, teacher education is now seen as too conservative. The longitudinal results of this program show high retention rates and ground the argument that quality teacher preparation programs for teaching in urban schools may well be cost effective, as well as provide increased student learning. This is counter to the current move to shorten teacher preparation programs, at a time of low teacher retention in our under resourced urban schools. The book does not advocate a model for teacher education, but it aims to provide principles for practice that include school/university collaboration, democratic dialogue across differences, and inquiry as a way to guide reform.

Professional Capital
Professional Capital

Author: Andy Hargreaves

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0807771708

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The future of learning depends absolutely on the future of teaching. 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. This book features: (1) a powerful and practical solution to what ails American schools; (2) Action guidelines for all groups--individual teachers, administrators, schools and districts, state and federal leaders; (3) a next-generation update of core themes from the authors' bestselling book, "What's Worth Fighting for in Your School?" [This book was co-published with the Ontario Principals' Council.].

Designing Instructional Systems
Designing Instructional Systems

Author: A J Romiszowski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-01-08

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1136548637

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This book deals with large-scale or macro-level instructional design, which is referred to by other authors variously as curriculum development, course design, training system design or instructional systems design. The emphasis throughout the book is on the application of a systems approach, which implies both a way of thinking about the problem and a methodology for seeking and developing solutions. Thus the approach of the book is problem-oriented. The successful problem-solver requires more than a technique or procedure. He requires experience of similar problems, some general principles that he can apply to the class of problems and a great deal of creativity to develop an optimal method of solving each problem. This book brings together the theories and practical experience that have been built up by instructional technologists over the last two decades, the techniques that are currently most used for the analysis of problems in education and for their solution, and a range of new ideas specially developed by the author to encourage the creative element (so often missing from educational materials). This book is intended for anyone involved in instructional design. It is designed on a ‘grid’ structure to facilitate the reader’s choice of chapters. Those who wish to gain a general overview may concentrate on the chapters at the theory base and analysis levels. Those more practically concerned with course design will find much of use in the synthesis and evaluation levels. Those who wish simply to discover ‘what’s new’ in this book and its treatment of instructional design will find what they are seeking principally in the analysis and evaluation levels.

Teach Like a Disciple
Teach Like a Disciple

Author: Jillian N. Lederhouse

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 117

ISBN-13: 1498289800

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Although much has been written about P-12 teaching from a biblical perspective, this study focuses on Christ's relationships with a diverse group of individuals: wealthy and poor, women and men, unschooled and well-educated, loud and quiet, influential and powerless, those whom Jesus knew well and those who were strangers to him, those of his own faith and culture as well as those outside of it. These individuals are remarkably similar to the students we teach in our public and private school classrooms today. Each interaction between Jesus and an individual focuses on what we can learn from the student and Jesus as well as what we, as teachers, can apply in our profession. As in our own practice, some students learned their lessons well; others failed. For some, we are uncertain when or if they achieved Jesus' objective for them. Whether we are novices or experienced educators, we can learn through these instructive relationships how to be teachers who follow Jesus' example in seeing our students' potential, holistically caring for them, and ultimately having a positive impact on their lives. Through exploring these biblical relationships, we can gain a better understanding of how to teach like Christ's disciple.

Essential Assessment Concepts for Teachers and Administrators
Essential Assessment Concepts for Teachers and Administrators

Author: James H. McMillan

Publisher: Corwin Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 9780803968400

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This guide shows how to integrate assessment with teaching and learning to reach educational goals. The aim is to present assessment concepts in a concise manner that can be understood and applied by teachers, administrators, and other school personnel. The chapters, organized around major assessment topics, are: (1) "Integrating Assessment with Teaching and Learning"; (2) "Validity"; (3) "Reliability"; (4) "Fairness"; (5) "Understanding and Using Numerical Data"; and (6) "Interpreting and Using National and State Standardized Assessments." (Contains 20 tables, 29 figures, and 36 references.) (SLD)