Sparking Learning in Young Children: Classroom Best Practices provides a streamlined yet comprehensive overview of everything you need to kickstart your preschool, transitional kindergarten, or pre-K classroom to help ensure the best possible teaching and learning environment. Dive into relevant topics, offering insights from contemporary research, expert-defined best practices, and real-world examples from the authors twenty-plus years of experience. Whether a seasoned teacher or a dedicated aide, this guide is your roadmap to creating a vibrant, inclusive, and developmentally appropriate early childhood learning experience. This concise yet comprehensive resource equips you with the essential tools to create an engaging learning environment by focusing on key areas such as child development, planning and reflection, room design and materials, family engagement, and more!
"The best book on high school dynamics I have ever read."--Jay Mathews, Washington Post An award-winning professor and an accomplished educator take us beyond the hype of reform and inside some of America's most innovative classrooms to show what is working--and what isn't--in our schools. What would it take to transform industrial-era schools into modern organizations capable of supporting deep learning for all? Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine's quest to answer this question took them inside some of America's most innovative schools and classrooms--places where educators are rethinking both what and how students should learn. The story they tell is alternately discouraging and hopeful. Drawing on hundreds of hours of observations and interviews at thirty different schools, Mehta and Fine reveal that deeper learning is more often the exception than the rule. And yet they find pockets of powerful learning at almost every school, often in electives and extracurriculars as well as in a few mold-breaking academic courses. These spaces achieve depth, the authors argue, because they emphasize purpose and choice, cultivate community, and draw on powerful traditions of apprenticeship. These outliers suggest that it is difficult but possible for schools and classrooms to achieve the integrations that support deep learning: rigor with joy, precision with play, mastery with identity and creativity. This boldly humanistic book offers a rich account of what education can be. The first panoramic study of American public high schools since the 1980s, In Search of Deeper Learning lays out a new vision for American education--one that will set the agenda for schools of the future.
Informed by psychology and neuroscience, Cavanagh argues that in order to capture students' attention, harness their working memory, bolster their long-term retention, and enhance their motivation, educators should consider the emotional impact of their teaching style and course design.
Based on over 1000 nationwide student surveys, these 10 deep engagement strategies help you implement achievement-based cooperative learning. Includes video and a survey sample.
With a focus on the leader’s role in initiating and sustaining anti-bias education in programs for young children and their families, this book is both a stand-alone text and a perfect companion for Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves. It emphasizes that this work is not only about changing curriculum, but requires thoughtful, strategic, long-term planning that addresses all components of an early childhood program. With a powerful combination of conceptual frameworks, strategies, and practical tools, Louise Derman-Sparks, renowned expert on anti-bias education, together with experienced early childhood directors Debbie LeeKeenan and John Nimmo explain the structural and individual changes leaders must foster. Featuring the authors’ extensive experience in the field, supplemented with insights from other anti-bias educators, they build on and expand current thinking about best early childhood leadership practices. This is an essential resource for anti-bias education leaders engaged in change in the wide range of early childhood care and education settings. Book Features: The principles, guidelines, and strategies needed for school- and program-wide transformation. Activities for working with teachers and families to integrate an anti-bias approach. Strategies for supporting and strengthening the leader’s ability to initiate and sustain anti-bias education change, including resources to increase staff skills for implementing anti-bias education with children. Tools for assessing anti-bias education progress and managing mandated standards and assessments. “A concise and powerful message for anti-bias leaders in early childhood education everywhere. A truly inspired gift of lessons from the movement, for the movement.” —Carol Brunson Day, President of the Board, National Association for the Education of Young Children “If you are an educator wanting to see more equity and inclusiveness in the world, at times discouraged confused, or overwhelmed with how to manage the conflict that always emerges in the change process, you’ll find reassurance, resources, and strategic thinking to engage in this anti-bias work.” —Margie Carter, author, The Visionary Director, and international early childhood consultant "It is never too early to prepare children to deal effectively with issues of race, class, gender, family, and ability and equity. This book is a tool box for building early childhood programs that foster sentiments of justice and fairness in leaders, teachers, and young children, and help them to act on these values.” —Herbert Kohl, educator and bestselling author of The Herb Kohl Reader: Awakening the Heart of Teaching
"This book begins by pushing back on the kind of rote routines that lack opportunities for reasoning (like the calendar) that teachers often use in early childhood and primary classrooms. Instead, the author offers innovations on old routines and some new routines that encourage reasoning, argumentation, and the development of important math ideas. She focuses on using math routines in playful ways with your children. See chapter titles for the different routines featured in the book"--
Use the updated activities, examples, and research to improve your anti-bias and multicultural education programs. This clear and practical guide includes expanded information on English language learners, family engagement, culturally responsive teaching, and staff training. Stacey York teaches child development at Rochester Community and Technical College and established E-LECT, a collaborative effort between thirteen Minnesota community and technical colleges to provide e-learning for early childhood teachers.
