"This research-based book is intended as a 'companion' or reference to enhance pre-service and practising teachers' knowledge about how literature is created. Offering practical insights, it supports teachers' understanding of the writer's craft related to the quality literary texts they read with their students. While the major emphasis is on the Literature Strand and its sub strands, the book takes the three strands of the Australian Curriculum: English as a starting point for the book's content and offers explanations, interpretations and examples for each strand."--Publisher.
Your Teacher Training Skills Handbook will support you throughout your teacher training course, helping you develop both the academic and practical teaching skills required to achieve QTS with confidence. Written in a conversational style and following the progress of a fictional trainee teacher, Alex, use this book to not only develop your own skills, but to think about how you can pass those skills on to your learners.
Jennifer Buehler shows how to implement a YA pedagogy--one that revolves around student motivation while upholding the goals of rigor and complexity. Jennifer Buehler knows young adult literature. A teacher educator, former high school teacher, and host of ReadWriteThink.org's Text Messages podcast, she has shared her enthusiasm for this vibrant literature with thousands of teachers and adolescents. She knows that middle and high school students run the gamut as readers, from nonreaders to struggling readers to reluctant readers to dutiful readers to enthusiastic readers. And in a culture where technological distractions are constant, finding a way to engage all of these different kinds of readers is challenging, no matter the form of delivery. More and more, literacy educators are turning to YA lit as a way to transform all teens into enthusiastic readers. If we want to meet the needs of all students as readers, we have to offer books they can--and want to--read. Today's YA lit provides the books that speak to the world of teens even as they draw them out into the larger world. But we have to do more than put YA titles in front of students and teach these books as we've traditionally taught more canonical works. Instead, we can implement a YA pedagogy--one that revolves around student motivation while upholding the goals of rigor and complexity. Buehler explores the three core elements of a YA pedagogy with proven success in practice: (1) a classroom that cultivates reading community; (2) a teacher who serves as book matchmaker and guide; and (3) tasks that foster complexity, agency, and autonomy in teen readers. With a supporting explication of NCTE's Policy Research Brief Reading Instruction for All Students and lively vignettes of teachers and students reading with passion and purpose, this book is designed to help teachers develop their own version of YA pedagogy and a vision for teaching YA lit in the middle and secondary classroom.
In Running the Room: The Teacher's Guide to Behaviour, Tom Bennett rewrote the book on behaviour management, and outlined the psychology and dynamics underpinning student habits. In this companion, he goes into more detail about how to apply those principles to the classroom.
This book lays out a new vision for the teaching of English, building on themes central to Wilhelm's influential "You Gotta BE The Book." With portraits of teachers and students, as well as practical strategies and advice, they provide a roadmap to educational transformation far beyond the field of English. --from publisher description
In university teachers'' hectic lives, finding space to reflect, restore, renew, and recommit can seem impossible. Jean Koh Peters and Mark Weisberg believe regular reflection is critical and have designed A Teacher''s Reflection Book to help teachers and other professionals find that space. Growing out of the authors'' extensive experience facilitating retreats and leading teaching and learning workshops, the book builds on their discoveries in those settings, supporting and promoting teachers'' self-directed development. Inviting that development, A Teacher''s Reflection Book is a cornucopia of stories, exercises, and examples that will inspire teachers to make reflection a cornerstone of their daily lives. With its multiple suggestions and strategies, it offers something for every reader, and is responsive to teachers'' needs at all stages of their careers. The book''s six chapters offer readers several perspectives from which to reflect. Some sections offer glimpses of teachers in the midst of their daily teaching lives, while others step away, inviting readers to reflect on what it means to have a vocation as a teacher. The book explores how we listen, a crucial yet rarely taught skill, essential for reflecting, as well as for learning and teaching. And it invites teachers to reflect on their students: who they are, and what and how they learn. For those latter reflections, the authors turn the focus on fear, which so pervades university life and which can distort learners'' and teachers'' perspectives and responses. Throughout this book, readers will visit several classrooms and listen to the evocative voices of several thoughtful students. Revelatory, practical, and wise, A Teacher''s Reflection Book is a valuable companion and guide. "One key strength of the book is its authentic writing style, which engages the reader and builds the trustworthiness of the authors. Another strength is the book''s wealth of readings and the activities it offers to catalyze teacher reflection." -- Teaching Theology and Religion, Ryan S. Gardner "This excellent book should be part of every teacher''s professional library. It is a book pitched at all teachers in higher education and, through the processes of reflection, a book that advances important principles of good teaching practice that are usually introduced all too briefly in the basic texts on teaching in higher education. ...Several descriptive words come to mind when reading this book. It is a polite and gentle book. Politeness is revealed in the book''s sub-title - ''Exercises, stories, invitations''. It is the idea of invitation that characterizes much of the book. It is not didactic but rather invites us to use the book and the processes described in it in ways that work best for us. It does this through questions and inductive approaches to reflection. Through these approaches and the careful use of real-life examples, we are gently invited to explore the perspectives presented in the text and apply these to our personal and professional lives. It is also an accessible book. Most refreshingly, it is not burdened with unnecessary technical jargon and convoluted language that sadly cripples too much writing in education today and makes learning inaccessible to many, particularly for those readers whose first language is not English." -- Higher Education Research & Development (HERDSA), Robert Cannon "I was asked to write a book review but I find that, instead, I want to write a thank you note thanking Jean Koh Peters and Mark Weisberg for the gift of their book, A Teacher''s Reflection Book. ...The reflections, examples and exercises you offer in the book make reflecting about both challenging and positive moments in my life as a teacher feel like something I can do easily and regularly. ...In this book, you have found a way to model, encourage and help create a compassionate space where teachers can make the deepest connection between who they are and what they do. You give us permission to find our truth in and the courage to bring our hearts to our teaching and writing. You have made a home for reflection." -- The Law Teacher, Kimberly Kirkland, University of New Hampshire School of Law "We are all so busy. We race from task to task. We attempt to multi-task; dividing and depleting our energies. How many times do we arrive in class breathless with hardly a moment to think about what we have planned for the day? I harbor no illusions that a blog entry is going to change our lives, but I would like to use this one to reiterate the need to make time for reflection, for contemplation about what we do, and how and why we do it. The value of doing so is laid out clearly in [this] new book..." -- Teaching Professor Blog, Maryellen Weimer
Teachers and teacher educators asked for: the latest research on literacy more information about national standards ways to consider gender in instruction advice for teaching Advanced Placement classes ideas for teaching media literacy and incorporating technology effectively into instruction even more resources for mentoring new teachers analysis of how trends in society, culture, and politics impact teachers and their classrooms. And Jim delivers. He has revamped his introductory chapters on literacy learning to include up-to-the-minute thinking from the field, and he has incorporated lists of key standards and helpful suggestions for reaching them. His practical strategies turn recent findings on literacy and gender into well-designed, research-based instruction, and his ideas help you meet the very different needs of AP students by understanding their goals and providing them with appropriate challenges.
The Book Club Companion is a testament to what is possible when teachers think carefully about what they do. What we have here is not simply a guidebook to effective practice, but an experience in reflective practice. I hope that you find The Book Club Companion as powerful and provocative as I do. - Peter Smagorinsky Just because a book club meets during class time doesn't mean reading can't be fun. And just because reading is fun doesn't mean it can't help you meet curricular objectives. With The Book Club Companion you'll find out how the for-pleasure concept of book clubs can help students enjoy reading during the school day, and how you can use book clubs to immerse adolescents in literate, real-world behaviors as you connect them to the English curriculum. Drawing on current literacy research and more than a decade's experiences with student book clubs in secondary classrooms, Cindy O'Donnell-Allen demonstrates how clubs can help adolescents become more willing, engaged, and strategic readers. Her comprehensive guide distinguishes book clubs from similar instructional techniques like literature circles and offers ideas for implementing clubs, using flexible grouping to meet student and curricular demands, and creating themed sets to offer students choice and you planning options. The Book Club Companion provides numerous resources to get in-class clubs started, keep them running, encourage student response, track discussion, and assess progress. It includes book lists arranged by grade level, reproducible assignment sheets, scoring guides, and tools for record keeping and teacher research. Get into in-class book clubs. You'll motivate students to read, help them enjoy the experience, and give them an opportunity to become more reflective and accomplished readers as they share in the excitement of connecting the real world to the classroom.
