Shows teachers how to create intellectual environments that produce techinically competent students who are caring, secure, and activitely literate human beings
Introducing a spelling test to a student by saying, 'Let' s see how many words you know,' is different from saying, 'Let's see how many words you know already.' It is only one word, but the already suggests that any words the child knows are ahead of expectation and, most important, that there is nothing permanent about what is known and not known. Peter Johnston Grounded in research, Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Livesshows how words can shape students' learning, their sense of self, and their social, emotional and moral development. Make no mistake: words have the power to open minds – or close them. Following up his groundbreaking book, Choice Words, author Peter Johnston continues to demonstrate how the things teachers say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for the literate lives of students. In this new book, Johnston shows how the words teachers choose can affect the worlds students inhabit in the classroom. He explains how to engage children with more productive talk and how to create classrooms that support students' intellectual development, as well as their development as human beings.
This book describes and documents an exciting new approach to educating literacy teachers. The authors show how to help teachers develop their own critical literacy, while also preparing them to accelerate the literacy learning of struggling readers. The text takes readers inside a literacy lab in a high-poverty urban elementary school, reveals the instructional approach in action, and provides many excellent examples of critically responsive teaching. Featuring a synthesis of several fields of theory and research, this book: illustrates teacher preparation and development as personal and social transformation - demonstrating that this process requires changing the ways teachers think about students, language, culture, literacy, learning, and themselves as educators; provides pedagogical tools - including the history of the innovative literacy lab, the context of the instructional interactions, and the transition from a university-based to a school-based project; and combines critical and accelerative literacy instruction, showing how teachers can accelerate the slowest developing readers in their classrooms and also build a sense of engagement for students with the social world.
This accessible "how to" book about classroom interaction offers teachers powerful tools of discourse analysis as a way of understanding the complex dynamics of human interaction that constitute effective, equitable teaching and learning and guides them step-by-step through how to build their interactional awareness to improve their teaching.
Increasingly, educators are recognizing that for children to thrive intellectually, they need classrooms that offer and grow positive relationships and behavior, emotional self-regulation, and a sense of well-being. Using the guiding principles from his best-selling resources, Choice Words and Opening Minds, author Peter Johnston and six colleagues began a journey to create such classrooms--environments in which children meaningfully engage with each other through reading, writing, making and discussing books. By embracing the ideas and teaching strategies in Engaging Literate Minds, you can help your students become socially, emotionally, and intellectually healthy. $c --From publisher's description.
This updated edition of the best-selling book Because Writing Matters reflects the most recent research and reports on the need for teaching writing, and it includes new sections on writing and English language learners, technology, and the writing process.
In Responsive Literacy Coaching, Cheryl Dozier draws on twenty-four years of experience as an elementary classroom teacher and teacher educator to present both a theoretical framework and practical tools to enact responsive literacy coaching. Through thoughtful and purposeful coaching, teachers learn effective ways to improve literacy instruction and student achievement. The range of tools offered in the text invite customization based on the reader's specific instructional context. This framework empowers literacy coaches and teachers through conversation, sustained engagement, and reflective analysis. Dozier argues that at its best, literacy coaching is responsive, collegial, thoughtful, thought-provoking, deliberate, reflective, and transferable. In this book she invites readers to enter into a coaching dialogue, through:vignettes that bring coaching interactions to life;prompts to engage both teachers and students;occasions for collaborative reflection; frequently-asked questions. As literacy tasks are documented and analyzed, coaching interactions logged and categorized, and assessment scores scrutinized, Dozier cautions coaches to avoid being so caught up in the doing of coaching that one forgets the purpose behind it. In this book she provides an occasion for them to step back, and ask, what is the goal of literacy coaching? What kind of literacy environments and experiences are we creating for our schools and our students? What is possible as we engage in transformative literacy practices? While the tools offered in this book do not provide a "quick fix," they foster critical thinking and sustained inquiry that leads to positive change for both teachers and students.
In the years since Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning was first published and quickly became a beloved bestseller, countless educators and their students have been impacted by this short, but powerful book. Throughout it, author Peter Johnston provides examples of seemingly ordinary words, phrases, and uses of language that are pivotal in the orchestration of the classroom. Grounded in a balance of research and classroom practice, Choice Words demonstrates how and what we say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for what children learn and for who they become as literate people. Now, in this second edition, Peter Johnston returns to the central message of the book—that teachers’ language is their most powerful tool for impacting children’s learning and creating classroom community. With updates throughout the chapters to both the research and classroom examples, and new chapters on social-emotional learning and mindsets, this book has much to offer to both those familiar with Choice Words and those who will read it for the first time. This book will be enlightening for any teacher who wishes to be more conscious of the many ways their language helps children acquire literacy skills and view the world, their peers, and themselves in new ways.
This popular text examines literacy from a multidimensional and interdisciplinary perspective. It "unpackages" the various dimensions of literacy--linguistic, cognitive, sociocultural, and developmental--and at the same time accounts for the interrelationships among them. The goal is to provide a conceptual foundation upon which literacy curriculum and instruction in school settings can be grounded.
Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine, January 2010 Classroom talk, by which children make sense of what their peers and teachers mean, is the most important educational tool for guiding the development of understanding and for jointly constructing knowledge. So what practical steps can teachers take to develop effective classroom interaction? Bringing together leading international researchers and drawing on the pioneering work of Douglas Barnes, this book considers ways of improving classroom talk. Chapters cover: - classroom communication and managing social relations; - talk in science classrooms; - using critical conversations in studying literature; - exploratory talk and thinking skills; - talking to learn and learning to talk in the mathematics classroom; - the ′emerging pedagogy′ of the spoken word. With an accessible blend of theory, research and practice, the book will be a valuable resource for teachers, teacher-trainers, policy makers, researchers and students.