Educators today often feel out of touch with their students. To effectively teach children, teachers must first connect with them and understand them. This book shows teachers how to become relevant to their students by leaning in, establishing implicit understanding, tackling emotionality, transforming culture, looking around, and creating experiences. Includes practical strategies, engaging anecdotes, and ready-to-use mini-lessons.
When the world is changing as rapidly as it is today, education has to mean more than just covering static content. Transformational Teaching in the Information Age explores how teachers can truly engage and inspire students to be independent, imaginative, and responsible learners who are prepared to handle the challenges of tomorrow.
Making Research Relevant is the ideal core textbook for master’s-level introduction to research methods courses in mental health. Accessible and user friendly, it is designed to help trainees and practitioners understand, connect, and apply research to clinical practice and day-to-day work with students and clients. The text covers foundational concepts like research ethics and how to best consume research, as well as 11 applied, evaluative, and outcome-based research methods. Easy-to-read chapters are infused with case examples from diverse settings and paired with brief video lectures, which provide vignettes to guide application and visual components that demonstrate how research methods can benefit mental health practitioners in real-world scenarios.
Counseling expert V. Scott H. Solberg introduces a new paradigm and framework for career development focused on teaching skills that all students need to set long-term goals and experience post-secondary success. Based on nearly a decade of research and technical assistance in schools, the book shows how educators can leverage the use of individual learning plans (ILPs) to help students identify their interests and create their own career pathways using resources inside and outside of school. In Making School Relevant with Individualized Learning Plans, Solberg argues that the most effective career development is delivered using a multiyear whole-school approach led by caring advisors and other mentors, combined with the use of readily available online tools and resources. Core chapters provide examples of specific activities and resources that advisors and others can draw on for helping students develop three critical skill sets: self‐exploration, career exploration, and career planning and self‐management, which are needed to succeed in the world of work. This book will help educators and youth development leaders understand how ILPs prepare their youth to become college- and career-ready and thereby transition from high school with the competencies and drive necessary to pursue their career and life goals.
Shows how to use thematic instruction to link skills to content knowledge and incorporates strategies for making history personal and relevant to students' lives. Activites include role playing, debate, and service learning. Grades 5-9.
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.
When scholars discuss the medieval past, the temptation is to become immersed there, to deepen our appreciation of the nuances of the medieval sources through debate about their meaning. But the past informs the present in a myriad of ways and medievalists can, and should, use their research to address the concerns and interests of contemporary society. This volume presents a number of carefully commissioned essays that demonstrate the fertility and originality of recent work in Medieval Studies. Above all, they have been selected for relevance. Most contributors are in the earlier stages of their careers and their approaches clearly reflect how interdisciplinary methodologies applied to Medieval Studies have potential repercussions and value far beyond the boundaries of the Middles Ages. These chapters are powerful demonstrations of the value of medieval research to our own times, both in terms of providing answers to some of the specific questions facing humanity today and in terms of much broader considerations. Taken together, the research presented here also provides readers with confidence in the fact that Medieval Studies cannot be neglected without a great loss to the understanding of what it means to be human.
How our school system is failing 21st-century kids and what needs to be done about it "I am amazed at how much the world has changed today from when I was a student. the problem is that schools have not changed as rapidly as the world we live in..."Just a generation ago, school was a simple affair: students learned from set texts, graduated and got a job. Now, when almost every child has access to vast networks of information through computers, phones and social media, there is no longer a wrong and right way to learn, no longer a single model of teaching, not even a familiar classroom environment. So where does that leave students and the people in charge of their education?Greg Whitby has spent 30 years teaching in schools and studying the way they cope with rapid change. Described as the most innovative educator in Australia by tHE BULLEtIN magazine, Greg argues in this, his provocative new book, that schools are often too slow to respond to change and too quick to condemn the new. But in order to engage students, it is vital that educators re-think everything they have been taught, including their own role as the sole authority. EDUCAtING GEN WI-FI throws open the debate about education and offers up some thought provoking questions and answers.
Unique new approaches for making chemistry accessible to diverse students Students' interest and achievement in academics improve dramatically when they make connections between what they are learning and the potential uses of that knowledge i n the workplace and/or in the world at large. Making Chemistry Relevant presents a unique collection of strategies that have been used successfully in chemistry classrooms to create a learner-sensitive environment that enhances academic achievement and social competence of students. Rejecting rote memorization, the book proposes a cognitive constructivist philosophy that casts the teacher as a facilitator helping students to construct solutions to problems. Written by chemistry professors and research groups from a wide variety of colleges and universities, the book offers a number of creative ways to make chemistry relevant to the student, including: Teaching science in the context of major life issues and STEM professions Relating chemistry to current events such as global warming, pollution, and terrorism Integrating science research into the undergraduate laboratory curriculum Enriching the learning experience for students with a variety of learning styles as well as accommodating the visually challenged students Using media, hypermedia, games, and puzzles in the teaching of chemistry Both novice and experienced faculty alike will find valuable ideas ready to be applied and adapted to enhance the learning experience of all their students.
