A great way to help students learn your content is to have them write about it. Writing is a way for students to review their own learning, organize their thinking and evaluate how well they understand what has been taught. Use the 81 tools in this binder to help students in every grade and subject become actively engaged in their own learning. The binder contains everything teachers need to begin using these strategies immediately. Each strategy includes complete how-to-use instructions, teacher materials for classroom use, classroom examples, and a template for student assignments.
This book examines nearly 30 years of research to identify how teachers can incorporate writing instruction that helps students master the course content and improve their overall achievement. Building on the recommendations of the National Commission on Writing, authors Vicki Urquhart and Monette McIver introduce four critical issues teachers should address when they include writing in their content courses: Creating a positive environment for the feedback and guidance students need at various stages, including prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing; Monitoring and assessing how much students are learning through their writing; Choosing computer programs that best enhance the writing process; Strengthening their knowledge of course content and their own writing skills.
In Learning Targets, Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart contend that improving student learning and achievement happens in the immediacy of an individual lesson--what they call "today's lesson"—or it doesn't happen at all. The key to making today's lesson meaningful? Learning targets. Written from students' point of view, a learning target describes a lesson-sized chunk of information and skills that students will come to know deeply. Each lesson's learning target connects to the next lesson's target, enabling students to master a coherent series of challenges that ultimately lead to important curricular standards. Drawing from the authors' extensive research and professional learning partnerships with classrooms, schools, and school districts, this practical book - Situates learning targets in a theory of action that students, teachers, principals, and central-office administrators can use to unify their efforts to raise student achievement and create a culture of evidence-based, results-oriented practice. - Provides strategies for designing learning targets that promote higher-order thinking and foster student goal setting, self-assessment, and self-regulation. - Explains how to design a strong performance of understanding, an activity that produces evidence of students' progress toward the learning target. - Shows how to use learning targets to guide summative assessment and grading. Learning Targets also includes reproducible planning forms, a classroom walk-through guide, a lesson-planning process guide, and guides to teacher and student self-assessment. What students are actually doing during today's lesson is both the source of and the yardstick for school improvement efforts. By applying the insights in this book to your own work, you can improve your teaching expertise and dramatically empower all students as stakeholders in their own learning.
Based on interactive elements that apply to every reading situation, the authors explain instructional strategies that work best in the subject areas and how to optimize those classrooms for reading, writing, and discussion.
Learn the 5 steps that school leaders can take to improve student literacy in all content areas, with targeted interventions for students who are struggling the most.
This action tool can help teachers engage students in learning the essential skills of critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, communication, and collaboration.
Think you understand Disciplinary Literacy? Think again. In this important reference, content teachers and other educators explore why students need to understand how historians, novelists, mathematicians, and scientists use literacy in their respective fields. ReLeah shows how to teach students to: Evaluate and question evidence (Science) Compare sources and interpret events (History) Favor accuracy over elaboration (Math) Attune to voice and fi gurative language (ELA)
Approximately 4.7 million designated English language learners attend public schools (Office of English Language Acquisition, 2002). It is predicted that by the 2030s, English language learners will account for about 40 percent of the school-age population. Yet very few teachers have been trained to address the needs of these students, and the questions they ask are the same as they asked decades ago: Who are English language learners and what are effective ways for schooling them? What kind of educational program brings about the best results? What are sound practices for facilitating English language acquisition? How can English language learners have academic success in subject areas? How do we teach English language learners in our classrooms? - p. 5.
Properly crafted and individually tailored feedback on student work boosts student achievement across subjects and grades. In this updated and expanded second edition of her best-selling book, Susan M. Brookhart offers enhanced guidance and three lenses for considering the effectiveness of feedback: (1) does it conform to the research, (2) does it offer an episode of learning for the student and teacher, and (3) does the student use the feedback to extend learning? In this comprehensive guide for teachers at all levels, you will find information on every aspect of feedback, including • Strategies to uplift and encourage students to persevere in their work. • How to formulate and deliver feedback that both assesses learning and extends instruction. • When and how to use oral, written, and visual as well as individual, group, or whole-class feedback. • A concise and updated overview of the research findings on feedback and how they apply to today's classrooms. In addition, the book is replete with examples of good and bad feedback as well as rubrics that you can use to construct feedback tailored to different learners, including successful students, struggling students, and English language learners. The vast majority of students will respond positively to feedback that shows you care about them and their learning. Whether you teach young students or teens, this book is an invaluable resource for guaranteeing that the feedback you give students is engaging, informative, and, above all, effective.
How can today's teachers, whose classrooms are more culturally and linguistically diverse than ever before, ensure that their students achieve at high levels? How can they design units and lessons that support English learners in language development and content learning—simultaneously? Authors Amy Heineke and Jay McTighe provide the answers by adding a lens on language to the widely used Understanding by Design® framework (UbD® framework) for curriculum design, which emphasizes teaching for understanding, not rote memorization. Readers will learn the components of the UbD framework; the fundamentals of language and language development; how to use diversity as a valuable resource for instruction by gathering information about students’ background knowledge from home, community, and school; how to design units and lessons that integrate language development with content learning in the form of essential knowledge and skills; and how to assess in ways that enable language learners to reveal their academic knowledge. Student profiles, real-life classroom scenarios, and sample units and lessons provide compelling examples of how teachers in all grade levels and content areas use the UbD framework in their culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Combining these practical examples with findings from an extensive research base, the authors deliver a useful and authoritative guide for reaching the overarching goal: ensuring that all students have equitable access to high-quality curriculum and instruction.
