Radically change the way students learn from texts, extending beyond comprehension to critical reasoning and problem solving. Is your reading comprehension instruction just a pile of strategies? There is no evidence that teaching one strategy at a time, especially with pieces of text that require that readers use a variety of strategies to successfully negotiate meaning, is effective. And how can we extend comprehension beyond simple meaning? Bestselling authors Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Nicole Law propose a new, comprehensive model of reading instruction that goes beyond teaching skills to fostering engagement and motivation. Using a structured, three-pronged approach—skill, will, and thrill—students learn to experience reading as a purposeful act and embrace struggle as a natural part of the reading process. Instruction occurs in three phases: Skill. Holistically developing skills and strategies necessary for students to comprehend text, such as monitoring, predicting, summarizing, questioning, and inferring. Will. Creating the mindsets, motivations, and habits, including goal setting and choice, necessary for students to engage fully with texts. Thrill. Fostering the thrill of comprehension, so that students share their thinking with others or use their knowledge for something else. Comprehension is the structured framework you need to empower students to comprehend text and take action in the world.

Provide students a clear view of what success looks like for any process, task, or product. What does success look like for your students? How will they know if they have learned? This essential component of teaching and learning can be difficult to articulate but is vital to achievement for both teachers and students. The Success Criteria Playbook catapults teachers beyond learning intentions to define clearly what success looks like for every student—whether face-to-face or in a remote learning environment. Designed to be used collaboratively in grade-level, subject area teams—or even on your own—the step-by-step playbook expands teacher understanding of how success criteria can be utilized to maximize student learning and better engage learners in monitoring and evaluating their own progress. Each module is designed to support the creation and immediate implementation of high-quality, high impact success criteria and includes: • Templates that allow for guided and independent study for teachers. • Extensive STEM-focused examples from across the K-12 STEM curriculum to guide teacher learning and practice. • Examples of success criteria applied across learning domains and grades, including high school content, skills, practices, dispositions, and understandings. Ensure equity of access to learning and opportunity for all students by designing and employing high-quality, high-impact success criteria that connect learners to a shared understanding of what success looks like for any given learning intention.

Beat burnout with time-saving best practices for feedback For ELA teachers, the danger of burnout is all too real. Inundated with seemingly insurmountable piles of papers to read, respond to, and grade, many teachers often find themselves struggling to balance differentiated, individualized feedback with the one resource they are already overextended on—time. Matthew Johnson offers classroom-tested solutions that not only alleviate the feedback-burnout cycle, but also lead to significant growth for students. These time-saving strategies built on best practices for feedback help to improve relationships, ignite motivation, and increase student ownership of learning. Flash Feedback also takes teachers to the next level of strategic feedback by sharing: How to craft effective, efficient, and more memorable feedback Strategies for scaffolding students through the meta-cognitive work necessary for real revision A plan for how to create a culture of feedback, including lessons for how to train students in meaningful peer response Downloadable online tools for teacher and student use Moving beyond the theory of working smarter, not harder, Flash Feedback works deeper by developing practices for teacher efficiency that also boost effectiveness by increasing students’ self-efficacy, improving the clarity of our messages, and ultimately creating a classroom centered around meaningful feedback.

In a Fresh Look at Phonics, Wiley Blevins, author of the blockbuster Phonics from A-Z, explains the 7 ingredients of phonics instruction that lead to the greatest student gains, based on two decades of research in classrooms. For each of these seven must-haves, Wiley shares lessons, routines, word lists, tips for ELL and advanced learners, and advice on pitfalls to avoid regarding pacing, decodable texts, transition time, and more. A Fresh Look at Phonics is the evidence-based solution you have been seeking that ensures all students develop a solid foundation for reading.

Explore the powerful synergy between your credibility with students and your collective efficacy as a member of a team. What’s the connection between teacher credibility and collective efficacy in schools? Highly credible teachers can’t reach their full potential without engagement in a collective of other teachers. And collective efficacy is difficult to achieve when teachers are not credible with their students. The Teacher Credibility and Collective Efficacy Playbook illuminates the connection between teacher credibility and collective efficacy and offers actions educators can take to improve both. When you increase your credibility with students, student motivation rises. And when you have evidence of your ability to impact student learning, and partner with other teachers to achieve this, your students learn more. A one-stop resource for educators intent on improving teacher practice, this powerful guide includes: - Specific actions teachers can take to become more trustworthy, competent, dynamic, and responsive in the eyes of students, and more confident impacting learning as a member of a team - Coaching videos from the authors that outline key concepts, share thinking and experiences, and challenge teachers to take steps to build credibility and collective efficacy - Tools for teams to use to polish their collective effectiveness through better communication and problem-solving - Reflective writing prompts, pause and ponder tasks, self-assessments, and data collection tools that help teachers grow professionally Jumpstart learning and achievement in your classroom and school by increasing your credibility with students and the collective efficacy of the team of educators at your school.

Learn when and how to teach comprehension using Comprehension during Guided, Shared, and Independent Reading for grades K–6. This 224-page book includes step-by-step lessons and research-based strategies that can be adapted for any student or any classroom. This book gives a glimpse into classrooms using these strategies, as well as suggestions for materials needed, planning, and grouping students and a list of recommended children's books.

In this remarkable resource, Maria Walther shares two-page read-aloud experiences for 101 picture books that tune you into what to notice, say, and wonder in order to bolster students’ literacy exponentially. A first-grade teacher for decades, Maria is a master of “strategic savoring.” Her lesson design efficiently sparks instructional conversations around each book’s cover illustration, enriching vocabulary words, literary language, and the ideas and themes vital to young learners. Teachers, schools, and districts looking to energize your core reading and writing program, search no further: The Ramped-Up Read Aloud delivers a formula for literacy development and a springboard to joy in equal parts.

A teacher presents a lesson, and at the end asks students if they understand the material. The students nod and say they get it. Later, the teacher is dismayed when many of the students fail a test on the material. Why aren’t students getting it? And, just as important, why didn’t the teacher recognize the problem? In Checking for Understanding, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey show how to increase students’ understanding with the help of creative formative assessments. When used regularly, formative assessments enable every teacher to determine what students know and what they still need to learn. Fisher and Frey explore a variety of engaging activities that check for and increase understanding, including interactive writing, portfolios, multimedia presentations, audience response systems, and much more. This new 2nd edition of Checking for Understanding has been updated to reflect the latest thinking in formative assessment and to show how the concepts apply in the context of Fisher and Frey’s work on gradual release of responsibility, guided instruction, formative assessment systems, data analysis, and quality instruction. Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey are the creators of the Framework for Intentional and Targeted (FIT) Teaching™. They are also the authors of numerous ASCD books, including The Formative Assessment Action Plan: Practical Steps to More Successful Teaching and Learning and the best-selling Enhancing RTI: How to Ensure Success with Effective Classroom Instruction and Intervention.

Fountas and Pinnell support teachers on the next leg of the literacy journey, addressing the unique challenges of teaching upper elementary students.

That version of the standards you wish you had All over the nation, teachers and administrators are poring over the Common Core State Standards to come up with meaningful plans for raising student achievement. But as clear as the standards are, they are more of a sundial than a GPS for pinpointing just what to teach and how to teach it. Enter Jim Burke with The Common Core Companion: The Standards Decoded, Grades 6-8. It's that version of the standards you wish you had: a roadmap of what each standard says, what each standard means, and how precisely to put that standard into day-to-day practice across English Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. Designed to provide schools, districts, and departments with a common language or set of reference points for effective school-wide implementation, The Common Core Companion clearly lays out: Grades 6-8 standards side by side with key distinctions highlighted so teachers know what they must teach from grade to grade All the different content-area versions of each standard arranged on one page to facilitate easy reference and school wide collaboration Explanations of each standard on a corresponding page, written in accessible language, along with prompts and questions to help students learn and apply each standard Essential content to cover and lesson ideas for modeling the literacy skills behind the standards Instructional techniques for each standard based on Jim's extensive teaching experience and current research on effective instruction Complete glossary for each standard and adaptations for ELL students Don't spend another minute poring over the standards. Jim has already done that for you. Focus instead on how to teach them, using The Common Core Companion as your one-stop guide for teaching, planning, assessing, collaborating, and designing powerful reading and writing curricula.