Are you ready to plan your best lessons ever? Planning Powerful Instruction is your go-to guide for transforming student outcomes through stellar instructional planning. Its seven-step framework—the EMPOWER model—gives you techniques proven to help students develop true insight and understanding. You’ll have at your fingertips: the real reasons why students engage—and what you must do to ensure they do a framework to help you create, plan, and teach the most effective units and lessons in any subject area more than 50 actionable strategies to incorporate right away suggestions for tailoring units for a wide range of learners downloadable, ready-to-go tools for planning and teaching

Critical thinking and online reading need to go hand in hand—but they often don’t. Students click, swipe, and believe because they don’t know how to do otherwise. At times, so do we. And that’s a problem. Fighting Fake News combats this challenge by helping you model how to read, myth-bust, truth-test, and respond in ways that lead to wisdom rather than reactivity. No matter what content you teach, the lessons showcased here provide engaging, collaborative reading and discussion experiences so students can: Notice how teacher and peers read digital content, to be mindful of how various reading pathways influence perception Identify the author background, the website sponsor, and other evidence that help set a piece in context Stress-test the facts by evaluating news sources, reading laterally, and other critical reading strategies Use "Reader’s Rules of Notice" to learn to identify common rhetorical devices used to influence the reader Be aware of how for-profit social media platforms feed on our responses to narrow rather than widen our reading landscape We are still in the wild west era of the digital age, scrambling to impart a safer, ethical framework for evaluating information. Thankfully, it distills to one mission: teach students (and ourselves) how to think critically, and we will forever have the tools to fight fake news.

Are you ready to plan your best lessons ever? Planning Powerful Instruction is your go-to guide for transforming student outcomes through stellar instructional planning. Its seven-step framework—the EMPOWER model—gives you techniques proven to help students develop true insight and understanding. You’ll have at your fingertips: the real reasons why students engage—and what you must do to ensure they do a framework to help you create, plan, and teach the most effective units and lessons in any subject area more than 50 actionable strategies to incorporate right away suggestions for tailoring units for a wide range of learners downloadable, ready-to-go tools for planning and teaching

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.

Bring the science of reading directly into the classroom! Developed for Grades PK-K, this resource provides teachers with exciting strategies to boost students’ reading and writing skills. This book offers easy-to-use lessons and methods to give young learners practice with word recognition, reading comprehension and content knowledge, and writing. With these research-based strategies, early childhood teachers can make reading and writing fun, meaningful, and effective! This book meets College and Career Readiness and other state standards.

Learn how to use literature and informational texts related to sports as an alternative or a supplement to a canon-centric English classroom. This practical book promotes an instructional approach that honors students’ knowledge of, interests in, and experiences with sports culture to advance literacy learning. Informed by his own experiences in high school classrooms, the author documents the distinct methods employed by four secondary English teachers in rural, urban, and suburban schools. Each narrative features the voices of teachers and students and details a range of activities that readers can adapt for their unique contexts. Whether teaching traditional English courses or those focused on the study of sports literature, teachers can use this book to tap into students’ sporting interests and foster critical readings of sports culture as a mirror to our greater society. Book Features:Adaptable methods for using sports-related content to foster the six language arts: reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and visually representing.Actionable ideas for going beyond sports fandom and, instead, reading sports culture through a critical lens.Implications for incorporating sports culture into the English curriculum, whether teaching traditional courses or a stand-alone sports literature class.Answers to frequently asked questions that can support teachers as they bring sports culture to the English classroom. “Luke Rodesiler demonstrates that moving beyond traditional canonical texts and topics contributes to an understanding that racism, sexism, inequity, and inequality of all kinds are current ongoing problems. When we expand our teaching to include new topics and new voices, we can invigorate our teaching in ways that make it matter more—in both the immediate and the long term.” —From the Foreword by Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Distinguished Professor, Boise State University

Your blueprint to planning Grades 6-8 math lessons that lead to achievement for all learners When it comes to planning mathematics lessons, do you sometimes feel burdened? Have you ever scrambled for an activity to engage your students that aligns with your state standards? Do you ever look at a recommended mathematics lesson plan and think, "This will never work for my students"? The Mathematics Lesson-Planning Handbook: Your Blueprint for Building Cohesive Lessons, Grades 6–8 walks you step by step through the process of planning focused, research-based mathematics lessons that enhance the coherence, rigor, and purpose of state standards and address the unique learning needs of your individual students. This resource deepens the daily lesson-planning process for middle school teachers and offers practical guidance for merging routines, resources, and effective teaching techniques into an individualized and manageable set of lesson plans. The effective planning process helps you Identify learning intentions and connect goals to success criteria Select resources and worthwhile tasks that make the best use of instructional materials Structure lessons differently for traditional and block middle school schedules Anticipate student misconceptions and evaluate understanding using a variety of formative assessment techniques Facilitate questioning, encourage productive struggle, and close lessons with reflection techniques This author team of seasoned mathematics educators make lesson planning practical and doable with a useful lesson-planning template and real-life examples from Grades 6–8 classrooms. Chapter by chapter, the decision-making strategies empower teachers to plan mathematics lessons strategically, to teach with intention and confidence, and to build purposeful, rigorous, coherent lessons that lead to mathematics achievement for all learners.

Analyze, argue, compare/contrast, describe, determine, develop, evaluate, explain, imagine, integrate, interpret, organize, summarize, support, and transform . . . Can a mere fifteen words turn today’s youth into the innovative, ambitious thinkers we need? Yes, contend Jim Burke and Barry Gilmore, coauthors of Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness, because these are the moves that make the mind work and students must learn if they’re to achieve academically. It’s that simple. Or is it? To arrive at these fifteen critical reading, writing, and thinking processes, Jim and Barry combed through the standards, research, and secondary curriculum—and that’s for starters. Then, for each of these powerhouse processes, they developed a lesson structure, assignments, and activities so you can teach with potency, right away, and immediately cultivate in students discipline-specific habits of mind. Here’s the best part yet: Jim and Barry distill each intellectual process into a potent concision that nevertheless spans subject areas: Before, during, and after sections offer essential questions, lesson ideas, and activities to assist you in instruction. Two sample student pieces illustrate not only what to look for but the process for getting there. Culminating tasks include producing an analytic essay, visual text, argument, narrative and informational writing, poetry, descriptive science writing, and explanatory writing in math. Every chapter has a correlation chart to Webb’s Depth of Knowledge to deepen understanding and a reproducible rubric to aid in assessment. At the end of the day, what we want is for our students to know how to think at high levels in any discipline in school or any arena in life. In Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness, Jim and Barry translate these processes into remarkable instructional protocols. Use the book and you’ll know for yourself what a revolution they’ve created.

Streamline literacy learning with power-packed children’s books Pam Koutrakos shows how to streamline and integrate literacy instruction using a single children’s text for a variety of purposes, weaving together different aspects of literacy from reading and writing to spelling and grammar. This user-friendly resource is packed with ready-to-go lessons and tools to create and teach using multitasking texts. Resources include Full lessons centered on high-quality, inclusive children’s literature A DIY section to help teachers plan and teach lessons Dozens of student and classroom examples Printables available online to help with immediate implementation

Ever feel at a loss when you are wondering how to inspire kids to develop a love of reading? Then this book is for you! Anyone interested in kids and their success will find this a great read! The authors have compiled tales of achievement, based on real-life teaching and administrative experiences with boys who were reluctant readers. Each chapter contains an inspiring story meant to bolster your resolve and strengthen your skill set in working with male readers. This book is guaranteed to make you laugh and make you cry! Each chapter also includes hints and suggestions for encouraging the developing reader. Chapters focus on real-life scenarios that range from how to work with children who are growing up in poverty to the serendipities that meet anyone working with kids and even some thoughts on the current testing environment in education. The final chapters include a culmination of suggested best practices and how-to’s!