Real and Relevant provides teachers with a realistic, integrated, and inspirational guide for how to lead service and project-based learning with their students. By engaging in service or project-based learning with students, you are doing nothing less than changing the world for the better. By letting your students explore and begin to solve real life problems, they acquire deeper knowledge, new skills, newfound motivation, responsibility and engagement.

This book introduces a set of pedagogical practices designed to assist adolescent English learners in developing their English skills in a way that honors and leverages their native languages and cultures. Responding to the linguistic and educational diversity of adolescents, the R.E.A.L. (Relevant, Engaging, and Affirming Literacy) method offers teachers a range of scalable activities, reading lists, and other resources, along with numerous suggestions on how to adapt them for students’ particular needs. By sharing experiences from actual secondary English classes, Stewart presents diverse learners making meaningful connections to texts and responding through writing, speaking, and other artistic means. These students are developing high levels of literacy, English language skills, and even biliteracy through R.E.A.L. instruction that all English teachers can use. Book Features: Shows educators how to effectively engage middle and high school students through reading and responding to literature. Provides creative solutions for centering students’ needs and interests within standards and other curricular restraints. Brings together theory from reader response, second language acquisition, and bilingual research. Written for all English language arts teachers and for all levels of adolescent ELs—beginners to advanced students. Considers ELs’ full literacy development in all of their languages, not just English.

Students need to connect to the real world, be engaged, and learn deeply. But how are teachers supposed to ensure that students meet these objectives in the current school system? In The Relevant Classroom, Eric Hardie presents six strategies derived from his two decades of experience as an elementary and secondary teacher and principal to show teachers ways to foster real-world connections, genuine engagement, and deeper learning: 1. Make meaning central to student work. 2. Contextualize the curriculum. 3. Create space to learn. 4. Connect student work to the community. 5. Follow the (student) leaders. 6. Reenvision feedback and evaluation. This practical volume includes advice on how to get started, vivid examples, reflection questions, and tips on how to overcome common obstacles. The Relevant Classroom is about recognizing that teachers who tap into students' capacities for creativity, collaboration, and innovation can create learning experiences that are truly meaningful for students.

Lopez outlines simple but ingenious steps for addressing diverse classrooms in a way that amply enhances the learning experience for students.

Amidst rapid and fundamental shifts in the economic, geo-political, technological, and societal landscape, this cutting-edge book makes the timeless case that research can be informed by problems in the ‘real world’ and make important contributions to theory and practice.

Teaching Resistance is a collection of the voices of activist educators from around the world who engage inside and outside the classroom from pre-kindergarten to university and emphasize teaching radical practice from the field. Written in accessible language, this book is for anyone who wants to explore new ways to subvert educational systems and institutions, collectively transform educational spaces, and empower students and other teachers to fight for genuine change. Topics include community self-defense, Black Lives Matter and critical race theory, intersections between punk/DIY subculture and teaching, ESL, anarchist education, Palestinian resistance, trauma, working-class education, prison teaching, the resurgence of (and resistance to) the Far Right, special education, antifascist pedagogies, and more. Edited by social studies teacher, author, and punk musician John Mink, the book features expanded entries from the monthly column in the politically insurgent punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll, plus new works and extensive interviews with subversive educators. Contributing teachers include Michelle Cruz Gonzales, Dwayne Dixon, Martín Sorrondeguy, Alice Bag, Miriam Klein Stahl, Ron Scapp, Kadijah Means, Mimi Nguyen, Murad Tamini, Yvette Felarca, Jessica Mills, and others, all of whom are unified against oppression and readily use their classrooms to fight for human liberation, social justice, systemic change, and true equality. Royalties will be donated to Teachers 4 Social Justice: t4sj.org

Summary Relevant Search demystifies relevance work. Using Elasticsearch, it teaches you how to return engaging search results to your users, helping you understand and leverage the internals of Lucene-based search engines. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Users are accustomed to and expect instant, relevant search results. To achieve this, you must master the search engine. Yet for many developers, relevance ranking is mysterious or confusing. About the Book Relevant Search demystifies the subject and shows you that a search engine is a programmable relevance framework. You'll learn how to apply Elasticsearch or Solr to your business's unique ranking problems. The book demonstrates how to program relevance and how to incorporate secondary data sources, taxonomies, text analytics, and personalization. In practice, a relevance framework requires softer skills as well, such as collaborating with stakeholders to discover the right relevance requirements for your business. By the end, you'll be able to achieve a virtuous cycle of provable, measurable relevance improvements over a search product's lifetime. What's Inside Techniques for debugging relevance? Applying search engine features to real problems? Using the user interface to guide searchers? A systematic approach to relevance? A business culture focused on improving search About the Reader For developers trying to build smarter search with Elasticsearch or Solr. About the Authors Doug Turnbull is lead relevance consultant at OpenSource Connections, where he frequently speaks and blogs. John Berryman is a data engineer at Eventbrite, where he specializes in recommendations and search. Foreword author, Trey Grainger, is a director of engineering at CareerBuilder and author of Solr in Action. Table of Contents The search relevance problem Search under the hood Debugging your first relevance problem Taming tokens Basic multifield search Term-centric search Shaping the relevance function Providing relevance feedback Designing a relevance-focused search application The relevance-centered enterprise Semantic and personalized search

Anti-bias education begins with you! Become a skilled anti-bias teacher with this practical guidance to confronting and eliminating barriers.

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.

A bold, brain-based teaching approach to culturally responsive instruction To close the achievement gap, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement. Culturally responsive instruction has shown promise, but many teachers have struggled with its implementation—until now. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction. The book includes: Information on how one’s culture programs the brain to process data and affects learning relationships Ten “key moves” to build students’ learner operating systems and prepare them to become independent learners Prompts for action and valuable self-reflection