Build skills for lifelong success Many students leave high school without the skills they need to succeed in postsecondary education and the workforce. How can we better equip students for lifelong success? Research demonstrates that intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies impact student behavior and achievement, increase graduation rates, and promote strong post-school outcomes. The Skills That Matter provides middle and high school educators with the resources, tools, and practical examples to teach key intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies, including self-regulation, goal-setting, self-efficacy, assertiveness, and conflict management. Readers will find Competency-specific evidence-based instructional strategies with examples, and Tools such as sample instructional plans, formative assessments, and student-friendly products. This book provides teachers with the practical information they need to better develop socially and emotionally engaged, career-equipped, lifelong learners.

Help your students learn how to communicate effectively, make good choices, and practice appropriate behavior with Social Skills Matter! This book includes reproducible mini-books for children to assemble, color, read, and make their own. Each mini-book focuses on a different facet of important social skills including cooperative play, learning about feelings, communication, school-day behavior, manners, and behavior management. Mastery of these essential social skills can be a factor in determining a child’s future success, social acceptance, and happiness. Key Education products are intended to engage and educate young and special learners, as well as assist teachers in building a strong and developmentally appropriate curriculum for these children.

Corporate trainer and mentor Maralee McKee turns her attention to the home and shares the simple, savvy, and sincere skills kids need in order to flourish in today's culture. Skills for each stage of life make this the go-to book for moms with children of any age. Readers will learn how to impart the basic tools that empower kids to relate to others well, as well as... gain self-confidence by learning to make conversation pleasant, not painful overcome self-doubt by mastering new etiquette for today's on-the-go, casual, techno-savvy families develop the interpersonal skills that will help them become the best version of themselves they can be in any setting Fun, practical, and thoroughly up-to-date, this manual offers everything moms need to equip their kids to flourish in their relationships.

Why Motor Skills Matter shows how children use their senses and bodies to explore their environments and what we can do to protect and strengthen this critical pathway for their development, health, and learning.

In this new book from Routledge and MiddleWeb, author Angie Miller shows how you can turn your students into informed citizens by teaching them how to research effectively. In today’s information-saturated world research skills have moved beyond fact-finding, into fact-sifting, fact-sorting, and fact-assessing. Miller shows you how to help students check sources, take good notes, make use of information, and synthesize and present information across the subject areas. She also shows how to make research a daily practice, not a one-time essay or project. With examples and online handouts you can use immediately, this practical book is a valuable resource for educators seeking to engage students in their work and encourage them toward higher level thinking.

Chapter 1. Overview: Why skills matter Chapter 2. Adults' pro ciency in key information-processing skills Chapter 3. The socio-demographic distribution of key information-processing skills Chapter 4. How skills are used in the workplace Chapter 5. The outcomes of investment in skills

The routine jobs of yesterday are being replaced by technology and/or shipped off-shore. In their place, job categories that require knowledge management, abstract reasoning, and personal services seem to be growing. The modern workplace requires workers to have broad cognitive and affective skills. Often referred to as "21st century skills," these skills include being able to solve complex problems, to think critically about tasks, to effectively communicate with people from a variety of different cultures and using a variety of different techniques, to work in collaboration with others, to adapt to rapidly changing environments and conditions for performing tasks, to effectively manage one's work, and to acquire new skills and information on one's own. The National Research Council (NRC) has convened two prior workshops on the topic of 21st century skills. The first, held in 2007, was designed to examine research on the skills required for the 21st century workplace and the extent to which they are meaningfully different from earlier eras and require corresponding changes in educational experiences. The second workshop, held in 2009, was designed to explore demand for these types of skills, consider intersections between science education reform goals and 21st century skills, examine models of high-quality science instruction that may develop the skills, and consider science teacher readiness for 21st century skills. The third workshop was intended to delve more deeply into the topic of assessment. The goal for this workshop was to capitalize on the prior efforts and explore strategies for assessing the five skills identified earlier. The Committee on the Assessment of 21st Century Skills was asked to organize a workshop that reviewed the assessments and related research for each of the five skills identified at the previous workshops, with special attention to recent developments in technology-enabled assessment of critical thinking and problem-solving skills. In designing the workshop, the committee collapsed the five skills into three broad clusters as shown below: Cognitive skills: nonroutine problem solving, critical thinking, systems thinking Interpersonal skills: complex communication, social skills, team-work, cultural sensitivity, dealing with diversity Intrapersonal skills: self-management, time management, self-development, self-regulation, adaptability, executive functioning Assessing 21st Century Skills provides an integrated summary of the presentations and discussions from both parts of the third workshop.

Forget the 10,000 hour rule— what if it’s possible to learn the basics of any new skill in 20 hours or less? Take a moment to consider how many things you want to learn to do. What’s on your list? What’s holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills—time you don’t have and effort you can’t spare? Research suggests it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill. In this nonstop world when will you ever find that much time and energy? To make matters worse, the early hours of prac­ticing something new are always the most frustrating. That’s why it’s difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It’s so much easier to watch TV or surf the web . . . In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition— how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct com­plex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By complet­ing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. Kaufman personally field-tested the meth­ods in this book. You’ll have a front row seat as he develops a personal yoga practice, writes his own web-based computer programs, teaches himself to touch type on a nonstandard key­board, explores the oldest and most complex board game in history, picks up the ukulele, and learns how to windsurf. Here are a few of the sim­ple techniques he teaches: Define your target performance level: Fig­ure out what your desired level of skill looks like, what you’re trying to achieve, and what you’ll be able to do when you’re done. The more specific, the better. Deconstruct the skill: Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. If you break down the subcompo­nents, it’s easier to figure out which ones are most important and practice those first. Eliminate barriers to practice: Removing common distractions and unnecessary effort makes it much easier to sit down and focus on deliberate practice. Create fast feedback loops: Getting accu­rate, real-time information about how well you’re performing during practice makes it much easier to improve. Whether you want to paint a portrait, launch a start-up, fly an airplane, or juggle flaming chain­saws, The First 20 Hours will help you pick up the basics of any skill in record time . . . and have more fun along the way.

A counselor and popular Washington Post contributor offers a new take on grades 6-8 as a distinct developmental phase--and the perfect time to set up kids to thrive. Middle school is its own important, distinct territory, and yet it's either written off as an uncomfortable rite of passage or lumped in with other developmental phases. Based on her many years working in schools, professional counselor Phyllis Fagell sees these years instead as a critical stage that parents can't afford to ignore (and though "middle school" includes different grades in various regions, Fagell maintains that the ages make more of a difference than the setting). Though the transition from childhood to adolescence can be tough for kids, this time of rapid physical, intellectual, moral, social, and emotional change is a unique opportunity to proactively build character and confidence. Fagell helps parents use the middle school years as a low-stakes training ground to teach kids the key skills they'll need to thrive now and in the future, including making good friend choices, negotiating conflict, regulating their own emotions, be their own advocates, and more. To answer parents' most common questions and struggles with middle school-aged children, Fagell combines her professional and personal expertise with stories and advice from prominent psychologists, doctors, parents, educators, school professionals, and middle schoolers themselves.

Teaching is an essential skill in becoming a faculty member in any institution of higher education. Yet how is that skill actually acquired by graduate students? Teaching as if Learning Matters collects first-person narratives from graduate students and new PhDs that explore how the skills required to teach at a college level are developed. It examines the key issues that graduate students face as they learn to teach effectively when in fact they are still learning and being taught. Featuring contributions from over thirty graduate students from a variety of disciplines at Indiana University, Teaching as if Learning Matters allows these students to explore this topic from their own unique perspectives. They reflect on the importance of teaching to them personally and professionally, telling of both successes and struggles as they learn and embrace teaching for the first time in higher education.