Discover how to design innovative learning environments that increase student ownership so they can achieve at high levels and meet rigorous standards. Students Taking Charge shows you how to create student-driven classrooms that empower learners through problem-based learning and differentiation, where students pose questions and actively seek answers. Technology is then used seamlessly throughout the day for information, communication, collaboration, and product generation. You’ll find out how to: Design an Authentic Learning Unit, which is at the core of the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom, aimed at engaging students; Understand the structures needed to support its implementation and empower students; Build the facilitation strategies that will move students from engagement to empowerment to efficacy. This new K–5 edition offers a more detailed look into elementary school implementation. With the book’s practical examples and step-by-step guidelines, you’ll be able to start designing your innovative classroom immediately!

Discover how to design innovative learning environments that increase student ownership so they can achieve at high levels and meet rigorous standards. Students Taking Charge shows you how to create student-centered classrooms that empower learners through problem-based learning and differentiation, where students pose questions and actively seek answers. Technology is then used seamlessly throughout the day for information, communication, collaboration, and product generation. You’ll find out how to: Design an Authentic Learning Unit, which is at the core of the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom, aimed at engaging students; Understand the structures needed to support its implementation and empower students; Build the facilitation strategies that will move students from engagement to empowerment to efficacy. This new 6–12 edition offers a more detailed look into secondary school implementation. With the book’s practical examples and step-by-step guidelines, you’ll be able to start designing your innovative classroom immediately!

The Common Core State Standards demand a level of understanding that requires students to engage with content. Students Taking Charge: Inside the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom focuses on increasing academic rigor, fostering student engagement, and increasing student responsibility for learning. Teachers and administrators who recognize the needs of today's society and students, and their impact on teaching and learning, can use this book to create student-centered classrooms that make technology a vital part of their lessons. Filled with practical examples and step-by-step guidelines, Students Taking Charge will help educators design innovative learning environments that allow students to take ownership of learning so they can achieve at high levels and meet the rigorous requirements of the Common Core. These innovative learning environments also empower students through problem-based learning and differentiation, where students pose questions and actively seek answers. Computer technology is then used seamlessly throughout the day for information, communication, collaboration, and product generation. Check out the learner-active classroom in action! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjyiclWVJ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zoXfaY0XhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y91flkGcyX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjHH_ujBIFw

Lead your organization to implement innovative learning environments in which students take ownership so they can achieve at high levels and meet rigorous standards. Students Taking Charge Implementation Guide for Leaders shows you how to inspire, coach, and support teachers to create student-driven classrooms that empower learners through problem-based learning and differentiation, where students pose questions and actively seek answers. Technology is then used seamlessly throughout the day for information, communication, collaboration, and product generation. You’ll find out how to: Inspire the adaptive change at the core of the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom, aimed at engaging students; Understand the structures needed to support its implementation and empower teachers and students; Employ leadership strategies that will move teachers and students from engagement to empowerment to efficacy. This new implementation guide for school leaders offers a more detailed look into the key mindset shifts that are critical for leaders of a Learner-Active, Technology-Infused School. With the book’s practical examples and step-by-step guidelines, you’ll be able to help your teachers implement innovative classrooms immediately.

With the view that children are capable young scientists, authors encourage science teaching in ways that nurture students' curiosity about how the natural world works including research-based approaches to support all K-5 children constructing scientific explanations via talk and writing. Grounded in NSF-funded research, this book/DVD provides K-5 teachers with a framework for explanation (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) that they can use to organize everything from planning to instructional strategies and from scaffolds to assessment. Because the framework addresses not only having students learn scientific explanations but also construct them from evidence and evaluate them, it is considered to build upon the new NRC framework for K-12 science education, the national standards, and reform documents in science education, as well as national standards in literacy around argumentation and persuasion, including the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010).The chapters guide teachers step by step through presenting the framework for students, identifying opportunities to incorporate scientific explanation into lessons, providing curricular scaffolds (that fade over time) to support all students including ELLs and students with special needs, developing scientific explanation assessment tasks, and using the information from assessment tasks to inform instruction.

The author helps teachers promote students' ability to handle emotions, regulate their own behavior, and learn in ways that meet their needs and those of the class.

How can you shift from a focus on content to the creation of active learning experiences? In this practical resource, author Jason Kennedy provides a blueprint to help you stop "teaching" and start designing learning, so you can improve students’ critical thinking, decision making, problem solving, and collaboration with others, preparing them for their futures beyond school doors. The framework for learning design covers components of planning (learning targets), of instruction (the opening, learning task, skills, tools, and success criteria), and of the work session (choices, pathways, feedback, and assessment). Appropriate for teachers of any subject area, the book also offers wide variety of tools to help you implement the ideas in your own setting.

If students haven’t developed the brain-based skills to focus, catch and correct errors, identify cause-and-effect relationships, and more, they can't make sense of lessons. Executive function is the missing link to student achievement. But how can you develop this in the classroom? Bestselling author Nancy Sulla has the answers. She explains how building executive function requires a combination of activities, structures, and teacher facilitation strategies aimed at six increasingly complex life skills that should be the goal of any school: conscious control, engagement, collaboration, empowerment, efficacy, and leadership. This updated new edition includes information on how and why to build executive function skills in the post-pandemic, AI world, as well as modifications for English language learners. There are also Efficacy Notebook sections throughout—spaces for you to pause and reflect as you’re reading. In addition, there are examples across grade levels and templates for your own use. With these powerful tools, you will be inspired, armed, and ready to establish a clear framework for building executive function in all your students.

Learn how to design versatile learning environments in which instruction is as effective virtually as it is in person. Bestselling author and consultant Nancy Sulla shows how you can reinvent the classroom experience and provide high-quality instruction that works as well at home as it does in school. You will discover how to help students build strong work habits and empower them to take responsibility for their learning; five key types of instructional activities; the power of PBL to increase student engagement and motivation; and five types of synchronous engagement between teachers and students. You will also gain strategies for building social and emotional learning, positioning the teacher as the facilitator of learning and parents as partners, and keeping equity at the forefront. No matter what grade level you teach or whether you are teaching fully in school, remotely, or a combination of both, this essential book will help you understand the key structures and strategies that work so students are positioned to learn anywhere, anytime.

Pressured by standardized testing and rigid pacing guidelines, many schools are forced to cover too much content too quickly, without being able to meet the needs of individual students. In this powerful book from acclaimed author and presenter Bob Sornson, you’ll learn how shifting from curriculum-based instruction to competency based, personalized learning can help students become more successful, confident, and engaged learners. Each chapter is easy to digest and provides compelling research, strategies, and anecdotes to inspire conversation and action. This second edition provides updated statistics and examples of schools successfully using competency based learning models to help you bring about meaningful change. Teachers, administrators, and community leaders will all find practical resources and a clear rationale for transforming our current educational system into a new, dynamic model of teaching and learning.