More than ever before, as they teach to an increasingly diverse population, educators need a clear, concise guide to designing and implementing responsive curriculum. This book, built around the lessons of classroom teachers, provides the 'how' of instruction design. The first section identifies the most important components of design: addressing standards, designing multiple assessments, identifying richly detailed source materials, and creating interrelated lessons and culminating activi...

Task-based teaching has created enormous interest among teachers in recent years. But how does the idea of designing tasks (e.g. discussions, problems, games) that encourage learners to use real language work in practice? This book explains the basic principles behind task-based learning and teaching and gives practical examples of how to make it work in different teaching situations.

What it really means to "read closely."What could Fern Arable, Jay Gatsby, and Winston Churchill possibly have in common? They all need masterful teachers to help students revel in their complexity. And Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher are just the two mentors to help you make that happen.Call it close reading, call it deep reading, call it analytic reading—call it what you like. The point is, it’s a level of understanding that students ...

Finally, a concrete resource for teaching adolescents the way they learn best!Teachers of teens will not be particularly surprised by the latest research showing that the frontal lobe, affecting reasoning and decision-making skills, is not fully developed in an adolescent′s brain. These educators know how challenging it is to provide students with a strong understanding of content as well as the necessary social and emotional skills for productivity, socia...

How can teachers guarantee that what they teach results in students learning what they really need to know? In The Purposeful Classroom: How to Structure Lessons with Learning Goals in Mind, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey present a variety of strategies that teachers at all levels can use to ensure that students clearly understand the purpose behind every lesson. They provide step-by-step guidance to help teachers* Understand the difference between standards, objectives, an...

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 u...

Teachers across the country are seeking ways to make their multicultural classrooms come alive with student talk about content. Content-Area Conversations: How to Plan Discussion-Based Lessons for Diverse Language Learners is a practical, hands-on guide to creating and managing environments that spur sophisticated levels of student communication, both oral and written. Paying special attention to the needs of English language learners, the authors*Detail research-based ste...

A step-bystep guide for teaching your students to think critically and solve complex problems!In a world with increasingly global economies and competition, students need to learn how to think critically and analytically, and to apply their imaginations to solve complex problems. Problem-based learning (PBL) does just that, helping students identify problems, pose their own questions, research answers, report results, and create a stake in their own learni...

Research has identified the importance of helping students develop the ability to monitor their own comprehension and to make their thinking processes explicit, and indeed demonstrates that metacognitive teaching strategies greatly improve student engagement with course material.This book -- by presenting principles that teachers in higher education can put into practice in their own classrooms -- explains how to lay the ground for this engagement, and help students become self-reg...

Are we missing the opportunity to reach struggling learners from the very beginning? Are we hastily—and unnecessarily— referring students to intervention programs that substitute for high-quality core instruction? What if we could eliminate the need for intervention programs in the first place?Response to Intervention (RTI) programs are only as powerful and effective as the core instruction on which they're built. High-quality instruction, then, is the key ingredient that helps all...

"An interesting compilation for administrators, new teachers, and seasoned teachers. This text acts as a concise reminder of what we should all be doing in our classrooms and includes practical implementation ideas."—Patricia Ruggiano Schmidt, Professor of LiteracyLe Moyne College"Easy to read quickly, especially when looking for something specific. I definitely enjoyed the quotes to start each chapter and the research for each strategy."—Kath...

Backed by solid research, Writing Instruction That Works answers the following question: What is writing instruction today and what can it be tomorrow? This up-to-date, comprehensive book identifies areas of concern for the ways that writing is being taught in today’s secondary schools. The authors offer far-reaching direction for improving writing instruction that assist both student literacy and subject learning. They provide many examples of successful writing practices in each...