Raising Black Students' Achievement Through Culturally Responsive Teaching

In this book, Johnnie McKinley reveals the depth of her caring about black students’ learning and describes the beliefs and values that exceptional teachers and their students follow as they grow and learn together. By sharing educators’ stories, Johnnie introduces readers to classrooms where learning is continuous, where teachers and students respect each other, and where principals and teachers alike approach teaching students of color from a position of effi cacy and confi dence.

How to Plan Rigorous Instruction

Here, you ll learn how to
* Create a rigorous unit assessment to guide your instruction and ensure standards mastery.
* Select rigorous learning materials by examining the type of thinking you want students to engage in and the type of understanding you want them to acquire.
* Choose rigorous instructional strategies by looking at ways to help students grasp new content and acquire new skills, apply what they are learning in a meaningful way, use thinking processes to synthesize new understandings, and adapt these understandings to new contexts across disciplines.
* Create a rigorous learning unit, tailored to your standards and classroom content, and to the students you teach.

Leading and Managing a Differentiated Classroom

Today s teachers are responsible for a greater variety of learners with a greater diversity of needs than ever before. When you add in the ever-changing dynamics of technology and current events, the complexity of both students and teachers lives grows exponentially. Far too few teachers, however, successfully teach the whole class with the individual student in mind.

Learning for Keeps: Teaching the Strategies Essential for Creating Independent Learners

How can teachers help students develop the literacy and problem-solving skills critical to becoming independent learners ready to tackle not only their immediate academic challenges but also the real-world problems they will face as adults? Asking students to memorize and recite facts isn t the answer. Instead, says Rhoda Koenig, educators must deliberately cultivate thinking skills and build the strategies that empower students to boost their own learning--for keeps.
In this highly practical book, Koenig combines explicit strategy lessons and coaching techniques that prepare teachers to skate alongside learners, give feedback, support them when they stumble, and gradually let go.

Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning

Bestselling author Mike Schmoker describes a plan for radically improving student learning that is built on three core elements: a focused and coherent curriculum (what we teach); clear, prioritized lessons (how we teach); and purposeful reading and writing, or authentic literacy.
With this "less is more" philosophy, educators can help students learn content at a deeper level, develop greater critical thinking skills, and discover more clearly how content-area concepts affect their lives and the world around them.