Developing Academic Thinking Skills In Grades 6 12

Presents a comprehensive manual for the sixth through twelfth-grade classroom that helps students develop critical thinking skills, and contains language activities on problem solving, identifying cause and effect, comparing and classifying, evaluating, and more.

A professional strategies notebook developed for grades 6-12 provides teachers with strategies to build every student's mastery of high-level thinking skills and includes model lessons featuring questioning, decision-making, creative thinking, problem solving, and idea generating.

Help your students become 21st century thinkers! Developed for grades 6-12, this resource provides teachers with strategies to build every student's mastery of high-level thinking skills, promote active learning, and encourage students to analyze, evaluate, and create. Model lessons are provided as they integrate strategy methods including questioning, decision-making, creative thinking, problem solving, and idea generating. This resource is correlated to College and Career Readiness and other state standards.

Many students, ranging from native English speakers to recent immigrants, need help in understanding and using the language of school. Language is the lifeblood of learning in all content areas, and it plays a major role in academic achievement. Building Academic Language explains the functions and features of academic language that every teacher (language arts, history, math, & science teachers, etc.) should know for supporting academic reading, writing, and discussion. The book includes research-based instructional and assessment activities that content teachers can use to build students' abilities to understand and describe the many abstract concepts, higher-order thinking skills, and complex relationships in a discipline. The book emphasizes an approach that builds from students' existing ways of learning and communicating, scaffolding them to think and talk as content area experts think and talk about math, science, history, and language arts. Major topics and themes include: What is academic language and how does it differ by content area? How can language-building activities (discussions, small groups, etc.) support content understanding? How can we build language abilities for content reading and writing - and vice versa? How can we build on students' diverse ways of understanding, learning, and communicating about the world? How can we more effectively model and scaffold academic language in our teaching and assessment?

Conversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.

This two-part book provides teachers in kindergarten through grade eight with a valuable resource as how to include primary sources in a social studies curriculum along with a required social studies textbook. The first section of this book contains descriptions with relevant examples of primary documents and authentic artifacts that are appropriate for incorporation into social studies classrooms. In the second part of this book, the application of primary sources for specific social studies instruction is presented. This book specifically presents ways to use primary sources as means to explore the community where the students reside, to make connections to past and present events, and to research a specific change agent in a particular place. Each chapter contains: questions and pedagogical strategies for criticallly reading, viewing, and responding to varied authentic artifacts; techniques for interacting with primary materials; modifications to meet the needs of diverse learners; assessment techniques; information tied to technology and the “new literacies”; and connections to the National Curriculum Standards for the Social Studies (2010) and the Common Core State Standards (2010).

More emphasis is being placed on writing instruction in K-12 schools than ever before. With the growing number of digital tools in the classroom, it is important that K-12 teachers learn how to use these tools to effectively teach writing in all content areas. The Handbook of Research on Digital Tools for Writing Instruction in K-12 Settings will provide research about how students use digital tools to write, both in and out of school settings, as well as discuss issues and concerns related to the use of these learning methods. This publication is beneficial to educators, professionals, and researchers working in the field of K-12 and teacher education.

Summarization. Just when we thought we knew everything about it, the doors to divergent thinking open and summarization—no longer something that students must endure until you get to the "cool" stuff—takes on an exciting new role in student success! In this second edition of Summarization in Any Subject, Dedra Stafford joins Rick Wormeli in adding fresh depth and creative variations to the basics, including changes to all 50 techniques from the first edition and brand new summarizing techniques that can be differentiated for multiple disciplines and levels of student readiness. Personably written, with a sense of humor and a commitment to students' substantive engagement with curriculum, this new edition provides practical, "show me what it looks like" tools and descriptions as well as QR codes and tech integrations for many of the techniques. The book provides A clear rationale for summarization in any subject along with an explanation of the cognitive science that powers its positive effects, including the influence of background knowledge and primacy-recency, plus the benefits of metaphors, chunking, timing, maintaining objectivity, and the efficacy that comes when students process content. Practical tips for teaching students note taking, paraphrasing, and text structure. Nine easy strategies that teachers can use to help students begin to understand what they need to know in order to summarize. Detailed descriptions of 60 strategies and critical thinking variations that provide students with memorable learning experiences, plus targeted support materials that assist in teaching and learning. It's time to revitalize learning and shatter the tedium associated with summarization, and this new edition of Summarization in Any Subject can help you do just that.