Engaging Literate Minds

Increasingly, educators are recognizing that for children to thrive intellectually they need socially and emotionally healthy classrooms. Conveniently, this is exactly what parents have always wanted for their children--classrooms that offer and grow positive relationships and behavior, emotional self-regulation, and a sense of well-being. Using the guiding principles from Peter Johnston's best-selling professional resources, Choice Words and Opening Minds, Peter and six colleagues began a journey to create just such classrooms--environments in which children meaningfully engage with each other through reading, writing, making, and discussing books. In Engaging Literate Minds, you'll discover how these teachers struggled and succeeded in building such classrooms. Inside you'll find the following: Practical ways to develop a caring learning community and children's socio-emotional competence Powerful teaching practices from real classrooms Engaging ways to encourage inquiry and student agency Suggestions on how to use formative assessment in everyday teaching practices Helpful research behind the classroom practices and children's development Ways to help students inspire and support each other Building a just, caring, literate society has never been more important than it is today. By embracing the ideas and teaching strategies in Engaging Literate Minds, you can help children to become socially, emotionally, and intellectually healthy. Not only do these classroom practices develop the skills to achieve district benchmarks and beyond, they help develop children's humanity.

Increasingly, educators are recognizing that for children to thrive intellectually, they need classrooms that offer and grow positive relationships and behavior, emotional self-regulation, and a sense of well-being. Using the guiding principles from his best-selling resources, Choice Words and Opening Minds, author Peter Johnston and six colleagues began a journey to create such classrooms--environments in which children meaningfully engage with each other through reading, writing, making and discussing books. By embracing the ideas and teaching strategies in Engaging Literate Minds, you can help your students become socially, emotionally, and intellectually healthy. $c --From publisher's description.

Increasingly, educators are recognizing that for children to thrive intellectually they need socially and emotionally healthy classrooms. Conveniently, this is exactly what parents have always wanted for their children's classrooms that offer and grow positive relationships and behavior, emotional self-regulation, and a sense of well-being. Using the guiding principles from Peter Johnston's best-selling professional resources, Choice Words and Opening Minds,Peter and six colleagues began a journey to create just such classrooms'senvironments in which children meaningfully engage with each other through reading, writing, making, and discussing books. Together, they bring you Engaging Literate Minds: Developing Children's Social, Emotional, and Intellectual Lives, K-3 where you'll discover how these teachers struggled and succeeded in building such classrooms. Inside you'll find the following: Practical ways to develop a caring learning community and children's socio-emotional competence Powerful teaching practices from real classrooms Engaging ways to encourage inquiry and student agency Suggestions on how to use formative assessment in everyday teaching practices Helpful research behind the classroom practices and children's development Ways to help students inspire and support each other Building a just, caring, literate society has never been more important than it is today. By embracing the ideas and teaching strategies Engaging Literate Minds, you can help children to become socially, emotionally, and intellectually healthy. Not only do these classroom practices develop the skills to achieve district benchmarks and beyond, they help develop children's humanity.

This is a book about problem solving--an internal tool that shapes the cognitive development of young readers and writers. At the same time, it is a book about the role of the teacher and the curriculum in structuring problem-solving opportunities. It is a book that advocates for schools to create intellectual environments that make literate thinking a top priority for children. Finally, it is a book that presents teaching and learning as collaborative processes between many people with a common goal--literacy for children. from the Introduction. How can teachers create a literacy curriculum that builds processing links between reading, writing, and spelling knowledge? In Shaping Literate Minds, Linda J. Dorn and Carla Soffos illustrate how processing theory can be applied to the everyday practices of classroom teaching. If instruction emphasizes the interrelationships of these three language areas, students learn how to transfer knowledge, skills, and strategies across literacy events. This is complex theory, but the authors provide clear and practical examples to support teachers as they incorporate these ideas into their classroom practices. Grounded in authentic experiences from primary classrooms, this book provides: explanations of processing behaviors among reading, writing, and spelling knowledge; observational tools that support teachers in noticing changes over time in specific literacy behaviors; guidance on creating conditions for developing self-regulated learners; authentic reading and writing samples and teacher/student interactions; figures and pictures that clearly describe how teachers can use assessment to inform and guide instruction, with links to national standards; details for establishing a school-based literacy model that includes team meetings, assessment walls, high standards, and a curriculum for literacy; appendixes with reproducible assessment checklists, report cards, task cards for literacy corners, and guided reading observation forms for team meetings. With a national emphasis on accountability, high standards, and literacy achievement, Shaping Literate Minds will help teachers and administrators implement a high-quality literacy curriculum that links to national and state goals.

Introducing a spelling test to a student by saying, 'Let' s see how many words you know,' is different from saying, 'Let's see how many words you know already.' It is only one word, but the already suggests that any words the child knows are ahead of expectation and, most important, that there is nothing permanent about what is known and not known. Peter Johnston Grounded in research, Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Livesshows how words can shape students' learning, their sense of self, and their social, emotional and moral development. Make no mistake: words have the power to open minds – or close them. Following up his groundbreaking book, Choice Words, author Peter Johnston continues to demonstrate how the things teachers say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for the literate lives of students. In this new book, Johnston shows how the words teachers choose can affect the worlds students inhabit in the classroom. He explains how to engage children with more productive talk and how to create classrooms that support students' intellectual development, as well as their development as human beings.

Engaging Minds: Cultures of Education and Practices of Teaching explores the diverse beliefs and practices that define the current landscape of formal education. The 3rd edition of this introduction to interdisciplinary studies of teaching and learning to teach is restructured around four prominent historical moments in formal education: Standardized Education, Authentic Education, Democratic Citizenship Education, Systemic Sustainability Education. These moments serve as the foci of the four sections of the book, each with three chapters dealing respectively with history, epistemology, and pedagogy within the moment. This structure makes it possible to read the book in two ways – either "horizontally" through the four in-depth treatments of the moments or "vertically" through coherent threads of history, epistemology, and pedagogy. Pedagogical features include suggestions for delving deeper to get at subtleties that can’t be simply stated or appreciated through reading alone, several strategies to highlight and distinguish important vocabulary in the text, and more than 150 key theorists and researchers included among the search terms and in the Influences section rather than a formal reference list.

"The innovative approach of this book will stimulate students to play the role of detective in eliciting data, providing evidence, explaining the significance of their observations, and reporting on the ramifications of the study. The dozen chapters in this manual provide guidelines for promoting the journalistic approach, including teacher comments on their success with SciJourn (science journalism). The SciJourn standards are clearly defined, emphasizing the features essential in choosing a topic, to its organization, voice, word choice, language usage, grammatical rules, and the final presentation of the article. Research strategies such as interviews and surveys are reviewed. By giving students the independence they so strive for during the difficult years, trusting them with the freedom to ferret out and filter the myriad prevailing profuse factoids into a coherent understanding, this is a technique that should be exploited."--Publisher's website.

In the years since Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning was first published and quickly became a beloved bestseller, countless educators and their students have been impacted by this short, but powerful book. Throughout it, author Peter Johnston provides examples of seemingly ordinary words, phrases, and uses of language that are pivotal in the orchestration of the classroom. Grounded in a balance of research and classroom practice, Choice Words demonstrates how and what we say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for what children learn and for who they become as literate people. Now, in this second edition, Peter Johnston returns to the central message of the book—that teachers’ language is their most powerful tool for impacting children’s learning and creating classroom community. With updates throughout the chapters to both the research and classroom examples, and new chapters on social-emotional learning and mindsets, this book has much to offer to both those familiar with Choice Words and those who will read it for the first time. This book will be enlightening for any teacher who wishes to be more conscious of the many ways their language helps children acquire literacy skills and view the world, their peers, and themselves in new ways.