Teaching Essentials

What makes a teacher outstanding? More than anything, it's a way of being with kids in the classroom that lets them know they're smart and capable of high achievement. When you combine this mind-set with effective instruction, teaching and learning are transformed. In Teaching Essentials, Regie Routman gives us as much of a blueprint for achieving this powerful, responsive teaching as we're ever going to get. Drawing on her extensive work with students who have excelled against great odds, Regie shares the principles and practices that help all students and teachers reach their full potential. Teaching Essentials shows teachers and principals how to build an efficient and joyful practice by: setting lessons and activities in a meaningful context using an Optimal Learning Model to organize teaching and gradually release responsibility to students demonstrating reading, writing, and thinking for students so they have explicit models to follow articulating high expectations for every student, including ELLs and struggling learners, and ensuring that they meet them embedding assessment into all aspects of instruction and planning employing the reading-writing connection to improve comprehension motivating writers by always writing for real audiences and purposes implementing a schoolwide coaching model for higher achievement and a more fulfilling collaboration with colleagues. A companion website, www.regieroutman.com, provides additional information, including a downloadable, easy-to-use study guide to promote professional conversations and video clips of Regie teaching so you can view and review the language and routines behind engaging, responsive instruction and learning. The Teaching Essentials book and website are ideal for individual, whole school, and districtwide professional development.

Science Teaching Essentials: Short Guides to Good Practice serves as a reference manual for science faculty as they set up a new course, consider how to teach the course, figure out how to assess their students fairly and efficiently, and review and revise course materials. This book consists of a series of short chapters that instructors can use as resources to address common teaching problems and adopt evidence-based pedagogies. By providing individual chapters that can be used independently as needed, this book provides faculty with a just-in-time teaching resource they can use to draft a new syllabus. This is a must-have resource for science, health science and engineering faculty, as well as graduate students and post-docs preparing for future faculty careers. Provides easily digested, practical, research-based information on how to teach Allows faculty to efficiently get up-to-speed on a given pedagogy or assessment method Addresses the full range of faculty experiences as they being to teach for the first time or want to reinvent how they teach

ECC Essentials: Teaching the Expanded Core Curriculum to Students with Visual Impairments is the first comprehensive book for teachers of students with visual impairments to focus on the nine areas of the ECC that encompass the unique skills children and adolescents with visual impairments need to learn in order to access the core educational curriculum and become independent individuals, by providing the rationale, suggestions, and strategies necessary to implement instruction. The nine areas include compensatory access, sensory efficiency, assistive technology, orientation and mobility, independent living, social interaction, recreation and leisure, career education, and self-determination. ECC Essentials helps teachers manage time efficiently and effectively; work with students of different ages and ability levels; collaborate with parents and other members of the educational team; conduct assessments; align instruction with state standards and the general education core curriculum; and maximize planning effectiveness. The book includes learning activities that combine several areas of the ECC; information about additional resources; specific guidelines and strategies for teaching each of the nine areas of the ECC. ECC Essentials provides teachers with a road map for helping their students achieve success in school and in life.

The Essentials of Teaching Health Education, Second Edition, presents a skills-based approach to teaching K-12 health education, offering practical strategies for curriculum design and program development and an individualized approach to student learning. Its ancillaries facilitate the learning

This book describes effective, engaging ways to build young children's print concepts and alphabetic knowledge, which are crucial for both reading and writing development. Presenting shared reading, shared writing, and targeted instructional activities, each chapter features helpful classroom vignettes, a section debunking myths about preschool literacy, and Ideas for Discussion, Reflection, and Action. Strategies are provided for creating print-rich classroom and home environments and differentiating instruction for diverse students, including English language learners. The book also discusses how to assess preschoolers' reading and writing progress. Reproducible checklists and parent handouts can be downloaded and printed in a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" size.

Teachers’ active online participation and engagement with students are critical factors to the success of online courses. Essentials of Online Teaching is a standards-based, straightforward guide to teaching online in higher education, high school and vocational training, or corporate learning environments. This brief but powerful book encourages immediate application of concepts with the help of real-world examples, technical insights, and professional advice. The guide includes: a practical approach informed by, but not about, relevant learning theories; clear models and examples from a wide variety of online courses; teachers’ reflections about their online practice; a checklist of standards to help guide teaching decisions; and an accompanying website (www.essentialsofonlineteaching.com) with additional resources. Essentials of Online Teaching addresses key instructional challenges in online teaching and presents the reader with practical solutions for each phase of a course—preparation, beginning, middle, and end.

General Education Essentials "Full-time and part-time faculty in any discipline and at any size campus with any type of mission can pick up this volume and learn something that will help her or him improve teaching and learning.???"—From the Foreword by Terrel L. Rhodes, vice president for Curriculum, Quality, and Assessment, Association of American Colleges and Universities Every year, hundreds of small colleges, state schools, and large, research-oriented universities across the United States (and, increasingly, Europe and Asia) revisit their core and general education curricula, often moving toward more integrative models. And every year, faculty members who are highly skilled in narrowly defined fields ask two simple questions: "Why?" and "How is this going to affect me?" General Education Essentials seeks to answer these and other questions by providing a much-needed overview of and a rationale for the recent shift in general education curricular design, a sense of how this shift can affect a faculty member's teaching, and an understanding of how all of this might impact course and student assessment. Filled with examples from a variety of disciplines that will spark insights, General Education Essentials explores the techniques that can be used to ensure that students are gaining the skills they need to be perceptive scholars and productive citizens. "This is THE ONE BOOK for academics to get up to speed about reforming general education." —Jerry Gaff, senior scholar, Association of American Colleges and Universities

How do we teach English Language Learners (ELLs) and how do our ELLs learn? This book answers those questions. "Essentials For Successful English Language Teaching" is about how we teach English Language Learners (ELLs) and how our ELLs learn. Farrell and Jacobs encourage those involved in teaching English to develop, maintain and rediscover the reasons that led them to take up the profession. They focus on the essentials in teaching the English language that teachers can implement in their instruction so that their students can excel in their learning: encourage learner autonomy; emphasize the social nature of learning; develop curricular integration, focus on meaning; celebrate diversity; expand thinking skills; utilize alternative assessment, and, promote English language teachers as co-learners along with their students. These essentials are best implemented as a whole, rather than one at a time and so they are interwoven with each other to encourage a holistic teaching approach. Highly accessible, each chapter comes with case studies and a range of activities to encourage the reader to put each of the essentials into practice. This reflective and engaging book will be invaluable to postgraduate students of TESOL and applied linguistics, and in-service language teachers.