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.

Foreword / Cornelius Minor Gratitude -- Creating a culture of reading through book clubs -- Organizing and setting up book clubs -- Launching and managing book clubs -- Lighting the fire of discussion -- Resources at a glance -- Living with books all year long.

Describes why secondary students don't read, and offers teachers practical advice and strategies for developing depth, stamina, and passion in adolescent readers.

While challenging the teacher as hero trope, We Got This shows how authentically listening to kids is the closest thing to a superpower that we have. Cornelius identifies tools, attributes, and strategies that can augment our listening.

"Writing allows each of us to live with that special wide-awakeness that comes from knowing that our lives and our ideas are worth writing about." -Lucy Calkins Teaching Writing is Lucy Calkins at her best-a distillation of the work that's placed Lucy and her colleagues at the forefront of the teaching of writing for over thirty years. This book promises to inspire teachers to teach with renewed passion and power and to invigorate the entire school day. This is a book for readers who want an introduction to the writing workshop, and for those who've lived and breathed this work for decades. Although Lucy addresses the familiar topics-the writing process, conferring, kinds of writing, and writing assessment- she helps us see those topics with new eyes. She clears away the debris to show us the teeny details, and she shows us the majesty and meaning, too, in these simple yet powerful teaching acts. Download a sample chapter for more information.

Most educators want to cultivate an antibias and antiracist classroom and school community, but they often struggle with where and how to get started. Liz helps us set ourselves up for success and prepare for the mistakes we'll make along the way. Each chapter in Start Here, Start Now addresses many of the questions and challenges educators have about getting started, using a framework for tackling perceived barriers from a proactive stance. Liz answers the questions with personal stories, sample lessons, anchor charts, resources, conversation starters, extensive teacher and activist accounts, and more. We can break the habits that are holding us back from this work and be empowered to take the first step towards reimagining the possibilities of how antibias antiracist work can transform schools and the world at large. We must remind ourselves that what is right is often not what is easy, and we must continue to dream. Amidst the chaos, our path ahead is clear. This is our chance to dream big and build something better.

Want to know how to implement authentic STEM teaching and learning into your classroom? STEM Lesson Essentials provides all the tools and strategies you'll need to design integrated, interdisciplinary STEM lessons and units that are relevant and exciting to your students. With clear definitions of both STEM and STEM literacy, the authors argue that STEM in itself is not a curriculum, but rather a way of organizing and delivering instruction by weaving the four disciplines together in intentional ways. Rather than adding two new subjects to the curriculum, the engineering and technology practices can instead be blended into existing math and science lessons in ways that engage students and help them master 21st century skills.