If countless books and movies are to be believed, America’s Wild West was, at heart, a world of cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and gunslingers, scruffy settlers and mountain men—a man’s world. Here, Chris Enss, in the latest of her popular books to take on this stereotype, tells the stories of twelve courageous women who faced down schoolrooms full of children on the open prairies and in the mining towns of the Old West. Between 1847 and 1858, more than 600 women teachers traveled across the untamed frontier to provide youngsters with an education, and the numbers grew rapidly in the decades to come, as women took advantage of one of the few career opportunities for respectable work for ladies of the era. Enduring hardship, the dozen women whose stories are movingly told in the pages of Frontier Teachers demonstrated the utmost dedication and sacrifice necessary to bring formal education to the Wild West. As immortalized in works of art and literature, for many students their women teachers were heroic figures who introduced them to a world of possibilities—and changed America forever.

A groundbreaking guide to facilitating online and blended courses This comprehensive resource offers teachers in grades K-12 a hands-on guide to the rapidly growing field of online and blended teaching. With clear examples and explanations, Kristin Kipp shows how to structure online and blended courses for student engagement, build relationships with online students, facilitate discussion boards, collaborate online, design online assessments, and much more. Shows how to create a successful online or blended classroom Illustrates the essential differences between face-to-face instruction and online teaching Foreword by Susan Patrick of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning This is an essential handbook for learning how to teach online and improve student achievement.

Provides a brief description of what school was like on the American frontier, discussing the buildings, teachers, supplies, and challenges for a formal education.

Feeling overwhelmed—constantly, on a daily basis—has unfortunately become the status quo among educators. But it doesn't have to be. Schools need to stop adding more programs, strategies, activities, resources, projects, assessments, and meetings. Though they are often implemented with the best intentions, these things ultimately end up as clutter—that which inhibits our ability to help students learn. Instead, teachers need more clarity, which emerges when we prioritize our efforts to do less with greater focus. This isn't simply a matter of teachers doing less. Rather, teachers need to be intentional and prioritize their efforts to develop deeper understanding among students. In Teaching with Clarity, Tony Frontier focuses on three fundamental questions to help reduce curricular and organizational clutter in the interest of clarity and focus: * What does it mean to understand? * What is most important to understand? * How do we prioritize our strategic effort to help students understand what is most important? By prioritizing clear success criteria, intentional design, meaningful feedback, and a shared purpose, teachers can begin to clear away the curricular clutter that overwhelms the profession—and embrace the clarity that emerges.

The contributions to this volume explore several focal issues related to the global spread of English and their implications for English language teaching, providing both theoretical and empirical perspectives on recent research and implications in educational terms. The volume is divided into three thematic sections, namely "Developments in ELF research and pedagogic implications", "Raising teachers' awareness of ELF", and "ELF and ELT practices". The book provides up-to-date perspectives on the issues, implications and repercussions that findings in ELF research can have for ELT practices. The contributors are all scholars and researchers who have long been engaged in ELF-related research, and who have undertaken operational and practical work in the field, and, as such, offer novel perspectives on the effects of EFL research on the teaching and learning of English. The volume also presents the findings of innovative projects in teacher education, involving pre- and in-service teachers, providing exemplificative good practices of possible new routes into pluralistic, ELF-aware and ELF-oriented didactic perspectives.

In Effective Supervision, Robert J. Marzano, Tony Frontier, and David Livingston show school and district-level administrators how to set the priorities and support the practices that will help all teachers become expert teachers. Their five-part framework is based on what research tells us about how expertise develops. When these five conditions are attended to in a systematic way, teachers do improve their skills: * A well-articulated knowledge base for teaching * Opportunities for teachers to practice specific strategies or behaviors and to receive feedback * Opportunities for teachers to observe and discuss expertise * Clear criteria for success and help constructing professional growth and development plans * Recognition of the different stages of development progressing toward expertise. The focus is on developing a collegial atmosphere in which teachers can freely share effective practices with each other, observe one another's classrooms, and receive focused feedback on their teaching strategies. The constructive dynamics of this approach always keep in sight the aim of enhancing students' well-being and achievement. As the authors note, "The ultimate criterion for expert performance in the classroom is student achievement. Anything else misses the point."

Why have decades of school reform had so little measurable effect on student achievement? Why have billions of dollars spent on technology, small-school initiatives, and school-choice options failed to improve our schools? Too often, educators are simply pulling the wrong levers, say Tony Frontier and James Rickabaugh. They explain that the various components of schooling fall into five categories: structure, sample, standards, strategy, and self. Understanding how these five “levers” work--and their relative power--can help unlock the potential for lasting improvements in teaching and learning. The authors show readers that changes to structure and sample (how schools are organized and how students are grouped) will not be effective without changes to standards (expectations for student learning), strategy (instructional strategies to engage students in meaningful learning), and self (the set of beliefs teachers and students have about their capacity to be effective). At the heart of this book is a simple message for teachers, administrators, board members, and education policymakers at all levels: the key to success is not doing more work and making more changes, but doing the right work, and making the right changes.