Supports English teachers who seek to engage their students in genre studies in the reading and writing workshop. The book profiles six different units of study: memoir, feature article, editorial, short story, fairy tale, and response to literature. Each study is set in an individual fifth-through tenth-grade classroom and is described from its theoretical foundations, through the planning for the specific needs of the students, to the teaching, and finally evaluation.

This title is a comprehensive volume that focuses on genre study through inquiry-based learning with an emphasis on reading comprehension and the craft of writing. In exploring genre study, Fountas and Pinnell advocate a way of thinking and learning where students are actively engaged in the thinking process.

If questions of subjectivity and identification are at stake in all biographical writing, they are particularly trenchant for contemporary women biographers of women. Often, their efforts to exhume buried lives in hope of finding spiritual foremothers awaken maternal phantoms that must be embraced or confronted. Do women writing in fact have any greater access to their own mothers' lives than to the lives of other women whose stories have been swept away like dust in the debris of the past? In Thinking through the Mothers, Janet Beizer surveys modern women's biographies and contemplates alternatives to an approach based in lineage and the form of thought that emphasizes the line, the path, hierarchy, unity, resemblance, reflection, and the aesthetic-mimesis-that depends on these ideas. Through close readings of memoirs and fictions about mothers, Beizer explores how biographers of the women who came before rehearse and rewrite relationships to their own mothers biographically as they seek to appropriate the past in a hybrid genre she calls "bio-autography." Thinking through the Mothers features the work of George Sand and Colette and spans such varied figures as Gustave Flaubert, Julian Barnes, Louise Colet, Eunice Lipton, Vladimir Nabokov, Huguette Bouchardeau, and Christa Wolf. Beizer seeks an alternative to women's "salvation biography" or "resurrection biography" that might resist nostalgia, be attentive to silence, and reinvent the means to represent the lives of precursors without appropriating traditional models of genealogy.

A proven program for enhancing students' thinking and comprehension abilities Visible Thinking is a research-based approach to teaching thinking, begun at Harvard's Project Zero, that develops students' thinking dispositions, while at the same time deepening their understanding of the topics they study. Rather than a set of fixed lessons, Visible Thinking is a varied collection of practices, including thinking routines?small sets of questions or a short sequence of steps?as well as the documentation of student thinking. Using this process thinking becomes visible as the students' different viewpoints are expressed, documented, discussed and reflected upon. Helps direct student thinking and structure classroom discussion Can be applied with students at all grade levels and in all content areas Includes easy-to-implement classroom strategies The book also comes with a DVD of video clips featuring Visible Thinking in practice in different classrooms.

Exploring how critical thinking is expressed in writing, this book investigates the specific linguistic elements involved in this process. Ian Bruce takes a genre-based approach to compare the textual expression of critical thinking in samples of academic, professional and journalistic writing, using five studies to examine the similarities and differences in the elements deployed across different genres. Looking at phenomena such as the relations between propositions and words which express the writer's personal attitude, content-organizing patterns, and the role of metaphor, this book highlights the most important contributory factors in the expression of critical thinking. Providing an in-depth exploration of how it is articulated through different types of specialist writing, this book provides a lens to both examine texts and to identify and practice this skill.

For too long, false perceptions--and often policy--have led teachers to believe they must choose between teaching reading and teaching content. As teachers, however, we know that for students to be successful in all subjects, they must have a strong foundation in reading and writing. Reading for Learning: Using Discipline-Based Texts to Build Content Knowledge addresses this issue head-on, exploring the reality, which is that reading and content can, and should, go hand-in-hand to support subject area learning. Drawing on research in human cognition, reading development, and discipline-specific pedagogies, Heather Lattimer provides practical, classroom-tested approaches to helping students access and critically respond to content-based texts, such as selecting texts that enhance student learning experiences, using strategies to help focus student readers before they engage with texts, supporting comprehension in content areas through discussion and writing, analyzing texts and applying content learning. Rich in classroom examples, the book strives not to remake content teachers into reading teachers, but instead to support content teachers in using texts to deepen students' understanding of the core ideas, critical information, and ways of thinking in the disciplines.

The classic book on systems thinking—with more than half a million copies sold worldwide! "This is a fabulous book... This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing."—Forbes "Thinking in Systems is required reading for anyone hoping to run a successful company, community, or country. Learning how to think in systems is now part of change-agent literacy. And this is the best book of its kind."—Hunter Lovins In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet—Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.