A great way to help students learn your content is to have them write about it. Writing is a way for students to review their own learning, organize their thinking and evaluate how well they understand what has been taught. Use the 81 tools in this binder to help students in every grade and subject become actively engaged in their own learning. The binder contains everything teachers need to begin using these strategies immediately. Each strategy includes complete how-to-use instructions, teacher materials for classroom use, classroom examples, and a template for student assignments.

This book examines nearly 30 years of research to identify how teachers can incorporate writing instruction that helps students master the course content and improve their overall achievement. Building on the recommendations of the National Commission on Writing, authors Vicki Urquhart and Monette McIver introduce four critical issues teachers should address when they include writing in their content courses: Creating a positive environment for the feedback and guidance students need at various stages, including prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing; Monitoring and assessing how much students are learning through their writing; Choosing computer programs that best enhance the writing process; Strengthening their knowledge of course content and their own writing skills.

Learn the 5 steps that school leaders can take to improve student literacy in all content areas, with targeted interventions for students who are struggling the most.

Based on interactive elements that apply to every reading situation, the authors explain instructional strategies that work best in the subject areas and how to optimize those classrooms for reading, writing, and discussion.

In Learning Targets, Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart contend that improving student learning and achievement happens in the immediacy of an individual lesson--what they call "today's lesson"—or it doesn't happen at all. The key to making today's lesson meaningful? Learning targets. Written from students' point of view, a learning target describes a lesson-sized chunk of information and skills that students will come to know deeply. Each lesson's learning target connects to the next lesson's target, enabling students to master a coherent series of challenges that ultimately lead to important curricular standards. Drawing from the authors' extensive research and professional learning partnerships with classrooms, schools, and school districts, this practical book - Situates learning targets in a theory of action that students, teachers, principals, and central-office administrators can use to unify their efforts to raise student achievement and create a culture of evidence-based, results-oriented practice. - Provides strategies for designing learning targets that promote higher-order thinking and foster student goal setting, self-assessment, and self-regulation. - Explains how to design a strong performance of understanding, an activity that produces evidence of students' progress toward the learning target. - Shows how to use learning targets to guide summative assessment and grading. Learning Targets also includes reproducible planning forms, a classroom walk-through guide, a lesson-planning process guide, and guides to teacher and student self-assessment. What students are actually doing during today's lesson is both the source of and the yardstick for school improvement efforts. By applying the insights in this book to your own work, you can improve your teaching expertise and dramatically empower all students as stakeholders in their own learning.

This action tool can help teachers engage students in learning the essential skills of critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, communication, and collaboration.

Approximately 4.7 million designated English language learners attend public schools (Office of English Language Acquisition, 2002). It is predicted that by the 2030s, English language learners will account for about 40 percent of the school-age population. Yet very few teachers have been trained to address the needs of these students, and the questions they ask are the same as they asked decades ago: Who are English language learners and what are effective ways for schooling them? What kind of educational program brings about the best results? What are sound practices for facilitating English language acquisition? How can English language learners have academic success in subject areas? How do we teach English language learners in our classrooms? - p. 5.