Where Great Teaching Begins is a step-by-step walk through the crucial, behind-the-scenes intellectual work necessary to make instruction truly effective and help students learn deeply and meaningfully. --from publisher description.

Turn good intentions into better outcomes—by design! Why leave student success up to chance? By combining your intuition and experience with the latest research on high-impact learning practices, you can evolve your teaching from good to great and make a lasting difference for your students. Organized around the DIIE framework, Great Teaching by Design takes you step-by-step from intention to implementation to accelerate the impact your teaching has on student learning. Inside, you’ll find • A deep dive into the four stages of the DIIE model: Diagnosis and Discovery, Intervention, Implementation, and Evaluation • A fresh look at the Visible Learning research, which identifies the most powerful strategies for teaching and learning • Stories of best practices in action and examples from classrooms around the world Great teaching may come by chance, but it will come by design. Whether you’re new to teaching or looking to give your instruction a boost, take up the challenge and discover a new framework for teaching with true intentionality.

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

Co-teaching has been increasingly adopted to support students in the general education classroom. After 20 years of field testing, we know what works—and what doesn't. In this practical guide, co-teaching and inclusion experts Toby J. Karten and Wendy W. Murawski detail the best practices for successful co-teaching and ways to troubleshoot common pitfalls. This book addresses the do's, don'ts, and do betters of * The co-teaching relationship and collaborative roles. * Co-planning instruction and assessment. * Co-teaching in action. * Academic and behavioral supports and interventions. * Collaborative reflections, improvements, and celebrations. Readers will gain valuable insights on what to start doing, what to stop doing, and how to improve their co-teaching practices to better reach all students.

This book is a must for any K-12 teacher. The practical strategies - from learning the characteristics of an effictive "No", to lesson design - will help any teacher improve their classroom management.

While working with students, their parents, and with colleagues, I noticed God is always at work. In many casual conversations, I was encouraged by the number of colleagues that stated their dependence on God for guidance. These short devotions are intended as an encouragement to educators, beginning their school day, to draw attention to the activities of the Holy Spirit in their life and work activities. It is my prayer the reader will identify with many of these devotions and be reminded of the Holy Spirit's activity in their lives.

In order to create great lessons, a teacher needs to know the curriculum, know the lesson content, know the students, and know how to set objectives that will engage these students as thinkers and put them on the path to learning. In this excerpt from Where Great Teaching Begins, Anne R. Reeves introduces and illustrates a step-by-step process for analyzing complex academic standards—like those in the Common Core—and translating them into lesson objectives that are specific and learner-focused, describe learning outcomes rather than activities, and engage higher-order thinking skills.