Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners by Ron Ritchhart , Mark Church

 

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

Recommended by Kendra Fowler. Found in her personal library.

Your First Year: How to Survive and Thrive as a New Teacher by Todd Whitaker

 

Learn all the essentials for making your first year of teaching a success! In this exciting new book, internationally renowned educator Todd Whitaker teams up with his daughters--Madeline, an elementary teacher, and Katherine, a secondary teacher--to share advice and inspiration. They offer step-by-step guidance to thriving in your new role and overcoming the challenges that many new teachers face. Topics include:

• Learning classroom management skills such as building relationships and maintaining high expectations and consistency
• Setting up your classroom and establishing procedures and rules
• Planning effective lessons and making your instructional time an engaging experience
• Managing your own emotions in the classroom and dealing effectively with misbehavior
• Working with peers, administrators, and parents to build support and foster collaboration

The book is filled with specific examples and vignettes from elementary, middle, and high school classes, so you'll gain helpful strategies no matter what grade level and subject area you teach. You'll also find out how to make tweaks or hit the "reset" button when something isn't going as planned. Things may not always go perfectly your first year, but the practical advice in this book will help you stay motivated on the path to success!

This title is available at the Lamar and HS libraries.

Whole Brain Teaching for Challenging Kids (and the rest of your class, too!) by Christopher Biffle

 

Based on cutting edge scientific research, Whole Brain Teaching recognizes that students learn the most when they are engaged in lessons that involve seeing, hearing, doing, speaking and feeling.

This title is available at the Lamar library. 

The Writing Strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Writers by Jennifer Serravallo

 

The Writing Strategies Book, Jen Serravallo collects 300 of the most effective strategies to share with writers and grouping them beneath 10 crucial goals.

"You can think of the goals as the what, "writes Jen, "and the strategies as the how." From composing with pictures all the way to conventions and beyond, you'll have just-right teaching, just in time. With Jen's help you'll:

• develop individual goals for every writer
• give students step-by-step strategies for writing with skill and craft
• coach writers using prompts aligned to a strategy
• present mentor texts that support a genre and strategy
• adjust instruction to meet individual needs with Jen's Teaching Tips
• demonstrate and explain a writing move with her Lesson Language
• learn more with Hat Tips to the work of influential teacher-authors.

She even offers suggestions for stocking your writing center, planning units of study, celebrating student writing, and keeping records.

Whether you use Writing Workshop, 6+1 Traits, Daily 5's "Work on Writing," a scripted writing program, the writing exercises in your basal, or any other approach, you'll discover a treasure chest of ways to work with whole classes, small groups, or individual writers.

Found in Angie Myrick's personal library.

The Reading Strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Readers by Jennifer Serravallo

 

This book provides strategies that can be used daily in the classroom. It is also a good reminder of important strategies for veteran teachers.

In The Reading Strategies Book, she collects 300 strategies to share with readers in support of thirteen goals-everything from fluency to literary analysis. Each strategy is cross-linked to skills, genres, and Fountas & Pinnell reading levels to give you just-right teaching, just in time. 

Whether you use readers workshop, Daily 5/CAFE, guided reading, balanced reading, a core reading program, whole-class novels, or any other approach, The Reading Strategies Book will complement and extend your teaching. Rely on it to plan and implement goal-directed, differentiated instruction for individuals, small groups, and whole classes.

Found in Angie Myrick's personal library.

Leverage Leadership: A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools 1st Edition by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo

 

Planning to pursue a career in administration? This book provides a blueprint for those tough conversations about teaching and learning.

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo (Managing Director of Uncommon Schools)shows leaders how they can raise their schools to greatness by following a core set of principles. These seven principles, or "levers," allow for consistent, transformational, and replicable growth. With an intentional focus on these areas, leaders will leverage much more learning from the same amount of time investment. Fundamentally, each of these seven levers answers the core questions of school leadership: What should an effective leader do, and how and when should they do it. 

Found in Angie Myrick's personal library. A digital copy can be found in OverDrive/Sora.

Data Wise, Revised and Expanded Edition: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning Revised and Expanded Edition by Kathryn Parker Boudett (Editor), Elizabeth A. City (Editor), Richard J.

 

Not the most interesting read, but definitely one if you are wanting to recheck your thinking on how to use data. 

Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning presents a clear and carefully tested blueprint for school leaders. It shows how examining test scores and other classroom data can become a catalyst for important schoolwide conversations that will enhance schools’ abilities to capture teachers’ knowledge, foster collaboration, identify obstacles to change, and enhance school culture and climate.

Found in Angie Myrick's personal library.

Results Now: How We Can Achieve Unprecedented Improvements in Teaching and Learning by Mike Schmoker

 

After attending a roundtable discussion a couple of summers ago, Schmoker made me rethink some of our instructions. He led with the question, "How much time are your students reading?"  

According to author Mike Schmoker, there is a yawning gap between the most well-known essential practices and the reality of most classrooms. This gap persists despite the hard, often heroic work done by many teachers and administrators. Schmoker believes that teachers and administrators may know what the best practices are, but they aren't using them or reinforcing them consistently. He asserts that our schools are protected by a buffer—a protective barrier that prevents scrutiny of instruction by outsiders. The buffer exists within the school as well. Teachers often know only what is going on in their classrooms—and they may be completely in the dark about what other teachers in the school are doing. Even principals, says Schmoker, don't have a clear view of the daily practices of teaching and learning in their schools.

Very fast read and worth the time for those leading any type of team.

Found in the personal library of Angie Myrick. A digital copy can be found in OverDrive/Sora.

Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters

 

For those who have read the Notice and Note series, this is the next logical book to read. In their hit books Notice and Note and Reading Nonfiction, Kylene Beers and Bob Probst showed teachers how to help students become close readers. Now, in Disrupting Thinking they take teachers a step further and discuss an on-going problem: lack of engagement with reading. They explain that all too often, no matter the strategy shared with students, too many students remain disengaged and reluctant readers. The problem, they suggest, is that we have misrepresented to students why we read and how we ought to approach any text - fiction or nonfiction.

Found in Angie Myrick's personal library.

Understanding the Math We Teach and How to Teach It, K-8

Not necessarily a book you read from cover to cover, but one that will give you more information about how to possibly teach a concept and what concepts need to be scaffolded for success. 

Found in Angie Myrick's personal library. 

 

From Striving to Thriving: How to Grow Confident, Capable Readers by Stephanie Harvey

 

Reading experts Stephanie Harvey and Annie Ward demonstrate how to "table the labels" and use detailed formative assessments to craft targeted, personalized instruction that enable striving readers to do what they need above all - to find books they love and engage in voluminous reading.

This title is available in the MWHS Library.

Who's Doing the Work?

Are you working harder than your students? 

Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris explore how some traditional scaffolding practices may actually rob students of important learning opportunities and independence. Who’s Doing the Work? suggests ways to make small but powerful adjustments to instruction that hold students accountable for their own learning.

Found in Angie Myrick's personal library.

Educated by Tara Westover

 

A memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University.

This title is available at the MWHS Library and as an eBook in OverDrive. OverDrive is found in the Library Resources folder of ClassLink.

Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear

 

No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.

Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.

Learn how to:
- make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy);
- overcome a lack of motivation and willpower;
- design your environment to make success easier;
- get back on track when you fall off course;
...and much more.

Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.

This title is available as an eBook in OverDrive. OverDrive is located in the Library Resources folder of ClassLink.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin Diangelo

 In this "vital, necessary, and beautiful book" (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and "allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to 'bad people' (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

This title is available as an eBook in OverDrive. OverDrive is found in the Library Resources folder of ClassLink.

Be the One for Kids: You Have the Power to Change the Life of a Child by Ryan Sheehy

 

This book will take educators on a journey through stories and ways that they can simply enhance your teaching practices and build relationships, including a look at the author's own experience as a teacher and administrator.

This book is available from Cathy Hammond's personal library.

Courageous Edventures: Navigating Obstacles to Discover Classroom Innovation by Jennie Magiera

Let's go on an edventure Many educators want to boldly innovate and take risks in their teaching, but hesitate when they meet challenges. Whatever obstacles you and your students face in the classroom, you can navigate them with grace, humor, and grit. In this practical book, Jennie Magiera charts a course through the limitless possibilities of using technology in the classroom. With lesson plans, videos, and other resources, you'll discover your own version of classroom innovation. Teachers will learn: Keys to problem-based innovation (PBI) How to create their own Teacher-IEP...Innovation Exploration Plan Strategies and solutions for tackling common tech problems Methods for putting learning into the hands of students How to find innovation in everyday places.

This book is available in Cathy Hammond's personal library.