You Win in the Locker Room First: 7 C's to Build a Winning Team in Sports, Business, and Life by Jon Gordon

 NFL head coach Mike Smith lead one of the most remarkable turnarounds in NFL history. In the season prior to his arrival in 2008, the Atlanta Falcons had a 4-12 record and the franchise had never before achieved back-to-back winning seasons. Under Smith's leadership, the Falcons earned an 11-5 record in his first season and would go on to become perennial playoff and Super Bowl contenders earning Smith AP Coach of year in 2008 and voted Coach of Year by his peers in 2008, 2010 and 2012.

You Win in the Locker Room First draws on the extraordinary experiences of Coach Mike Smith and Jon Gordon--consultant to numerous college and professional teams--to explore the seven powerful principles that any business, school, organization, or sports team can adopt to revitalize their organization.

Step by step, the authors outline a strategy for building a thriving organization and provide a practical framework that give leaders the tools they need to create a great culture, lead with the right mindset, create strong relationships, improve teamwork, execute at a higher level, and avoid the pitfalls that sabotage far too many leaders and organizations.

In addition to sharing what went right with the Falcons, Smith also transparently shares what went wrong his last two seasons and provides invaluable lessons leaders can take away from his victories, success, failures and mistakes.

Whether it's an executive leadership team of a Fortune 500 company, a sports team, an emergency room team, military team, or a school team successful leaders coach their team and develop, mentor, encourage, and guide them. This not only improves the team, it improves the leaders and their relationships, connections, and organization.

You Win in the Locker Room First offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at one of the most pressure packed leadership jobs on the planet and what leaders can learn from these experiences in order to build their own winning team.

Recommended by Maygan Adams at MWJH. Audiobook available in OverDrive/Sora.
 

Teach Like a Pirate: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity and Transform Your Life As An Educator by Dave Burgess

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Based on Dave Burgess's popular "Outrageous Teaching" and "Teach Like a PIRATE" seminars, this book offers inspiration, practical techniques, and innovative ideas that will help you to increase student engagement, boost your creativity, and transform your life as an educator. You'll learn how to tap into and dramatically increase your passion as an teacher. Also, learn how to develop outrageously engaging lessons that will draw students in like a magnet and how to transform your class into a life-changing experience for your students. This groundbreaking inspirational manifesto contains over 30 hooks specially designed to captivate your class and 170 brainstorming questions that will skyrocket your creativity. Once you learn the Teach Like a PIRATE system, you'll never look at your role as an educator the same again.

Recommended by Maygan Adams at MWJH. This title can be found in the campus libraries at Lamar, Travis, MWJH, and HS.

Don't Ditch That Tech: Differentiated Instruction in a Digital World by Matt Miller, Angelia Ridgway, Nate Ridgway

Don’t Ditch That Tech provides practical ideas to help you find the sweet spot where classroom devices meet students’ needs. In this teacher-tailored guide, you’ll find tips on how to handle cart/lab scenarios, develop attention-grabbing strategies, build metacognitive practices, and more—all with differentiation in mind. Whether you're a tech newbie or the school’s device guru, you’ll walk away with new understandings and strategies for transforming and diversifying your approach to teaching in a twenty-first-century world.

Recommended by Danielle Harper, ELA teacher at MWJH. Found in Danielle's personal library. Digital version available in OverDrive/Sora.

Additional resources can be found at ditchthattextbook.com

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.