Category: Learning

Infuse Your Classroom with Meaning and Fun

To infuse classrooms with meaning, relevance and lots of fun, Stephanie Farley suggests ways to keep teaching student-centered: develop essential questions, make connections, and assess for learning not just grading. A super summer read, writes consultant Cathy Gassenheimer

8 Keys to Designing Tomorrow’s Schools Now

Learning Transformed offers a still timely blueprint of practical ideas to reinvent schools so all students receive a useful education, all teachers are treated as professionals, and all families and community members are welcome and value the role schools play, says teacher Theresa Wood.

A Deep Dive into How Learning Works

In How Learning Works: A Playbook education researchers John Almarode, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey offer teaching and learning strategies that can help students grow into independent learners. Education consultant Anne Anderson shares some highlights from her deep dive.

How to Help Students Think for Themselves

A Teacher’s Guide to Philosophy for Children is a short, comprehensive approach to teaching students the process of thinking for themselves. Instead of being the giver of knowledge, teachers can focus on helping students find answers worth knowing, writes Erin Corrigan-Smith.

Strategies to Ignite Student Learning

Judy Willis MD and her daughter, both teachers, offer a well-researched book – supported by their experience as educators and neuroscience experts – that’s filled with strategies to help students make learning leaps. For Laura Von Staden, “This is 200+ pages of pure gold.”

Making Every Student an Active Learner

The research-based Total Participation Techniques found in the second edition of the Himmele’s popular ASCD book can help boost student engagement and participation, and their retention of information, in just about any content area, says veteran educator Joanne Bell.

Active Learning Ideas for the Middle Grades

The fully developed strategies and techniques Susan Edwards offers in Active Learning in the Middle Grades Classroom are simple to use and will have students engaged in active, purposeful learning across content areas, says teaching consultant Anne Anderson.

Marzano on Stimulating Cognitive Growth

Opening with Darrell Scott’s message after his daughter Rachel’s death at Columbine High, Awaken the Learner offers Robert Marzano’s strategies to expand student learning by helping them understand how they think and make choices, says Laura Von Staden.

Humanity’s Apprentices

Reading Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives, Peter H. Johnston’s wonderful book about teaching children, reviewer Kimberley Moran “felt something in my brain crack wide open.”