"The What's in it for schools"? series aims to make educational policy issues relevant to practitioners. Each book in the series focuses on a major educational issue. The authors set the issue in context, look at how it impacts on the daily lives of schools and teachers, and raise key questions. The books are grounded in social theory, recent research evidence and best practice, and will make an excellent contribution to any staffroom bookshelf.
In classrooms that operate as learning communities, the social and learning purposes advance together through all participants being involved and engaged in building knowledge. This is a new way of seeing and managing classrooms, it offers:
* An integration of what's best in learning and what's best in the social life of classrooms
* A vision of the role of the teacher that is more creative and more related to the commitments of teachers
* A more connected view of school, in contrast to the mechanistic view that currently dominates
* An answer to the short-term performance pressures of politicians - better performance.
This book presents the practice and vision of classrooms that operate as learning communities. This is the most comprehensive and practical book on this theme. The text is engaging without either preaching or patrolling how teachers think. It is the aim of the book that after reading it any classroom teacher will feel more able to take steps towards building a more effective classroom with the aspects of learning communities they choose.

This book explores the prominence of 'race' in the lives of young children and their early childhood educators. It critiques the often presumed racial innocence of young children and shows instead how young children actively engage with the politics of race as they form their own identities. It challenges early childhood educators to engage with children's racialised identity politics, and shows how this often requires early childhood educators to rethink their own racialised identities. Amongst the challenges the book presents it offers points of possibility and hope for creating more racially just early childhood classrooms.

Written by award-winning state teachers of the year. Contains lesson plans and strategies that can be implemented immediately. Addresses a timely, growing topic of immigrants and refugees in K-12 classrooms.

Adopting a UDL attitude within Academia bridges the gap between the theory and practice of UDL (Universal Design for Learning). It guides the reader through the origins of the development of UDL as an innovative way of thinking about inclusion and the evolution of this theory into practice, as it explores UDL and its relevance beyond the classroom. Including reader-friendly descriptions and case studies supplemented with international research, this book allows the reader to think and see through a UDL lens, ultimately emphasising their part in the inclusion agenda. From the outset this book shares the attitude necessary to promote UDL and inclusion across higher education and addresses some of the most common questions: Is this a scientific theory or just a new practice, and why is it important? How can I be more inclusive in my current practice? Is it sustainable and how do I ensure I'm implementing it correctly? The book will have a broad appeal and is essential reading for anyone looking to understand and implement UDL across their learning environment - be it a university or any higher education institution.

Teaching comprehension with informational texts is a critical component of any reading program and one that many children struggle with as they progress through their schooling. Nonfiction can be overwhelming to young readers, presenting them with complex vocabulary and a new density of information that may combine text, diagrams, pictures, captions, and other devices. In this book, Tony Stead provides wonderful ways to enhance children's understanding and engagement when reading for information. Based on many years of working in K-7 classrooms, he outlines practical approaches to ensure all children can become confident and competent readers of nonfiction.

"Reality Checks" offers insights into why children struggle when faced with informational reading, and practical concepts, skills, and strategies that help them navigate nonfiction successfully.

Part one examines effective ways to teach children how to extract the information that is explicitly stated in a text. Covered are strategies such as using prior knowledge, retelling, locating specific information, and the role of nonfiction read-alouds.

Part two explores interpreting information, including making connections between the text, the reader, and the outside world, making inferences and making revisions to inferences based on reflection.

Part three looks at evaluating information, assisting children in developing critical reading skills, differentiating fact from opinion, locating author bias, and identifying techniques writers use to persuade readers' thinking.

Part four offers an array of practical ways to reinforce and extend children's nonfiction reading skills, including working with visual information such asmaps and diagrams. It also provides pre-and-post-assessment strategies, procedures for monitoring progress, curriculum planning ideas, and instruction on guided reading.

A helpful appendix provides graphic organizers, assessment rubrics, curriculum mapping sheets, and more.

-Offers school-based mentors in Scotland a practical toolkit to develop their mentoring skills, giving them the guidance needed to effectively support trainee and newly qualified early years, primary, and secondary teachers. -Gives a broad overview of the mentoring process and of mentoring teachers for long-term career development, exploring the nature of the mentor-mentee role within the Scottish context, guiding the mentee through lesson planning, and offering strategies for observation and lesson analysis. -Includes lesson plans and feedback sheets, observation sheets, case studies, sample dialogues, and learning activities and exercise, giving mentors practical tools for use with teachers in a classroom setting. -Offers an online eResource offering downloadable resources and web-based training material.

This volume of essays offers innovations in teaching Chaucer in higher education. The projects explored in this study focus on a student-centred, active learning designed to enhance independent research skills and critical thinking. These studies also seek to establish conversations - between teachers and learners, and students and their texts.

Reading is all about understanding. Many English language learners simply do not understand what they are reading, whether it's a picture book, a literature selection, or a science textbook. Juli Kendall and Outey Khuon believe that small group comprehension lessons have a key role to play in advancing students' understanding of texts."Making Sense" provides answers to many common questions asked by teachers of English language learners: How do we organize small-group comprehension instruction? How do we select books to teach strategies? How do we know our kids are getting it--and what do we do when they don't get it? It is an easy-to-use, practical resource for ELD, ESL, and ESOL pull-out teachers, and for push-in teachers working "in-class" to support English language learners.The book's five main sections are geared to the stages of language proficiency, and lessons are divided into 'younger' and 'older' students, spanning kindergarten through grade 8. The authors outline fifty-two lessons that teach students how to make connections, ask questions, visualize (make mental images), infer, determine importance, and synthesize. Each lesson follows a four-part teaching framework: Start Up/Connection--helping students build background and use prior knowledge to connect to the lesson;Give Information--explicitly telling students what they are going to learn and why they are learning it, and then teaching them;Active Involvement--often occurs during the teaching as students practice what they are learning while the teacher checks for understanding and monitors and adjusts instruction;Off-You-Go --opportunities for students to practice what they learned with peers or independently."Making Sense" also explores the stages of language proficiency through descriptions of ten English language learners of different ages. A chart of student characteristics for each stage shows how students demonstrate understanding and outlines the implications for planning instruction. This book will appeal to experienced teachers seeking to expand their repertoire of lessons, as well as new teachers just beginning the adventure of teaching comprehension to English language learners.

Bringing Hygge into the Early Years is a "how-to" guide for every early educator who wishes to bring more calmness and balance into their day, in turn, leaving them feeling empowered to teach and live well. Drawing from the author's experience of embracing the Scandinavian way of living well, "hygge," this book explores how this approach can have a positive impact across your early years setting, from improved mental health and wellbeing, to embracing child-led play and high-quality outdoor provision. With step-by-step guidance on how to embed the approach alongside examples of hygge from early educators around the world, the book is divided into four main parts: Re-balance you The hygge environment Slow teaching Embracing nature Throughout each chapter, case studies and activities provide the opportunity to reflect on existing practice and support you as you make positive changes to both your wellbeing and provision. This guide will be essential reading for all early years professionals, offering further support to improve mental health and wellbeing, as well as valuable tools to lead early years practice with confidence and joy.

Assessment is the daily life of a teacher; designing plans, setting questions, giving feedback and grading are all activities that teachers undertake on a regular basis. Yet, the close examination of such activities can be hindered by constraints caused by the context in which different teaching and learning activities occur and an unawareness of the effect that assessment has on the students themselves. This book provides a practical guide on the effective use of assessment. It includes the use of assessment tools and pedagogical design that help students deepen their learning. Major issues on assessment and some excellent examples are presented as a useful resource to university teachers in enhancing teaching and students' learning. It will also be found useful by teachers when implementing various assessment methods. School administrators and teaching development professionals will find the book useful when making decisions related to learning and teaching issues.

Advancing Natural Language Processing in Educational Assessment examines the use of natural language technology in educational testing, measurement, and assessment. Recent developments in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled large-scale educational applications, though scholars and professionals may lack a shared understanding of the strengths and limitations of NLP in assessment as well as the challenges that testing organizations face in implementation. This first-of-its-kind book provides evidence-based practices for the use of NLP-based approaches to automated text and speech scoring, language proficiency assessment, technology-assisted item generation, gamification, learner feedback, and beyond. Spanning historical context, validity and fairness issues, emerging technologies, and implications for feedback and personalization, these chapters represent the most robust treatment yet about NLP for education measurement researchers, psychometricians, testing professionals, and policymakers.

This book presents a mobile technology capacity building framework that offers academics, students, and practitioners involved in workplace education a deeper understanding of, and practical guidance on, how mobile technology can enhance professional learning. Approaching professional and workplace learning as a hybrid space in which work, learning and technology meet, the book discusses the value of mobile technology in shaping professional education, particularly during student placements. The framework focuses on staying professional and safe, considering issues of time and place, planning learning activities, initiating dialogue, networking, creating learning opportunities on-the-go, and deepening reflection. It is designed to assist students and their educators to use mobile technology knowledgeably and responsibly, and to help bridge the gap between university learning and workplace practice. This book also contributes to a better understanding of the interconnectedness between learning, practice and technology. It demonstrates how to enhance learning and working with mobile technology by drawing on two perspectives: the 'professional-plus' and the 'deliberate professional'.

This volume is important because despite various external representations, such as analogies, metaphors, and visualizations being commonly used by physics teachers, educators and researchers, the notion of using the pedagogical functions of multiple representations to support teaching and learning is still a gap in physics education. The research presented in the three sections of the book is introduced by descriptions of various psychological theories that are applied in different ways for designing physics teaching and learning in classroom settings. The following chapters of the book illustrate teaching and learning with respect to applying specific physics multiple representations in different levels of the education system and in different physics topics using analogies and models, different modes, and in reasoning and representational competence. When multiple representations are used in physics for teaching, the expectation is that they should be successful. To ensure this is the case, the implementation of representations should consider design principles for using multiple representations. Investigations regarding their effect on classroom communication as well as on the learning results in all levels of schooling and for different topics of physics are reported. The book is intended for physics educators and their students at universities and for physics teachers in schools to apply multiple representations in physics in a productive way.

"Mary Kooya (TM)s Telling Stories in Book Clubs gives us a compelling, provocative, and insightful picture of teachers reading, talking, and learning together. By weaving together the responses of the novice teachersa (TM) book club, the experienced teachersa (TM) book club, and her own thoughtful analyses, Kooy has documented what teacher learning looks like from the inside. This book is a must read for all those interested in professional development across the lifespan."
Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Boston College

"Kooya (TM)s narrative about book clubs as learning communities makes a significant contribution to both research and practice. Tying together reading, teaching and learning, the book gives us a superb example of how to nurture the intellectual and relational needs for continuous teacher growth and development. The book is a must for teachers, researchers and policymakers!"
Ann Lieberman, emeritus professor from Teachers College, Columbia University and Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

"Mary Kooy is a gifted writer and teacher. She takes the obvious truth that we read books with other people and turns it into a compelling work of professional development. We see the communities emerge and coalesce. We see the self-reflective questioning that is at the heart of all good teaching take shape through interaction and nurturing."
From the Foreword by Jo Anne Pagano, Colgate University

In the coming decades, the general public will be required ever more often to understand complex environmental issues, evaluate proposed environmental plans, and understand how individual decisions affect the environment at local to global scales. Thus it is of fundamental importance to ensure that higher quality education about these ecological issues raises the environmental literacy of the general public. In order to achieve this, teachers need to be trained as well as classroom practice enhanced. This volume focuses on the integration of environmental education into science teacher education. The book begins by providing readers with foundational knowledge of environmental education as it applies to the discipline of science education. It relates the historical and philosophical underpinnings of EE, as well as current trends in the subject that relate to science teacher education. Later chapters examine the pedagogical practices of environmental education in the context of science teacher education. Case studies of environmental education teaching and learning strategies in science teacher education, and instructional practices in K-12 science classrooms, are included. This book shares knowledge and ideas about environmental education pedagogy and serves as a reliable guide for both science teacher educators and K-12 science educators who wish to insert environmental education into science teacher education. Coverage includes everything from the methods employed in summer camps to the use of podcasting as a pedagogical aid. Studies have shown that schools that do manage to incorporate EE into their teaching programs demonstrate significant growth in student achievement as well as improved student behavior. This text argues that the multidisciplinary nature of environmental education itself requires problem-solving, critical thinking and literacy skills that benefit students' work right across the curriculum.

This volume presents current thoughts, research, and findings that were presented at a summit focusing on energy as a cross-cutting concept in education, involving scientists, science education researchers and science educators from across the world. The chapters cover four key questions: what should students know about energy, what can we learn from research on teaching and learning about energy, what are the challenges we are currently facing in teaching students this knowledge, and what needs be done to meet these challenges in the future?
Energy is one of the most important ideas in all of science and it is useful for predicting and explaining phenomena within every scientific discipline. The challenge for teachers is to respond to recent policies requiring them to teach not only about energy as a disciplinary idea but also about energy as an analytical framework that cuts across disciplines. Teaching energy as a crosscutting concept can equip a new generation of scientists and engineers to think about the latest cross-disciplinary problems, and it requires a new approach to the idea of energy.
This book examines the latest challenges of K-12 teaching about energy, including how a comprehensive understanding of energy can be developed. The authors present innovative strategies for learning and teaching about energy, revealing overlapping and diverging views from scientists and science educators. The reader will discover investigations into the learning progression of energy, how understanding of energy can be examined, and proposals for future directions for work in this arena.
Science teachers and educators, science education researchers and scientists themselves will all find the discussions and research presented in this book engaging and informative.

The challenges teacher educators are now facing are of a different nature from those of the past few decades. They have taken on an urgency and a magnitude not witnessed before. Strict government control of education is increasing, the social problems in the schools are more severe, the budget restrictions we face in the university are greater, and the public disillusionment with education, in general, is more than just a passing malaise. This period will be crucial to the future of teacher education; we need to rally together to examine our practice, renew our programs accordingly, collaborate with others, and offer examples of programs that do make a difference.This volume describes the systematic efforts of committed and creative teacher educators to improve their teacher education programs. It describes the accomplishments of individuals (and in part the programs in which they work) who have overcome many of the hurdles teacher educators typically face.

This definitive resource covers every aspect of teaching in higher education. Particular emphasis is placed on the two main concerns facing professors in North America and the UK today; the growing emphasis on the quality of college teaching and, more specifically, the increasingly demanding nature of the profession, whereby lecturers are forced to teach more students on a greater number of courses. Pons' practical advice is supported throughout by research evidence.

Contents:
1. Introduction 2. Areas of Provision in the Early Years Settings 3. The Social and Cooperational Play Continuum 4. Using the Social Play Continuum 5. Scaffolding the Growth of Sociability and Cooperation 6. Literacy and Numeracy 7. Emotional Well-being, Making Choices, Time to Learn

The book is a collective investigation of the structuring of theses in education, the social sciences and other disciplines that commonly do not follow the standard procedures of the scientific method. To help research students design a structure for their own thesis and liberate their investigations from the constraints associated with the use of the conventional structure, it explains how the structures adopted were designed to suit the topic, methodology and paradigm. It also provides a wide range of examples to draw upon, which suit a broad spectrum of theory, methodological approaches, research methods and paradigms. Additionally, by analyzing the methodologies and paradigms, and reviewing the methodological and paradigmatic spectrum, it offers a significant contribution to the way research is conceptualized. The book addresses a number of key questions faced by students, supervisors and examiners: *Why do examiners often find it difficult to read work in non-scientific disciplines when theses are structured in accordance with the conventional scientific method? *Why do students in non-scientific disciplines struggle to write up the outcomes of their research in the conventional structure? *What alternative thesis structures can be devised to better suit the wide range of methods? *Which theories and paradigms are commonly followed in education and the social sciences and how do these perspectives influence the research process? *What methods, theories and paradigms are commonly adopted by education and social science students and what problems do these pose when students write their theses?

The K-12 Educator's Data Guidebook is a comprehensive field guide for school professionals learning to use data. "Non-data people," rejoice! Requiring no prior proficiency in data tools and programming, this book validates the implicit challenges of learning to use data to empower educators and features original real-world examples from in-service educators to illustrate common problem-solving. Each chapter uses stories, humor, and a human approach to set the tone for a safe and fun learning experience. Through this highly practical foundation, everyday educators can better engage school initiatives, professional development, and instructional challenges that require competent data use for improving school systems.

Digital Learning in High-Needs Schools examines the challenges and affordances that arise when high-needs school communities integrate educational technologies into their unique settings. Although remote, blended, and networked learning are ubiquitous today, a number of cultural, economic, and political realities-from the digital divide and digital literacy to poverty and language barriers-affect our most vulnerable and under-resourced teachers and students. This book uses critical theory to compassionately scrutinize and unpack the systemic issues that impact high-needs schools' implementation of digital learning tools. Incisive sociocultural analyses across fifteen original chapters explore the intersection of society, technology, people, politics, and education in high-needs school contexts. Informed by real-world cases pertaining to technology infrastructure, formative feedback, Universal Design for Learning, and more, these chapters illuminate how best practices emerge from culturally responsive and context-specific foundations.