Today's teachers are expected to meet the needs of a range of diverse and multicultural learners in their classrooms, ensuring that they create favourable conditions for learning. This can be a daunting task, particularly for beginners, as it is only through teaching practice that student teachers develop important professional knowledge about themselves, fellow teachers, learners, their communities and the teaching profession as a whole. Teaching practice in an African context is an essential guide for both students and experienced teachers, providing the insight and skills they need to navigate South African schools. Teaching practice in an African context is informed by the principles of Africanisation and ubuntu, and is written in a clear, conversational style. It encourages reflection on the various practical aspects of teaching, leading to better education practice and thus improving performance. Teaching practice in an African context is aimed at undergraduate education students as well as qualified teachers already in practice.

The recent imperative for online teaching has brought many educational challenges to the fore. Featuring current topics such as accessibility, diversity, and mobile access, this guide contains everything a teacher needs to make a great online course in one read. The author provides step by step instructions for coding classes, appendices with relevant laws and a copyright checklist, a resource list for online course design and a bibliography of theory and applied pedagogy. In addition, she shares techniques to improve engagement for both students and instructors. Professors, instructors, and librarians in higher education teaching online, hybrid or flex courses that are looking for ways to build interesting classes for a diverse student body will find inspiration and direction in Creating Inclusive and Engaging Online Courses.

An effective sixth grade workbook that provides daily social and emotional learning (SEL) activities to help students explore emotions, actions, relationships, and decision making. The daily activities connect to the CASEL competencies, mindfulness, and key affective education initiatives. This SEL workbook makes at-home learning, whole class instruction, or small group support, quick and easy. Help students build self-awareness, analyze relationships, discover diverse perspectives, and apply what they have learned with engaging lessons. The use of fiction and nonfiction text allows for self-reflection and growth. Parents appreciate the teacher-approved activity books that keep their child engaged and learning. Great for homeschooling, to reinforce learning at school, and build connections between home and school. Teachers rely on the daily practice workbooks to save them valuable time. The ready to implement activities are perfect to introduce SEL topics for discussion.

Participation in a short sensory motor circuit prepares children to engage effectively with the day ahead. Behavioural clues such as fidgeting, poor concentration, excessive physical contact or overall lethargy can indicate that a child is finding it difficult to connect with the learning process. "Sensory Circuits" are a great way to energise or settle children into the school day.

A clear and comprehensive guide to evaluating and supporting instructional coaches and coaching programs, including how to recruit, hire, and retain effective coaches. With sound practices in place to evaluate coaching programs, instructional coaches will become better partners, teachers will become better mentors, and students will become better learners.Few evaluation systems are specifically geared toward coaching roles. Ensuring that school districts have accurate information about both coaches and coaching programs is crucial to guide improvement in supporting classrooms, as well as in ensuring accountability. With sound evaluation processes in place, districts can effectively evaluate instructional coaches and coaching programs and use data to set goals. A joint publication of ASCD and One Fine Bird Press.

How do you take the passion and chatter that K-5 students bring to the classroom and turn it into conversation skills that make them better learners? Academic conversation can help hone speaking and listening, critical thinking, and social-emotional skills, as well as deepen content knowledge. But despite its effectiveness, this kind of purposeful, student-led discussion is rarely taught or used at the elementary level. The mystery for teachers is how to support students at various stages of development and build an environment of trust that lets them cultivate these skills. In Demystifying Discussion, veteran teacher Jennifer Orr gives elementary school teachers a primer on teaching students to engage in student-led academic conversation. The strategies, sample assessments, and example conversations in this book show you how to help young learners get better at sharing, exploring, and synthesizing their individual and collective thinking. You'll also learn how to manage different perspectives and disagreements among students. This is a book to use all year long to improve classroom discussion, hone students' skills (and your own), and enhance students' overall learning throughout their time in school and beyond.

It's time to make your mental bandwidth work for you. Being an educator is more stressful than ever, and teachers and administrators must constantly shift gears to stay on top of the newest initiatives and students' ever-changing needs. Educator Bandwidth: How to Reclaim Your Energy, Passion, and Time provides the tools and strategies to reduce stress, avoid burnout, and regain the time that gets lost to interruptions, temptations, competing demands, and task-switching. The first step is to understand how much stress is weighing on your own mental bandwidth. Professional development experts Jane A. G. Kise and Ann Holm have developed the Brain Energy and Bandwidth Survey to help you self-assess the six key factors that contribute to bandwidth: Balance between priorities Filtering through possibilities Mental habits that improve focus Physical habits that fuel the brain Connection with others Workload and time management Kise and Holm combine the latest neuroscience research with their own extensive experience working with educators to bring the most effective strategies and habits that help you manage your mental bandwidth and prioritize drains on mental energy. When you can establish good habits, focus on what's possible within your locus of control, and balance priorities, you can improve your educator bandwidth and feel more engaged, centered, and effective in your work.

What if you had a collaborative process of looking at student data that could pinpoint student gaps in learning and suggest effective strategies to close those gaps? What if you knew not only what you should start doing to enhance student learning, but also what you should stop doing because it hasn't given you the hoped-for results? Enter Achievement Teams. This is not another program that's here today and gone tomorrow; it's a timeless approach that any school or district can replicate that focuses on the most significant variable in student achievement: teaching. In Achievement Teams, Steve Ventura and Michelle Ventura offer a framework based on John Hattie's Visible Learning research that makes teacher collaboration more efficient, rigorous, satisfying, and effective. Think of it as a systematic treasure hunt for best practices using real data on your students. The authors walk you through the Achievement Teams four-step meeting protocol: In Step 1, teams focus on the evidence from a pre-assessment to provide specific feedback to students and teachers about concepts and skills that students did and did not learn. In Step 2, teams use that evidence to establish SMART goals for both teachers and students. In Step 3, teams summarize the collected data and make inferences around students' mastery levels. In Step 4, teachers select high-impact strategies directly targeted to student needs. A post-assessment reveals what did and didn't work. The authors provide a plethora of resources along the way, including reflection activities to extend your thinking and a variety of helpful downloadable templates designed to facilitate the work. If you're a teacher or leader who is interested in maximizing student achievement, this book is for you.

Student learning communities (SLCs) are more than just a different way of doing group work. Like the professional learning communities they resemble, SLCs provide students with a structured way to solve problems, share insight, and help one another continually develop new skills and expertise. With the right planning and support, dynamic collaborative learning can thrive everywhere. In this book, educators Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Almarode explain how to create and sustain student learning communities by: Designing group experiences and tasks that encourage dialogue. Fostering the relational conditions that advance academic, social, and emotional development. Providing explicit instruction on goal setting and opportunities to practice progress monitoring. Using thoughtful teaming practices to build cognitive, metacognitive, and emotional regulation skills. Teaching students to seek, give, and receive feedback that amplifies their own and others' learning. Developing the specific leadership skills and strategies that promote individual and group success. Examples from face-to-face and virtual K-12 classrooms help to illustrate what SLCs are, and teacher voices testify to what they can achieve. No more hoping the group work you're assigning will be good enough-or that collaboration will be its own reward. No more crossing your fingers for productive outcomes or struggling to keep order, assess individual student contributions, and ensure fairness. Student Learning Communities shows you how to equip your students with what they need to learn in a way that is truly collective, makes them smarter together than they would be alone, creates a more positive classroom culture, and enables continuous academic and social-emotional growth.

We want students to master academic standards, and we want them to be confident, adaptive, and socially responsible. Above all, we want them to find meaning and satisfaction in their lives. Achieving these goals requires a concerted focus on the social-emotional skills that empower students in and beyond the classroom. In Teaching to Empower, Debbie Zacarian and Michael Silverstone explore what an empowered student looks like in our increasingly diverse contemporary schools and prompt educators to examine their own relationship to empowerment. The book's evidence-based strategies and authentic examples show you how to foster an inclusive culture of agency, self-confidence, and collaboration that will give each of your students-regardless of race, culture, language, socioeconomic status, abilities, sexuality, or gender-the opportunity, responsibility, and tools to become an active learner, thoughtful community member, and engaged global citizen. Whether you're a preservice teacher, a classroom novice, or a veteran, you'll find the practical guidance you'll need to: Create inclusive and empowering physical learning spaces. Set up self-directed learning and promote positive interdependence. Promote student self-reflection. Teach the skills of collaboration. Foster the self-advocacy that fuels deeper, more autonomous learning. Partner more effectively with families and the community to support student empowerment.

An effective first grade workbook that provides daily social and emotional learning (SEL) activities to help students explore emotions, actions, relationships, and decision making. The daily activities connect to the CASEL competencies, mindfulness, and key affective education initiatives. This SEL workbook makes at-home learning, whole class instruction, or small group support, quick and easy. Help students build self-awareness, analyze relationships, discover diverse perspectives, and apply what they have learned with engaging lessons. The use of fiction and nonfiction text allows for self-reflection and growth. Parents appreciate the teacher-approved activity books that keep their child engaged and learning. Great for homeschooling, to reinforce learning at school, and build connections between home and school. Teachers rely on the daily practice workbooks to save them valuable time. The ready to implement activities are perfect to introduce SEL topics for discussion.

The book includes the traditional foci of philosophy, sociology, psychology, and teaching and learning, and emphasises how these foci influence the practice of teaching. Classic theories, that informed and continue to inform teacher education, have dominated the engagement within education but this book shifts focus to current research and innovative theories that have evolved to promote teaching and learning in a challenging and complex educational context. Hence, this book makes a deliberate attempt to map out influential classical theories that have informed the study of Education as a backdrop to explore how contemporary theories are currently influencing teaching and learning.

Want to make your instruction more equitable and effective, more interesting, and more fun? It's time to try flexible grouping. Unlike traditional grouping, which typically puts like with like or combines students without regard to the best way to promote their individual growth, flexible grouping is both purposeful and fluid, regularly combining and recombining different students in different ways to pursue a wide range of academic and affective goals. In this comprehensive guide to flexible grouping, author Kristina J. Doubet shares a staged implementation approach that takes students from simple partner set-ups designed to build cooperative skills to complex structures ideal for interest and readiness-informed academic exploration. She covers the key factors to consider when forming groups and highlights how this approach to organizing learning can help you disrupt rigid tracking, deliver targeted instruction, connect to student interests, boost collaboration, and build community.Focused, practical, and written for teachers of all subjects and grade levels, The Flexibly Grouped Classroom provides: Dozens of strategies to expand your instructional repertoire, along with links to additional models and resources; Guidance on setting the tone and expectations for group tasks, ideas for student role distribution, and tips for monitoring progress, noise, and time; A planning template and sample grouping plans for an elementary and secondary classroom; and Specific troubleshooting advice to help you navigate common complications. Choosing to make your classroom a flexibly grouped one means positioning every student to learn better-without feeling superior or inferior, without being overburdened or underchallenged-and to discover for themselves how much farther they can go together than they ever could alone.

History and Geography are dynamic and diverse disciplines, but disciplines that always displayed integrative abilities and potential because human actions in spaces and places matter in both. In History, the human past concerns time and space. In Geography, space and spatiality dominate and can include humanity. Teaching and learning History and Geography in the South African classroom is the first textbook to consider History and Geography as interconnected disciplines in the South African education context. This book guides readers through developments in the History and Geography fields, new focus areas and some refreshed teaching and learning possibilities unlocked by technology. Drawing on prodigious research, experts in these fields impart recommendations for teaching, understanding, learning and assessing these subjects purposefully. Teaching and learning History and Geography in the South African classroom is aimed at educators and prospective educators in the Social Sciences, History and Geography programmes. Elize van Eeden is a professor at North-West University, and chairs the subject group History at the Vaal Triangle Campus. She served as chairperson of the South African Society for History Teaching (20092017) and is editor or assistant editor of three peer-reviewed journals accredited by the Department of Higher Education. She has authored more than 80 peer-reviewed articles, and has contributed chapters in 18 books as either co-writer or editor. Elize has authored 12 History books, one being the textbook, Didactical guidelines for teaching history in a changing South Africa (1999). Her main research interest is regional history in multidisciplinary research environments and its application in regional history in teaching. Pieter Warnich is a senior lecturer in History and Social Sciences Education at the North-West University. He is chairperson of the subject group History and Social Sciences Education at the Potchefstroom Campus. His main areas of specialisation are teaching, learning and assessment and History education curriculum studies development. Pieter has published widely in these fields where he authored peer-reviewed articles and chapters in books. He is co-editor of the book Outcomes-based assessment for South African teachers (2012). Currently he is editor of the accredited open-access History teaching journal, Yesterday&Today.

In Forces of Influence, Fred Ende and Meghan Everette contend that schoolwide success starts with relationships-not only between students and adults, but also among all adults up and down the education hierarchy. It's by leveraging these relationships that educators can influence outcomes and effect real change. But how can educators make sure they exert their influence astutely and sensitively, navigating education's priorities and pressures while keeping their work focused on the mission? This thought-provoking book helps readers navigate this tricky terrain, introducing four ""forces,"" or levels, of influence and explaining how educators can use them to support one another's practice and push for positive outcomes for all learners. The authors: Explore each of the four forces-the pull, the push, the shove, and the nudge-and explain why they work and what research shows about their effectiveness. Introduce the Forces of Influence Leadership Matrix (FILM), a framework that identifies how the four forces connect and helps readers determine when to use which force, with whom, and how. Provide advice on how to course-correct by switching and layering the forces for positive results-and how to recover from setbacks. Offer copious tools to support this work, including role-plays, self-assessments, templates, and questions to spur reflection and action taking. Everything educators do requires them to build, sustain, and leverage relationships. With this guide, they no longer have to wing it.

An effective third grade workbook that provides daily social and emotional learning (SEL) activities to help students explore emotions, actions, relationships, and decision making. The daily activities connect to the CASEL competencies, mindfulness, and key affective education initiatives. This SEL workbook makes at-home learning, whole class instruction, or small group support, quick and easy. Help students build self-awareness, analyze relationships, discover diverse perspectives, and apply what they have learned with engaging lessons. The use of fiction and nonfiction text allows for self-reflection and growth. Parents appreciate the teacher-approved activity books that keep their child engaged and learning. Great for homeschooling, to reinforce learning at school, and build connections between home and school. Teachers rely on the daily practice workbooks to save them valuable time. The ready to implement activities are perfect to introduce SEL topics for discussion.

At the heart of education are two fundamental questions: What should we teach? and How should we teach it? Educators striving to design and deliver the best-possible learning experiences can feel overwhelmed by the possibilities. To help them make these critical decisions, Angela Di Michele Lalor identifies five key priorities of a curriculum that matters-practices, deep thinking, social and emotional learning, civic engagement and discourse, and equity. Emphasizing the importance of schools' determining their own path forward, Lalor provides a framework for action by * Describing how each element contributes to a rigorous, meaningful curriculum, * Providing strategies for incorporating each element into daily instruction and assessment, and * Offering reflection activities to identify strengths, needs, and possible next steps. With insightful observations, research-based background information, and real-world examples from a variety of schools and districts, Making Curriculum Matter presents teachers and administrators with a path for reaching their most important overall goal: to provide comprehensive, meaningful learning to all students.

Just how should we teach entrepreneurship? This important book provides many of the answers to this challenging question. In developing the first signature pedagogy for entrepreneurship education, Colin Jones unites the contexts of enterprise and education at the intersection of scholarship, transformational learning and student engagement. Good teaching for entrepreneurship is shown to emerge both from the educator and the students' interest. For the educator, a process of scholarly leading is required to support student interest - from the alternate perspective, students require a willingness to welcome uncertainty and challenge the existing boundaries to effectively develop a capacity for self-negotiated action. A key guide for all entrepreneurship lecturers and tutors, written for all teaching contexts, this book will challenge you to teach 'who you are', as well as what you know.

Every learner and every teacher is a unique blend of personal characteristics and background factors that change with time and context, and affect the experience of living and developing. Traditionally, the education of children with disabilities focused on the nature of specific conditions in an attempt to alleviate barriers to learning. The disability, and not the impact of the impairment on participation at school or at home, was emphasised. The current focus is on the strengths, attitudes and positive functioning of children within meaningful contexts. Believe that all can achieve addresses inclusion as the foundation for education in an attempt to celebrate diversity in the classroom, to capitalise on the strengths each learner brings to the learning-teaching dyad, and to welcome every family member as part of the broader classroom community. Believe that all can achieve embraces the core values of the South African Constitution - freedom, dignity and equality. It shares best practice, evidence-based techniques and strategies in an effort to build a deeper understanding of the core issues. Narratives, case studies, screening checklists, engaging illustrations and examples enable the teacher to translate theory into actuality in the classroom. The chapters on challenging behaviours; intellectual, learning, physical and sensory disabilities; autistic spectrum disorders, and medical conditions add a wealth of information and a ready reference. Believe that all can achieve is aimed at students and teachers in the field of inclusive education. Seeing children with disabilities at work has taught me that there are many things they do that I thought they could not do. From this experience I now know that I would have no problem employing a person who is mentally or physically challenged. I ask God to help all of us have a better understanding and to see them as normal. I also ask that inclusion becomes part of many schools because I truly believe we can all benefit from inclusion. A mother of a typically developing child in an inclusive school. Everything must be done in the best interests of the child. Bill of Rights, 1996

Some great teachers are born, but most are self-made. And the way to make yourself a great teacher is to learn to think and act like one. In this updated second edition of the best-selling Never Work Harder Than Your Students, Robyn R. Jackson reaffirms that every teacher can become a master teacher. The secret is not a specific strategy or technique, nor it is endless hours of prep time. It's developing a master teacher mindset-rigorously applying seven principles to your teaching until they become your automatic response: Start where you students are. Know where your students are going. Expect to get your students there. Support your students along the way. Use feedback to help you and your students get better. Focus on quality rather than quantity. Never work harder than your students. In her conversational and candid style, Jackson explains the mastery principles and how to start using them to guide planning, instruction, assessment, and classroom management. She answers questions, shares stories from her own practice and work with other teachers, and provides all-new, empowering advice on navigating external evaluation. There's even a self-assessment to help you identify your current levels of mastery and take control of your own practice. Teaching is hard work, and great teaching means doing the right kind of hard work: the kind that pays off. Join tens of thousands of teachers around the world who have embarked on their journeys toward mastery. Discover for yourself the difference that Jackson's principles will make in your classroom and for your students.

South African classrooms reflect our diverse cultures and rich languages. This is a practical tool to help teachers and teachers in training understand the importance of South Africa's linguistic heritage in our schools today. This guide will empower educators to reach out to learners and parents from different linguistic backgrounds and to harness the power of diversity in their classrooms.