Are you ready to plan your best lessons ever? With so many demands and so much content available for teachers, we need to put a higher value on an often-overlooked skill: planning learning experiences that will both engage and inspire our students, by design, over time. Planning Powerful Instruction is your go-to guide for transforming student outcomes through stellar instructional planning. Its seven-step framework-the EMPOWER model-gives you techniques proven to help students develop true insight and understanding. You'll have at your fingertips: the real reasons why students engage-and what you must do to ensure they do a framework to help you create, plan, and teach the most effective units and lessons in any subject area more than 50 actionable strategies to incorporate right away suggestions for tailoring units for a wide range of learners downloadable, ready-to-go tools for planning and teaching Whether you are a classroom teacher, an instructional leader, or a pre-service teacher, Planning Powerful Instruction will forever change the way you think about how you teach and the unique value you bring to your learners.

Leave instruction to the experts! Uncommon Core puts us on high-alert about some outright dangerous misunderstandings looming around so-called "standards-aligned" instruction, then shows us how to steer past them-all in service of meeting the real intent of the Common Core. It counters with teaching suggestions that are true to the research and true to our students, including how: Reader-based approaches can complement text-based ones Prereading activities can help students meet the strategic and conceptual demands of texts Strategy instruction can result in a careful and critical analysis of text while providing transferable understandings Inquiry units around essential questions can generate meaningful conversation and higher-order thinking

This exciting new 6-12 literature series provides bridges and connections across ideas, strong skill instruction, and amazing literature.