Real and Relevant provides teachers with a realistic, integrated, and inspirational guide for how to lead service and project-based learning with their students. By engaging in service or project-based learning with students, you are doing nothing less than changing the world for the better. By letting your students explore and begin to solve real life problems, they acquire deeper knowledge, new skills, newfound motivation, responsibility and engagement.

Real and Relevant provides teachers with a realistic, integrated, and inspirational guide for how to lead service and project-based learning with their students. By engaging in service or project-based learning with students, you are doing nothing less than changing the world for the better. By letting your students explore and begin to solve real life problems, they acquire deeper knowledge, new skills, newfound motivation, responsibility and engagement.

Change the World with Service Learning is written in a clear and easy-to-use style designed for the teacher integrating Service Learning into the curriculum. The book guides educators from all content areas and grade levels to create meaningful Service Learning projects with their students by providing a no-fluff, step-by-step, teacher-to-teacher description of how to create, plan, teach, and celebrate Service Learning which meets and exceeds local, district, and national curricular expectations. The tools presented in Change the World with Service Learning will lead to projects which can have a lasting and positive impact on both the participating students, as well as those they are designed to serve.

Personalized Learning in the Middle Grades shows how teachers in grades 5-8 can leverage the use of personalized learning plans (PLPs) to increase student agency and engagement, helping youth to establish learning goals aligned with their interests and assess their own learning-particularly around essential skills that cut across disciplines. Drawing on their research and work with fifty schools in Vermont, where PLPs are used statewide, the authors show how personalized learning aligns with effective middle grades practice and provide in-depth examples of how educators have implemented PLPs in a wide range of schools representing different demographics and grade configurations. They also highlight five critical roles for teachers in personalized learning environments-as empowerer, scaffolder, scout, assessor, and community builder-and illustrate how teachers can adapt the PLP process for their own unique contexts. Grounded in experience and full of engaging examples, artifacts, and tools, the book builds on the emerging field of personalized learning and connects it with the developmental needs of middle schoolers to provide a unique and valuable resource for individual classroom teachers, teacher teams, school leaders, teacher-educators, and others.