Classroom management is traditionally a matter of encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad by doling out rewards and punishments. But studies show that when educators empower students to address and correct misbehavior among themselves, positive results are longer lasting and more wide reaching. In Better Than Carrots or Sticks, longtime educators and best-selling authors Dominique Smith, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey provide a practical blueprint for creating a cooperative and respectful classroom climate in which students and teachers work through behavioral issues together. After a comprehensive overview of the roots of the restorative practices movement in schools, the authors explain how to: Establish procedures and expectations for student behavior that encourage the development of positive interpersonal skills. Develop a nonconfrontational rapport with even the most challenging students. Implement conflict resolution strategies that prioritize relationship building and mutual understanding over finger-pointing and retribution. Rewards and punishments may help to maintain order in the short term, but they're at best superficially effective and at worst counterproductive. This book will prepare teachers at all levels to ensure that their classrooms are welcoming, enriching, and constructive environments built on collective respect and focused on student achievement.

Now in its 3rd edition, Better Learning Through Structured Teaching is the definitive guide to the gradual release of responsibility-an instructional framework any teacher can use to help students to be more successful and self-directed learners.To gradually release responsibility is to equip students with what they need to master content and develop new competencies. On a day-to-day basis, it means delivering lessons intentionally structured to incorporate four interrelated phases: * Focused Instruction ("I do it") that sets students up for cognitive apprenticeship by establishing lesson purpose, modeling strategies and skills, and sharing information and insight. * Guided Instruction ("We do it together") that incorporates targeted prompts, cues, and questions to scaffold understanding. * Collaborative Learning ("You do it together") that allows students to consolidate and extend understanding through accountable group tasks built on discussion and cooperative problem solving. * Independent Learning ("You do it alone") that provides students opportunities to practice and apply the skills and knowledge they've acquired to create authentic products and ask new questions. Authors Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey detail the components of each phase, sharing proven strategies and real-life examples. You'll find a variety of useful tips for classroom implementation, along with new guidance on teacher credibility, social-emotional learning, and embedding assessment throughout all four phases. No matter what grade level or subject you teach, Better Learning Through Structured Teaching is an essential resource for improving your practice and empowering your students.

Winner of AM&P EXCEL Bronze Award Your Students, My Students, Our Students explores the hard truths of current special education practice and outlines five essential disruptions to the status quo. Authors Lee Ann Jung, Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and Julie Kroener show you how to: Establish a school culture that champions equity and inclusion. Rethink the long-standing structure of least restrictive environment and the resulting service delivery. Leverage the strengths of all educators to provide appropriate support and challenge. Collaborate on the delivery of instruction and intervention. Honor the aspirations of each student and plan accordingly. To realize authentic and equitable inclusion, we must relentlessly and collectively pursue change. This book-written not for ""special educators"" or ""general educators"" but for all educators-addresses the challenges, maps out the solutions, and provides tools and inspiration for the work ahead. Real-life examples of empowerment and success illustrate just what's possible when educators commit to the belief that every student belongs to all of us and all students deserve learning experiences that will equip them to live full and rewarding lives.

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.

What is FIT Teaching? What is a FIT Teacher? The Framework for Intentional and Targeted Teaching (R)-or FIT Teaching (R)-is a research-based, field-tested, and experience-honed process that captures the essentials of the best educational environments. In contrast to restrictive pedagogical prescriptions or formulas, FIT Teaching empowers teachers to adapt the most effective planning, instructional, and assessment practices to their particular context in order to move their students' learning from where it is now to where it should be. To be a FIT Teacher is to make a heroic commitment to learning-not just to the learning of every student in the classroom, but to the professional learning necessary to grow, inspire, and lead. This book introduces the powerful FIT Teaching Tool, which harnesses the FIT Teaching approach and presents a detailed continuum of growth and leadership. It's a close-up look at what intentional and targeting teaching is and what successful teachers do to: Plan with purpose. Cultivate a learning climate. Instruct with intention. Assess with a system. Impact student learning. Designed to foster discussion among educators about what they are doing in the classroom, the FIT Teaching Tool can be used by teachers for self-assessment; by teacher peers for collegial feedback in professional learning communities; by instructional coaches to focus on the skills teachers need both onstage and off; and by school leaders to highlight their teachers' strengths and value. Join authors Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Stefani Arzonetti Hite for an examination of what makes great teachers great, and see how educators at all grade levels and all levels of experience are taking intentional steps toward enhanced professional practice.

For every teacher it's different, but you know who they are for you-the students who are "hard to teach." Maybe they're reading far below grade level. Maybe they're English learners. Maybe they have diagnosed learning disabilities or behavioral issues. Maybe they're underachieving for reasons that are unknown. They have been overlooked or underserved or frustrated, and they're not learning as they should. Until now. Until you. How to Reach the Hard to Teach presents a thoughtful and practical approach to achieving breakthrough success with linguistically and culturally diverse students who struggle in school. Combining elements of the SIOP (R) Model and the FIT Teaching (R) approach, authors Jana Echevarria, Nancy Frey, and Douglas Fisher take stock of what we know about excellent instruction and distill it into five guiding principles: Set high expectations. Provide access to the core curriculum. Use assessment to inform instruction. Attend to language development-both English and academic. Create a supportive classroom climate. You'll learn specific practices associated with each principle and see how real-life teachers are employing these practices in their classrooms so that all students have the opportunity to learn and receive optimal support for that learning. Every teacher has had the experience of seeing a "hard to teach" student in a new light and realizing all he or she might achieve. This book is about shining that light of possibility on the students who challenge us most, interrogating our beliefs, and taking action to ensure they receive the best instruction we have to offer.

Join Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher as they outline a clear-cut, realistic, and rewarding approach to formative assessment. They explain how four discrete steps work in tandem to create a seamless, comprehensive formative assessment system-one that has no beginning and no end. This ongoing approach enhances an active give-and-take relationship between teachers and students to promote learning. Where am I going? Step 1: Feed-up ensures that students understand the purpose of an assignment, task, or lesson, including how they will be assessed. Where am I now? Step 2: Checking for understanding guides instruction and helps determine if students are making progress toward their goals. How am I doing? Step 3: Feedback provides students with valuable and constructive information about their successes and needs. Where am I going next? Step 4: Feed-forward builds on the feedback from step 3 and uses performance data to facilitate student achievement. Dozens of real-life scenarios demonstrate how to apply these steps in your classroom, always focusing on the presence or absence of student learning to guide the action. By enabling teachers and students alike to see more clearly what they need to do for learning to be successful, this approach builds students' competence, confidence, and understanding. No matter what grade level you teach, The Formative Assessment Action Plan will help you make better use of assessment data so you can more quickly adjust instruction to keep every student on the path to success.

The benefits of collaborative learning are well documented-and yet, almost every teacher knows how group work can go wrong: restless students, unequal workloads, lack of accountability, and too little learning for all the effort involved. In this book, educators Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and Sandi Everlove show you how to make all group work productive group work: with all students engaged in the academic content and with each other, building valuable social skills, consolidating and extending their knowledge, and increasing their readiness for independent learning. The key to getting the most out of group work is to match research-based principles of group work with practical action. Classroom examples across grade levels and disciplines illustrate how to: Create interdependence and positive interaction. Model and guide group work. Design challenging and engaging group tasks. Ensure group and individual accountability. Assess and monitor students' developing understanding (and show them how to do the same). Foster essential interpersonal skills, such as thinking with clarity, listening, giving useful feedback, and considering different points of view. The authors also address the most frequently asked questions about group work, including the best ways to form groups, accommodate mixed readiness levels, and introduce collaborative learning routines into the classroom. Throughout, they build a case that productive group work is both an essential part of a gradual release of responsibility instructional model and a necessary part of good teaching practice.

Are we missing the opportunity to reach struggling learners from the very beginning? Are we hastily-and unnecessarily- referring students to intervention programs that substitute for high-quality core instruction? What if we could eliminate the need for intervention programs in the first place? Response to Intervention (RTI) programs are only as powerful and effective as the core instruction on which they're built. High-quality instruction, then, is the key ingredient that helps all students excel, and it's at the heart of Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey's unique approach to the RTI model - Response to Instruction and Intervention, or RTI2. In Enhancing RTI, the authors argue that students learn best when classroom instruction and supplemental intervention mirror each other in both content and purpose. This book provides K-12 teachers with the knowledge and tools they need to implement a cohesive RTI2 system that helps all children learn by proactively addressing their needs. To this end, you will learn how to: Integrate and align core instruction and supplemental intervention. Assess your own classroom instruction, in addition to your students' responses to it. Strengthen existing school improvement efforts within an RTI2 framework. Utilize systematic feedback to raise student achievement. Fisher and Frey maintain that the RTI2 model not only promotes active student learning, but it also, when done right, promotes a culture of hardwired excellence at all levels of instruction.

A teacher presents a lesson, and at the end asks students if they understand the material. The students nod and say they get it. Later, the teacher is dismayed when many of the students fail a test on the material. Why aren't students getting it? And, just as important, why didn't the teacher recognize the problem? In Checking for Understanding, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey show how to increase students' understanding with the help of creative formative assessments. When used regularly, formative assessments enable every teacher to determine what students know and what they still need to learn. Fisher and Frey explore a variety of engaging activities that check for and increase understanding, including interactive writing, portfolios, multimedia presentations, audience response systems, and much more. This new 2nd edition of Checking for Understanding has been updated to reflect the latest thinking in formative assessment and to show how the concepts apply in the context of Fisher and Frey's work on gradual release of responsibility, guided instruction, formative assessment systems, data analysis, and quality instruction.

Passion, vision, relatability-can we ever quantify the facets of successful leadership? Is there sufficient "there-there" behind these feel-good words to transform a school into a culture of learning and bold hope? Yes, and yes! Inspired by John Hattie's impressive research, Fisher, Frey, Lassiter, and Smith bring their trademark clarity to turn aspiration into energized action. For each of the five components that all effective leaders possess-trustworthiness, competence, dynamism, immediacy, and forward-thinking-leaders learn the first steps and bold leaps to mentor others. Each chapter abounds with professional development tools, including: Self-assessments so you know your baseline Pause and ponder questions to envision change REAL features to lead with alacrity Checklists to stay focused and strategic Relevant research to assimilate and share Now more than ever, schools need to be places where openness and trust are baked into every hallway hello and every meeting, so collective talents can take us farther than we ever imagined. Let Leader Credibility be your guide to steering others to that greatness.

50 Instructional Routines to Develop Content Literacy, 3/e helps adolescents read more and read better. Middle and high school teachers can immediately put to use its practical information and classroom examples from science, social studies, English, math, the visual and performing arts, and core electives to improve students' reading, writing, and oral language development. Going above and beyond basic classroom strategies, the instructional routines recommend simple changes to teachers' everyday procedures that foster student comprehension, such as thinking aloud, using question-answer relationships, and teaching with word walls.

Provide students a clear view of what success looks like for any process, task, or product. What does success look like for your students? How will they know if they have learned? This essential component of teaching and learning can be difficult to articulate but is vital to achievement for both teachers and students. The Success Criteria Playbook catapults teachers beyond learning intentions to define clearly what success looks like for every student-whether face-to-face or in a remote learning environment. Designed to be used collaboratively in grade-level, subject area teams-or even on your own-the step-by-step playbook expands teacher understanding of how success criteria can be utilized to maximize student learning and better engage learners in monitoring and evaluating their own progress. Each module is designed to support the creation and immediate implementation of high-quality, high impact success criteria and includes: * Templates that allow for guided and independent study for teachers. * Extensive STEM-focused examples from across the K-12 STEM curriculum to guide teacher learning and practice. * Examples of success criteria applied across learning domains and grades, including high school content, skills, practices, dispositions, and understandings. Ensure equity of access to learning and opportunity for all students by designing and employing high-quality, high-impact success criteria that connect learners to a shared understanding of what success looks like for any given learning intention.

Effective teaching is effective teaching, no matter where it occurs The pandemic teaching of mid-2020 was not really distance learning, but rather crisis teaching. But starting now, teachers have the opportunity to prepare for distance learning with purpose and intent-using what works best to accelerate students' learning all the while maintaining an indelible focus on equity. Harnessing the insights and experience of renowned educators Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie, The Distance Learning Playbook applies the wisdom and evidence of VISIBLE LEARNING (R) research to understand what works best with distance learning. Spanning topics from teacher-student relationships, teacher credibility and clarity, instructional design, assessments, and grading, this comprehensive playbook details the research- and evidence-based strategies teachers can mobilize to deliver high- impact learning in an online, virtual, and distributed environment. This powerful guide includes: Learning Intentions and Success Criteria for each module to track your own learning and model evidence-based teacher practices for meaningful learning A diversity of instructional approaches, including direct instruction, peer learning, and independent work that foster student self-regulation and move learning to deep and transfer levels Discussion of equity challenges associated with distance learning, along with examples of how teachers can work to ensure that equity gains that have been realized are not lost. Special guidance for teachers of young children who are learning from a distance Videos of the authors and teachers discussing a wide variety of distance learning topics Space to write and reflect on current practices and plan future instruction The Distance Learning Playbook is the essential hands-on guide to preparing and delivering distance learning experiences that are truly effective and impactful. To purchase from an Authorized Corwin Distributor click here. A Spanish translation of the Distance Learning Playbook, Grades K-12, Aprendizaje a Distancia Guia, Guia de Preescolar a Bachillerator, can be purchased by contacting Irene Yepez from Editorial Trillas at [email protected].

This interactive playbook provides the language, moves, and evidence-based advice you need to nurture social and emotional learning in yourself, your students, and your school.

Build cohesive PLC+ teams to improve learning outcomes Effective teacher collaboration can amplify student learning and well-being outcomes, increase teacher satisfaction rates, and improve the onboarding of new teachers. Yet developing a cohesive PLC+ team isn’t always so simple. Designed as a companion to PLC+: Better Decisions and Greater Impact by Design and The PLC+ Playbook, this easy-to-use playbook for school leaders provides strategies, techniques, and evidence-based approaches to help leaders foster successful collaboration among teachers and positively impact student learning. Four cross-cutting values are infused within each guiding question: high expectations, activation, individual and collective teacher efficacy, and equity. Building on this framework and drawing from Visible Learning research, the guide offers specific instructional leadership actions and behaviors to promote cohesion in PLC+ teams. Leaders will learn: Contextual information to boost knowledge about effectively engaging with adults Essential information on how to lead PLC+ teams to become strong, interdependent, and productive Leadership tools to support and inspire others to work at optimal levels Examples and insights into time management, decision-making, successes, failures, and learning opportunities Discover how to build social, human, and decisional capital within your organization, equipping teachers with the skills they need to drive school improvement.

Provide the perfect structure and support to develop student independence. Effective scaffolding leads to learner autonomy—but too many educators have been airlifting students to right answers, perpetuating a generation who don’t know how to learn. Yes, we know the sweet spot for learning involves giving our students the right blend of productive failure and productive success, but how to do it is cloaked in misconceptions. How Scaffolding Works unveils the essential moves and methods. Ten interactive modules help every K-12 educator structure support in new ways, including knowing how to: Gradually release responsibility to students through intentional and purposeful scaffolding Design lessons and experiences that attend to the affective, metacognitive, and cognitive aspects of learning Collect data before, during, and after learning, so we can place, move, and take away scaffolds with greater intention Promote independence with front-end scaffolds, distributed scaffolds, back-end scaffolds, peer scaffolds, and fading scaffolds Use a blend of demonstration, modeling, coaching, explaining, questioning and choice Promote purposeful practice—in which learners knows where they’re going and how to get there Perhaps we rush in to rescue learners because the world seems fraught; we want to help our students reach the safety of academic success. Our intentions are good, but it’s time to step back, gradually and purposefully, and let them pilot their own learning.

Build students' confidence and competence with tutoring strategies that spark meaningful, accelerated learning. Tutoring is much more than telling students information. Effective tutoring begins with the strong and caring relationship a tutor establishes with a learner to build trust, fuel motivation, and drive critical learning. How Tutoring Works distills the complexity of strategic moves effective tutors make to build students' confidence and competence. Harnessing decades of Visible Learning (R) research, this easy to read, eye-opening guide details the six essential components of any effective tutoring intervention-establishing a relationship and credibility, addressing student confidence and challenges, setting shared goals, helping a student learn how to learn, teaching and learning content, and establishing a habit of deliberate practice. Indispensable for any educator who intervenes with students, this rich resource includes: Examples of impactful tutoring conversations, including what to say and what not to say when building a relationship with a learner. Specific approaches to use when establishing credibility, addressing challenges to learning, leveraging the relevance of knowledge, setting goals, and ensuring practice. Learning strategies, with effect size, for teaching and learning content, including specific strategies for improving reading, writing, and mathematics. Tips and tools for helping students develop powerful cognitive, metacognitive, and affective study skills. Resources and advice for establishing an effective and transformational tutoring program. Done well, tutoring can repair a student's damaged relationship to learning, address unrealized potential, and alter the course of a young person's life. A strong and nurturing relationship between tutor and learner is key.

More than ever before, as they teach to an increasingly diverse population, educators need a clear, concise guide to designing and implementing responsive curriculum. This book, built around the lessons of classroom teachers, provides the 'how' of instruction design. The first section identifies the most important components of design: addressing standards, designing multiple assessments, identifying richly detailed source materials, and creating interrelated lessons and culminating activities. Section two expands on the needs of diverse learners, and the concluding section contains a completed instructional plan, easily adaptable to your content and grade level.

With How Feedback Works: A Playbook, learn to create a culture of feedback in your classroom with the latest research on teaching, engagement, and assessment.

Straightforward, affordable, and practical, Improving Adolescent Literacy gives all middle and secondary school teachers instructional routines that will allow them to develop the content literacy skills of their students. Chapter-opening vignettes from actual classrooms show readers effective teaching in action and give them a look at how the chapter's instructional approach works within content area teaching. Research-based rationales for each strategy follow the vignettes and provide an in-depth look at how to implement the strategy, along with examples of each strategy across the curriculum. In this 5th Edition, the authors provide new classroom examples from their colleagues across the disciplines as well as new instructional routines that have been researched and validated since the publication of the last edition. Also, this edition has been re-organized, adding three new chapters, to focus on the ways in which teachers can use reading, writing, speaking, and listening in their classes, emphasizing reading and comprehending texts, creating graphic organizers, developing vocabulary knowledge, and writing to learn.

Every teacher wants engaged students. No student wants to be bored. So why isn't every classroom teeming with discussion and activity centred on the day's learning expectations? Engagement by Design gives you a framework for making daily improvements in engaging your students, highlighting opportunities that offer the greatest benefit in the least amount of time. You'll learn how focusing on relationships, clarity, and challenge can make all the difference in forging a real connection with students. Engagement by Design puts you in control of managing your classroom's success and increasing student learning, one motivated student at a time.

We are in this together and will get through this together Parent involvement has always been a vital part of any child's education, but the pandemic and resulting remote instruction require that parents and educators partner at a deeper level. Following the tremendous success of The Distance Learning Playbook, K-12, education authorities Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie have teamed up with New York Times bestselling author and parenting expert Rosalind Wiseman to bring you the consummate guide to support your child's academic, social, and emotional development in any learning environment - while not overwhelming you in the process. This essential guide will arm you with the tools and insight to Create an environment conducive to learning, establish routines, and most importantly, take care of yourself and your child Maximize the time you spend supporting learning by focusing on what is proven to work best in education Help your child develop the cognitive attitudes and habits that foster creativity, critical thinking, and increased responsibility for their learning Support the development of your child's social and emotional learning skills, including the ability to navigate social interactions, build friendships, and regulate emotions at a time when they have never been more important to have, and more challenging to maintain The Distance Learning Playbook for Parents outlines supportive strategies for navigating virtual environments to ensure effective and impactful learning that aligns the needs and expectations of teachers, parents, and students alike.

Radically change the way students learn from texts, extending beyond comprehension to critical reasoning and problem solving. Is your reading comprehension instruction just a pile of strategies? There is no evidence that teaching one strategy at a time, especially with pieces of text that require that readers use a variety of strategies to successfully negotiate meaning, is effective. And how can we extend comprehension beyond simple meaning? Bestselling authors Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Nicole Law propose a new, comprehensive model of reading instruction that goes beyond teaching skills to fostering engagement and motivation. Using a structured, three-pronged approach-skill, will, and thrill-students learn to experience reading as a purposeful act and embrace struggle as a natural part of the reading process. Instruction occurs in three phases: Skill. Holistically developing skills and strategies necessary for students to comprehend text, such as monitoring, predicting, summarizing, questioning, and inferring. Will. Creating the mindsets, motivations, and habits, including goal setting and choice, necessary for students to engage fully with texts. Thrill. Fostering the thrill of comprehension, so that students share their thinking with others or use their knowledge for something else. Comprehension is the structured framework you need to empower students to comprehend text and take action in the world.

Everything you need to create a high-trust, high-achieving learning environment for multilingual students We have never known more than we do now about teaching multilingual students — nevertheless, we teeter on the edge of retreating to old-think practices. The next generation depends upon our getting this right, and this spare, salient guide helps ensure we do. Kids Come in All Languages provides teachers and leaders with all they need to design high-quality curriculum to support multilingual learners. With this book, learn to: Create a low-anxiety, high-expectation classroom climate that gives multilingual students access to engaging grade-level content Plan clear, cohesive lessons and tasks that motivate students to produce language, use critical thinking skills, and access complex texts Offer ample time for student-led talk that ramps up knowledge and amps up a sense of belonging Use heterogeneous, flexible grouping so children acquiring English don’t stall out in fixed-mindset, below-grade level groups And much more Teachers act like tributaries, helping learners access a wider stream of knowledge, and catch the swift current of wanting to learn. It’s time to envision this expansiveness for multilingual students. It’s time to design learning experiences with optimism for their futures.