How do we truly help students achieve their fullest potential? What are the roles of motivation, deliberate practice, and coaching in developing talent and abilities in students? This hands-on guide examines each of these elements in detail providing definitions, relevant research, discussions, examples, and practical steps to take with students in elementary, middle, and high school. The authors examine cutting-edge research on world-class performance and distill information specifically for educators. Offering guidelines to help teachers spot and encourage students' exceptional aptitudes, passionate interests, and special strengths, they show concretely how to promote greater motivation for learning and success. This foundational book infuses new ideas into established teaching. User-friendly chapters include thought-provoking insights, vignettes of how notable talents were developed, teaching and learning tips, grade-level examples, and discussion questions.

Educators know that problem-based learning answers that perennial student question: ""When will I ever use this in real life?"" Faced with a meaty problem to solve, students finally ""get"" why they need to learn the content and are energized to do so. But here's the exciting part: problem-based learning doesn't require weeks of study or an end-of-year project. In this book, Brian Pete and Robin Fogarty show how you can use problem-based learning as a daily approach to helping students learn authentic and relevant content and skills. They explain how to engage students in each of the seven steps in the problem-based learning model, so students learn how to develop good questions, launch their inquiry, gather information, organize their information, create evidence, present their findings, and assess their learning. Using practical examples, they also describe how to help students master these seven important thinking skills: develop, analyze, reason, understand, solve, apply, and evaluate. To put all this in context, the authors offer seven ""PBL in a Nutshell"" lessons that can easily be incorporated in a single classroom period. Depth of thinking and ease of implementation this is problem-based learning at its best.

This new book from a leading staff developer gathers together a wealth of tools, strategies and advice on developing, delivering and coaching professional development. With so many new initiatives and requirements to be incorporated into classroom teaching and assessment, this resource gives school leaders, staff developers and consultants everything they need to successfully guide staff to greater effectiveness and ultimately benefit student achievement. The book is built around four critical roles of the staff developer, and provides the knowledge base, skills, and tools for success. Photocopiables for helping staff process and transfer new learning are also included. This resource also presents important information about customizing professional development for the needs of adult learners, sustaining and extending new strengths, and promoting the critical transfer of new learning into practice. Strategies and questions to promote reflective processing are threaded throughout. From Staff Room to Classroom offers readers guidance as well as practical know-how and how-to distilled from the career experience of a distinguished international professional developer.

If you are convinced of the importance of teaching critical and creative thinking skills in the classroom, this is a must-have resource. Twenty-four skills are presented along with ready-to-use sample lessons.