John Almarode

Ann M. Miller

Banish boredom once and for all! If your STEM lessons are falling on disinterested ears, mix things up with engaging, brain-based science and math strategies that captivate students’ attention, activate prior knowledge, and invigorate interest. Blending current research on the student brain with practical methods for teaching science and math, Almarode and Miller identify six essential “ingredients” in a recipe for student success. You’ll discover: A customizable framework you can use right away Classroom-ready, content-specific attention grabbers Overt and covert strategies to boost behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement Techniques for making relevant connections that maximize retention

Captivate, Activate, and Invigorate the Student Brain in Science and Math, Grades 6-12

Kara Vandas

AN ESSENTIAL RESOURCE FOR STUDENT AND TEACHER CLARITY With the ever-changing landscape of education, teachers and leaders often find themselves searching for clarity in a sea of standards, curriculum resources, and competing priorities. Clarity for Learning offers a simple and doable approach to developing clarity and sharing it with students. Are both teachers and students clear about what must be learned, why students are learning it, and how they can be successful? Are students able to determine their next steps in learning through quality feedback and assessment? Have teachers had the time and support to collaborate around clarity to ensure an aligned approach within your school system? This book offers five powerful practices that include: Gaining clarity Sharing clarity Feedback with clarity Assessing with clarity Collaborating with clarity In addition, the book is chock-full of examples from teachers and leaders across North America who have shared their journey, struggles, and successes to provide examples, exemplars, and models for readers to use to propel their own work forward. This is a don’t-miss resource!

Five Essential Practices That Empower Students and Teachers

Clarity for Learning

Douglas Fisher

Nancy Frey

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; and - 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.

A Springboard for Academic and Social-Emotional Development

Student Learning Communities

John Hattie

First, let’s commend ourselves: how in the midst of a pandemic we faculty stepped up at record speed to teach in such a foreign learning environment. Try we did, adapt we did, and learn we did. But to be clear, and we already recognize this, this past spring was less about distance learning and more about crisis teaching. This time around we have the opportunity to be much more purposeful and intentional, and that’s where The Distance Learning Playbook for College and University Instruction will prove absolutely indispensable. Much more than a collection of cool tools and apps, The Distance Learning Playbook for College and University Instruction mobilizes decades of Visible Learning® research to reveal those evidence-based strategies that work best in an online environment. Supplemented by video footage and opportunities to self-assess and reflect, the book addresses every dynamic that must be in place for students to learn, even at a distance: Faculty-student relationships from a distance Teacher credibility from a distance Teacher clarity from a distance Engaging tasks from a distance Planning learning experiences from a distance Feedback, assessment, and grading from a distance Keeping the focus on learning, from a distance or otherwise What does our post-COVID future hold? "We suspect," Fisher, Frey, Almarode, and Hattie write, "it will include increased amounts of distance learning. In the meantime, let’s seize on what we have learned to improve post-secondary education in any format, whether face-to-face or from a distance." "We are all still active faculty members, committed to teaching, scholarship, and service. The unexpected transition to remote learning doesn’t mean we no longer know how to teach. We can still impact the lives of our students and know that we made a difference. The Distance Learning Playbook for College and University Instruction will show you how." ~Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, John Almarode, and John Hattie To purchase from an Authorized Corwin Distributor click here.

Teaching for Engagement and Impact in Any Setting

The Distance Learning Playbook for College and University Instruction

Translate the science of learning into strategies for maximum learning impact in your classroom. The content, skills, and understandings students need to learn today are as diverse, complex, and multidimensional as the students in our classrooms. How can educators best create the learning experiences students need to truly learn? How Learning Works: A Playbook unpacks the science of how students learn and translates that knowledge into promising principles or practices that can be implemented in the classroom or utilized by students on their own learning journey. Designed to help educators create learning experiences that better align with how learning works, each module in this playbook is grounded in research and features prompts, tools, practice exercises, and discussion strategies that help teachers to Describe what is meant by learning in the local context of your classroom, including identifying any barriers to learning. Adapt promising principles and practices to meet the specific needs of your students—particularly regarding motivation, attention, encoding, retrieval and practice, cognitive load and memory, productive struggle, and feedback. Translate research on learning into learning strategies that accelerate learning and build students’ capacity to take ownership of their own learning—such as summarizing, spaced practice, interleaved practice, elaborate interrogation, and transfer strategies. Generate and gather evidence of impact by engaging students in reciprocal teaching and effective feedback on learning. Rich with resources that support the process of parlaying scientific findings into classroom practice, this playbook offers all the moves teachers need to design learning experiences that work for all students!

A Playbook

How Learning Works

Kateri Thunder

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.

A Hands-On Guide to Making Learning Visible and Measurable

The Success Criteria Playbook

Karen Flories

Dave Nagel

Create strong and effectives PLCs plus—and that plus is YOU What makes a powerful and results-driven Professional Learning Community (PLC)? The answer is PLC plus— “plus” being the vital role teachers play in teaching and learning. Grounded in four cross-cutting themes—equity, high expectations, efficacy, and facilitation from discussion to action—the PLC+ framework supports educators in questioning practices, not just outcomes. It broadens the focus on student learning to encompass educational equity and teaching efficacy, and, in doing so, it leads educators to plan and implement PLCs that maximize individual expertise while harnessing the power of collaborative efficacy.

Better Decisions and Greater Impact by Design

PLC+

Help your PLC+ group to work wiser, not harder. This practical guide to planning and implementing PLC+ groups equips professional learning communities with the tools, templates, and step-by-step instructions needed to bring the PLC+ framework to life in a collaborative setting. Twenty-three modules support PLC+ groups as they work through one entire cycle of learning, addressing the five questions and four cross-cutting themes—equity, high expectations, individual and collective efficacy, , and effective activation and facilitation. Engage in deeper learning around the ideas and concepts central to PLC+ and make greater equity and efficacy a reality in your school or district.

A Hands-On Guide to Collectively Improving Student Learning

The PLC+ Playbook, Grades K-12

An essential resource for student and teacher clarity With the ever-changing landscape of education, teachers and leaders often find themselves searching for clarity in a sea of standards, curriculum resources, and competing priorities. Clarity for Learning offers a simple and doable approach to developing clarity and sharing it with students through five essential components: crafting learning intentions and success criteria co-constructing learning intentions and success criteria with learners creating opportunities for students to respond effective feedback on and for learning students and teachers sharing learning and progress The book is full of examples from teachers and leaders who have shared their journey, struggles, and successes for readers to use to propel their own work forward.

Make learning visible in the early years Early childhood is a uniquely sensitive time, when young learners are rapidly developing across multiple domains, including language and literacy, mathematics, and motor skills. Knowing which teaching strategies work best and when can have a significant impact on a child’s development and future success. Visible Learning in Early Childhood investigates the critical years between ages 3 and 6 and, backed by evidence from the Visible Learning® research, explores seven core strategies for learning success: working together as evaluators, setting high expectations, measuring learning with explicit success criteria, establishing developmentally appropriate levels of learning, viewing mistakes as opportunities, continually seeking feedback, and balancing surface, deep, and transfer learning. The authors unpack the symbiotic relationship between these seven tenets through Authentic examples of diverse learners and settings Voices of master teachers from the US, UK, and Australia Multiple assessment and differentiation strategies Multidisciplinary approaches depicting mathematics, literacy, art and music, social-emotional learning, and more Using the Visible Learning research, teachers partner with children to encourage high expectations, developmentally appropriate practices, the right level of challenge, and a focus on explicit success criteria. Get started today and watch your young learners thrive!

Visible Learning in Early Childhood

In the best science classrooms, teachers see learning through the eyes of their students, and students view themselves as explorers. But with so many instructional approaches to choose from—inquiry, laboratory, project-based learning, discovery learning—which is most effective for student success? In Visible Learning for Science, the authors reveal that it’s not which strategy, but when, and plot a vital K-12 framework for choosing the right approach at the right time, depending on where students are within the three phases of learning: surface, deep, and transfer. Synthesizing state-of-the-art science instruction and assessment with over fifteen years of John Hattie’s cornerstone educational research, this framework for maximum learning spans the range of topics in the life and physical sciences. Employing classroom examples from all grade levels, the authors empower teachers to plan, develop, and implement high-impact instruction for each phase of the learning cycle: Surface learning: when, through precise approaches, students explore science concepts and skills that give way to a deeper exploration of scientific inquiry. Deep learning: when students engage with data and evidence to uncover relationships between concepts—students think metacognitively, and use knowledge to plan, investigate, and articulate generalizations about scientific connections. Transfer learning: when students apply knowledge of scientific principles, processes, and relationships to novel contexts, and are able to discern and innovate to solve complex problems. Visible Learning for Science opens the door to maximum-impact science teaching, so that students demonstrate more than a year’s worth of learning for a year spent in school.

What Works Best to Optimize Student Learning

Visible Learning for Science, Grades K-12

Aleigha Henderson-Rosser

What a year! Twelve months and counting since COVID expanded, stretched, and blurred the boundaries of teaching and learning, at least one thing has remained constant: our commitment as educators to move learning forward. It’s just the context that keeps changing—why Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey, John Almarode, and Aleigha Henderson-Rosser have created a follow-up to The Distance Learning Playbook, their all-new Quick Guide to Simultaneous, Hybrid, and Blended Learning. First, to be clear: simultaneous learning must not be an additive, meaning we combine two entirely different approaches and double our workload. That’s unsustainable! Instead, we must extract, integrate, and implement what works best from both distance learning and face-to-face learning environments. Then and only then—Doug, Nancy, John, and Aleigha insist—can we maximize the learning opportunities for all of our students. To that end, The Quick Guide to Simultaneous, Hybrid, and Blended Learning describes how to: Have clarity about the most important learning outcomes for our students. This will help us decide what is best done asynchronously and what is best done with our "Roomies" and "Zoomies." Capitalize on the potential of asynchronous learning and use that valuable time to preview and review. This way we can draw on evidence from these tasks to help us decide where to go next in our teaching and our students’ learning. Utilize synchronous learning for collaborative learning and scaffolding of content, skills, and essential understandings. In doing so, we can collect additional evidence of students’ learning so that we provide feedback that moves learning forward. Establish norms for combining synchronous and face-to-face environments in simultaneous learning. Importantly, we have to set up the environment for our Roomies and Zoomies to learn together. Develop learning experiences and tasks that maximize learner engagement for all learners in all settings. Focus on acceleration and learning recovery. In other words, no more deficit thinking! Our students are where they are and there are specific things that we can do to ensure their learning. Implement the guide’s many resources, strategies, and templates. "None of us chose to be in a situation where some learners are physically in our classrooms, while others attend virtually and remotely," write Doug, Nancy, John, and Aleigha. "However, what we hope to convey is that we’ve got this! While the context is different, the principles behind clarity, planning, high-yield strategies and interventions, student learning, and assessment hold steady." This is where The Quick Guide to Simultaneous, Hybrid, and Blended Learning will prove indispensable on this next leg of our journey.

The Quick Guide to Simultaneous, Hybrid, and Blended Learning

Joseph Assof

Select the right task, at the right time, for the right phase of learning How do you generate that lightbulb “aha” moment of understanding for your students? This book helps to answer that question by showing Visible Learning strategies in action in high-impact mathematics classrooms. Walk in the shoes of teachers as they engage in the countless micro-decisions required to balance strategies, tasks, and assessments, demonstrating that it’s not only what works, but when. A decision-making matrix and grade-leveled examples help you leverage the most effective teaching practices at the most effective time to meet the surface, deep, and transfer learning needs of every student.

Teaching Mathematics in the Visible Learning Classroom, High School

Discover engaging, brain-based science and math strategies that captivate students' attention, activate prior knowledge, and invigorate interest. Features a ready-to-use framework, content-specific attention grabbers, and more.

John Almarode

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