Teaching Outside The Box Instead Of To The Test

Teaching Outside the Box Instead of to the Test

Teaching Outside the Box

Bring a fresh perspective to your classroom Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students by Their Brain, Third Edition integrates practical strategies and engaging advice for new and experienced teachers. Whether you are preparing for your first year of teaching or have been working in the classroom for decades, this conversational book provides you with answers to the essential questions that you face as an educator—how to engage students, encourage self-directed learning, differentiate instruction, and create dynamic lessons that nurture critical thinking and strategic problem solving. This updated edition includes expanded material that touches on Project-Based Learning, brain-based teaching, creating smooth transitions, integrating Common Core into the classroom, and other key subject areas. Questions for reflection at the end of each chapter help you leverage this resource in book groups, professional development courses, and in both undergraduate and graduate classes. The art of teaching is one that evolves with changing educational standards and best practices; to be the most effective teacher possible, daily self-reflection is critical, along with a need to see things from a different perspective. This means we must step outside the box—moving our focus from 'fixing' the students when a problem arises to helping a teacher improve his or her practice. Improve classroom management, discipline, motivation, and morale Explore strategies for arranging your classroom, engaging students, and avoiding the misbehavior cycle Create an environment where students learn and teachers teach Leverage insight from teachers and students Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students by Their Brain, Third Edition is an essential resource for teachers at any stage in their careers.

Teaching Outside the Box but Inside the Standards

Many educators feel caught between mandates to meet literacy standards and the desire to respond to individual students’ interests, skills, and challenges. This book illustrates how a dialogical approach to practice will enable teachers to meet the needs of today’s diverse student population within a standardized curriculum. Chapters highlight the efforts of four high school teachers to create dialogical classroom space, documenting both the possibilities of and impediments to such an approach to teaching. Drawing on a theoretical framework and rationale for engaged dialogical practice, the authors present and analyze key classroom events that illustrate the productive and restrictive tensions for such work and suggest ways for teachers and schools to implement these ideas, especially for complementing and expanding the Common Core State Standards. Book Features: Examples of teachers using dialogue to engage students, as well as colleagues, administrators, parents, policymakers, and other educational stakeholders.Guidance for teachers in how to differentiate instruction to meet literacy standards.Case studies illustrating how teachers navigate the tension between standardization and student-centered teaching.An exemplary collaborative effort among a university researcher, doctoral students, and high school teachers.The reflections and self-questioning of teachers who write honestly, engagingly, and insightfully about their dialogical practices.