Focus
Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning
Number of pages: 237
Publisher: ASCD: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development
BBB Library: Education
ISBN: 9781416611301
Editorial Review
Best-selling author Mike Schmoker boils down solutions for improved schools to the most powerful, simple actions and structures that ensure you prepare all students for college, careers, and citizenship.
Book Reviews
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Learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge and skills. Education means organized programs of learning. Training is a type of education that’s focused on learning specific skills. By schools, we don’t mean only the conventional facilities that we are used to for children and teenagers. We mean any community of
Poor children are exposed to adverse social and physical environments: lower-quality services, greater traffic volumes, higher crime rates, less playground safety, and no green spaces. They breathe contaminated air and drink impure water. Their households are more crowded, noisy, chaotic, unstable, and physically deteriorated. Their parents are uninterested in their activities, and
This title is in no way meant to condemn those who direct our collegiate experiences. The realities are that we may well have studied these topics and earned a good grade on a test over the theoretical aspects of this information but had no classroom experience on which to hook the
Wisdom to Share
Before the reading of a text, always be sure to teach any vocabulary that could impede understanding.
To create interest in the content of the text, share some background information about the topic, read an interesting selection from the text, or help students to connect it to recent or previous learning.
The next step is to have students practice, by themselves, the same kind of reading, note-taking, or annotation that you’ve just modeled, with the next paragraph or section of text.
Any teacher who got through college or has been in a good book club can read critically and annotate. With a little practice, teachers can quickly learn to model such reading.
Once students have had the benefit of close reading, annotating, and partner-sharing, they will be eager to discuss and debate issues they find in their textbooks, historical documents, and editorials, or in print and online publications.
All students are always on task. And what they learn differs markedly from the arcane, irrelevant skills found in early-grade reading standards documents.
We know what a sound, coherent curriculum is. Let’s build one for every course we teach, with common assessments, and then actually monitor to ensure that it’s being taught.
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