Better Learning Through Structured Teaching describes how teachers can help students develop stronger learning skills by ensuring that instruction moves from modeling and guided practice (situations where the teacher has most of the responsibility) to collaborative learning and, finally, to independent tasks. You'll find out how to use the four components of this approach to help meet critical challenges, including differentiating instruction and making effective use of class time: 1. Focus Lessons: Establishing the lesson’s purpose and then modeling your own thinking for students.2. Guided Instruction: Working with small groups of students who have similar results on performance assessments. 3. Collaborative Learning: Enabling students to discuss and negotiate with one another to create independent work, not simply one project. 4. Independent Tasks: Requiring students to use their previous knowledge to create new and authentic products. The authors explore each component using student dialogues and examples from a variety of disciplines and grade levels. They provide tips and tools for successfully implementing this instructional approach in your own classroom, including checklists for classroom setup and routines, critical questions, real-world lesson plans, and more. No matter what grade level you teach, Better Learning Through Structured Teaching is your essential guide to helping students develop and expand their capacity for authentic and long-lasting learning.

Describes a purposeful classroom structure that relies on four phases. Included with the description of each phase are practical strategies that help teachers use this approach, plus tips on how to differentiate instruction, make effective use of class time, and plan backwards from learning objectives.

In this updated 2nd edition of the ASCD best-seller, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey dig deeper into the hows and whys of the gradual release of responsibility instructional framework. To gradually release responsibility is to equip students with what they need to be engaged and self-directed learners. On a day-to-day level, it means delivering lessons purposefully planned to incorporate four essential and interrelated instructional phases: 1. Focused Instruction: Preparing students for learning by establishing lesson purpose, modeling strategies and skills, thinking aloud, and noticing how students respond. 2. Guided Instruction: Strategically using prompts, cues, and questions to lead students to new understanding. 3. Collaborative Learning: Allowing students to consolidate their understanding through exploration, problem-solving, discussion, and thinking with their peers. 4. Independent Learning: Requiring students to use the skills and knowledge they’ve acquired to create authentic products and ask new questions. The authors explore each phase, using real-life examples from a variety of disciplines. You’ll find tips and tools for classroom implementation, including checklists for planning and assessment; advice on feedback, homework, group work, differentiated instruction, and blended learning; answers to frequently asked questions; and examples that align to Common Core State Standards. No matter what grade level or subject you teach, Better Learning Through Structured Teaching is your essential guide to helping students expand their capacity for successful and long-lasting learning.

This book explains how teachers can use guided instruction-gradually transferring knowledge and the responsibility for learning to students through scaffolds for learning-to boost students to higher levels of understanding and accomplishment.

In Learning Targets, Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart contend that improving student learning and achievement happens in the immediacy of an individual lesson--what they call "today's lesson"—or it doesn't happen at all. The key to making today's lesson meaningful? Learning targets. Written from students' point of view, a learning target describes a lesson-sized chunk of information and skills that students will come to know deeply. Each lesson's learning target connects to the next lesson's target, enabling students to master a coherent series of challenges that ultimately lead to important curricular standards. Drawing from the authors' extensive research and professional learning partnerships with classrooms, schools, and school districts, this practical book - Situates learning targets in a theory of action that students, teachers, principals, and central-office administrators can use to unify their efforts to raise student achievement and create a culture of evidence-based, results-oriented practice. - Provides strategies for designing learning targets that promote higher-order thinking and foster student goal setting, self-assessment, and self-regulation. - Explains how to design a strong performance of understanding, an activity that produces evidence of students' progress toward the learning target. - Shows how to use learning targets to guide summative assessment and grading. Learning Targets also includes reproducible planning forms, a classroom walk-through guide, a lesson-planning process guide, and guides to teacher and student self-assessment. What students are actually doing during today's lesson is both the source of and the yardstick for school improvement efforts. By applying the insights in this book to your own work, you can improve your teaching expertise and dramatically empower all students as stakeholders in their own learning.

Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher have given all elementary teachers a real gift with this guide to teaching and learning subject-area vocabulary.... What they have created is an inviting and persuasive guide for elementary teachers to follow in restructuring their subject-area instruction to include meaningful attention to vocabulary. -Donna Ogle Author of Reading Comprehension: Strategies for Independent Learners During nonfiction read-aloud, the unfamiliar word manufacture comes up. Your unit on the solar system includes difficult new terms. In math time, kids need to know what an addend is. Learning Words Inside & Out helps you use moments like these to make word learning a part of all your lessons and to connect students to new vocabulary. Learning Words Inside & Out shows you how to embed powerful vocabulary instruction into your teaching. Throughout your teaching day, you'll give students the multiple encounters they need to know a word's meaning forever. With Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher's strategies, you'll: Make it intentional-Select words for instruction that are worth precious classroom time Make it transparent-Give students word-solving strategies by modeling your thinking during read-aloud Make it useable-Provide oral and written practice through authentic peer activities Make it personal-Help words stick through well-designed independent activities Make it a priority-Create a schoolwide focus on word learning. Frey and Fisher also call out specific ways to support English learners and struggling readers. Their numerous examples of classroom language model many types of effective teacher-student interaction. Best of all, an accompanying study guide will help you get the most from Frey and Fisher's strategies-a helpful resource for individuals or teacher study groups. Help your students develop a passion for words and give them the subject-area vocabulary they need for success. Read Learning Words Inside;& Out and connect kids with words by making word learning part of everything you do.

Find out how matching research-based principles of collaborative learning with practical action can make all group work productive group work, with all students engaged.