Morning Classroom Conversations

Morning Classroom Conversations
Author: Maurice J. Elias
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2021-08-27
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1071839330

Get students thinking and learning by getting them talking! Transitioning from home to school can be chaotic—but it doesn’t have to be. When you make Morning Classroom Conversations (MCCs) a regular part of your homeroom or advisory period, you give students a safe space to practice critical and creative thinking, build active listening skills, learn to respectfully disagree with others, and strengthen peer relationships... all while improving overall classroom climate. Written by expert practitioners in the area of SEL, this book provides teachers, school counselors, and other conversation leaders with a wealth of tools to guide successful MCCs from start to finish—in just 10-15 minutes! Features include: Three calendar years’ worth of thought-provoking prompts and themes An overview of the underlying structure and goals of MCCs Sample scripts Vignettes and student and teacher voices Adolescents need to feel heard and understood—by adults and by their peers. MCCs teach them to channel scattered thoughts and strong feelings into dynamic discussions while also strengthening social, emotional, and character development and building the skills they will need to achieve their goals as they transition to adult life.

The Morning Meeting Book

The Morning Meeting Book
Author: Roxann Kriete
Publisher: Center for Responsive Schools, Inc.
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2014-04-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1892989603

Promote a climate of trust, academic growth, and positive behavior by launching each school day with a whole class gathering. This comprehensive, user-friendly book shows you how to hold Responsive ClassroomMorning Meetings, a powerful teaching tool used by hundreds of thousands of teachers in K-8 schools. In the new edition of this essential text, you'll find: Step-by-step, practical guidelines for planning and holding Responsive Classroom Morning Meetings in K-8 classroomsDescriptions of Morning Meeting in action in real classrooms100 ideas for greetings, sharing, activities, and messages: some tried-and-true and some newUpdated information on sharingGuidance on adapting meeting components for different ages and abilities, including upper grades and English Language Learners.Explanations of how Morning Meeting supports mastery of Common Core State Standards, 21st century skills, and core competencies enumerated by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL).

Academic Conversations

Academic Conversations
Author: Jeff Zwiers
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2023-10-10
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1003843298

Conversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.

Rebellious Read Alouds

Rebellious Read Alouds
Author: Vera Ahiyya
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1071876791

Spark meaningful conversations about race, identity, and social justice in your classroom using read alouds as an entry point. Students need to see themselves and their peers in the books they read, and to engage with varying viewpoints. How can educators create a safe and nurturing space that inspires young children to explore diversity and ask curious questions? In Rebellious Read Alouds, author Vera Ahiyya—beloved by educators worldwide as The Tutu Teacher (@thetututeacher and @diversereads on Instagram)—empowers teachers to encourage classroom conversations about important and culturally relevant topics using daily read alouds as an entry point. Presenting a broad range of read aloud lessons around current, diverse picture books that can ignite deep conversations and learning about self, others, and the world, this wise and joyful guide prepares educators to tackle "hushed topics" with young children. It includes: Booklists, tools, and recommendations for building an inclusive classroom library of titles written or illustrated by people in traditionally marginalized populations Tips and resources for facilitating diversity conversations in a way that’s developmentally appropriate — and meets ELA and social justice standards 45 complete lessons plans around children’s books, with prompts and recommended stopping points for conversation, and suggestions for inspiring discussion and scaffolding deep thinking Interviews with educators and parents who offer advice from their experience doing rebellious read alouds Suggestions for partnering with administration, parents, and colleagues on this important work Spark the rebellious reader inside you and lead your students toward creating a more just and equitable world.

Classroom Conversations

Classroom Conversations
Author: Alexandra Miletta
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2008
Genre: Education
ISBN: 159558157X

Mother and daughter Alexandra and Maureen point to the great thinkers who have shaped their beliefs and practices in education, and who continue to influence teachers today. 19 essays from Dewey to Delpit offer parents and new educators an overview of education. These touchstone texts are framed by commentary, as the Milettas include both personal readings with wider contextual value and brief biographies.

Nurturing Students' Character

Nurturing Students' Character
Author: Jeffrey S. Kress
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2019-11-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0429576234

Nurturing Students’ Character is an easy-to-use guide to incorporating social-emotional and character development (SECD) into your teaching practice. The links are clear—elementary and middle school students have better odds of academic success if you nurture their social and emotional skills. Drawing on broad field experience and the latest research, this book offers intuitive techniques for infusing your everyday teaching and classroom management with SECD opportunities. With topics ranging from self-regulation and problem solving to peer communication and empathy, these concrete strategies, practical worksheets, and self-reflective activities will help you foster a positive classroom culture.

Troublemakers

Troublemakers
Author: Carla Shalaby
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1620972379

A radical educator's paradigm-shifting inquiry into the accepted, normal demands of school, as illuminated by moving portraits of four young "problem children" In this dazzling debut, Carla Shalaby, a former elementary school teacher, explores the everyday lives of four young "troublemakers," challenging the ways we identify and understand so-called problem children. Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children—Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus—Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem. From Zora's proud individuality to Marcus's open willfulness, from Sean's struggle with authority to Lucas's tenacious imagination, comes profound insight—for educators and parents alike—into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age. Shalaby's empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands—despite good intentions—work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.

Cultures of Thinking in Action

Cultures of Thinking in Action
Author: Ron Ritchhart
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2023-06-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1119901073

From leading educational researcher Ron Ritchhart, a deep dive that illuminates what the foundational mindsets needed to create cultures of thinking really looks like in action. Building on the framework presented in the best-selling Creating Cultures of Thinking, Ron Ritchhart’s new book, Cultures of Thinking in Action, takes the next step in helping readers not only understand how a culture of thinking looks and feels, but also how to create it for themselves and their learners. Arguing that no set of practices or techniques alone is sufficient to create a culture of thinking in and of itself, Ritchhart explores the underlying beliefs that motivate the creation of cultures of thinking, presenting key mindsets every educator and leader needs to embrace if they are serious about creating powerful thinkers and learners. Much more than just an instructional guide, Cultures of Thinking in Action offers readers a reflective journey into their own teaching, leading, and parentingwhile providing the foundation and concrete strategies needed to create and develop a culture of thinking for all learners. This book: Presents ten foundational mindsets of a culture of thinking Includes the latest research of the Cultures of Thinking Project Includes questions, exercises, and discussion prompts to inspire reflection by individuals and teams Provides case studies and best practice scenarios to exemplify each mindset Provides useful data collection tools to inform one’s teaching practice

How to Facilitate Meaningful Classroom Conversations across Disciplines, Grade Levels, and Digital Platforms

How to Facilitate Meaningful Classroom Conversations across Disciplines, Grade Levels, and Digital Platforms
Author: Michael B. Sherry
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2020-12-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1475855052

How can teachers facilitate meaningful classroom conversations in which students engage in shared inquiry, building on what others have written or said (even to disagree)? Such discussions can have many benefits: students can learn from each other, can bring their out-of-school ways of talking into classroom dialog, can make evidence-based, collaborative arguments, and can begin to communicate like historians, scientists, or other members of disciplinary communities. Yet classroom discussions often fail, teaching students implicitly that they have little to learn from school or each other, that their home-language practices are not welcome, that the loudest voice wins the argument, and that academic discourse is as mystifying and alien as the views of anyone who disagrees with them. Outside the classroom, dialog has never been more important. From climate-change summits or peace talks among neighboring nations, to clashes between rival ethnic groups or political-party mudslinging, to workplace conversations or a traffic stop on a dark street, we must learn to bring our own and others’ words into relationship with integrity or suffer the consequences. This book offers concepts, concrete classroom examples, and activities for teachers and students to transform classroom conversations into successful discussions across disciplines, grade levels, and digital platforms.

Dialogues in Middle Level Education Research Volume 2

Dialogues in Middle Level Education Research Volume 2
Author: David C. Virtue
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000882225

This book echoes and enhances the generative, dialogic, knowledge-building process that took place at the AMLE 2021 conference, reflecting the way in which middle-level researchers work collaboratively and draw ideas and inspiration for their studies from prior research and accounts of practice, as well as their own experiences in the field. Each of the five sections features a recent study presented at the roundtable session at the 2021 AMLE conference, accompanied by two companion pieces offering different perspectives on the work. In the latter, the authors enrich and extend the original research by incorporating feedback from the conference session discussions, revisiting their findings and conclusions, considering alternative approaches to further research, and proposing new or clarified implications for practice. Addressing themes across theoretical frameworks and diversity of research design, and with topics ranging from music education to teacher agency and the productive struggle, the volume crucially presents and discusses recent innovations in the field with a view to prompting future research questions and deeper inquiry. As such, it will benefit researchers, doctoral students, and academics in the fields of middle level education, educational research, and specifically research methods in education. Those interested in teaching and learning, and adolescent development more broadly will also benefit from this volume.