Grades 6 - 8

"…in reading Jeff's book, I learned something invaluable: how to actually create that 'context' we have all heard so much about, how to make editorial instruction meaningful, engaging, and understandable, even for students who struggle." —Vicki Spandel (from the foreword)

Some teachers love grammar and some hate it, but nearly all struggle to find ways of making the mechanics of English meaningful to kids. As a middle school teacher, Jeff Anderson also discovered that his students were not grasping the basics, and that it was preventing them from reaching their potential as writers. Jeff readily admits, “I am not a grammarian, nor am I punctilious about anything,” so he began researching and testing the ideas of scores of grammar experts in his classroom, gradually finding successful ways of integrating grammar instruction into writer's workshop.

Mechanically Inclined is the culmination of years of experimentation that merges the best of writer's workshop elements with relevant theory about how and why skills should be taught. It connects theory about using grammar in context with practical instructional strategies, explains why kids often don't understand or apply grammar and mechanics correctly, focuses on attending to the “high payoff,” or most common errors in student writing, and shows how to carefully construct a workshop environment that can best support grammar and mechanics concepts. Jeff emphasizes four key elements in his teaching:

Comprising an overview of the research-based context for grammar instruction, a series of over thirty detailed lessons, and an appendix of helpful forms and instructional tools, Mechanically Inclined is a boon to teachers regardless of their level of grammar-phobia. It shifts the negative, rule-plagued emphasis of much grammar instruction into one which celebrates the power and beauty these tools have in shaping all forms of writing.

"Introducing a spelling test to a student by saying, 'Let's see how many words you know,' is different from saying, 'Let's see how many words you know already.' It is only one word, but the already suggests that any words the child knows are ahead of expectation and, most important, that there is nothing permanent about what is known and not known."
— Peter Johnston

Grounded in research, Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Livesshows how words can shape students' learning, their sense of self, and their social, emotional and moral development. Make no mistake: words have the power to open minds – or close them.

Following up his groundbreaking book, Choice Words, author Peter Johnston continues to demonstrate how the things teachers say (and don’t say) have surprising consequences for the literate lives of students. In this new book, Johnston shows how the words teachers choose can affect the worlds students inhabit in the classroom. He explains how to engage children with more productive talk and how to create classrooms that support students’ intellectual development, as well as their development as human beings.

• Layered Leadership, the multitude of supports in place for teachers to encourage learning and change within schools
• Shared experiences that develop community and develop common understanding of practices, curriculum, and assessment
• Importance of “rowing in the same direction” in that literacy coaches and leaders stay interconnected and aligned to the goals of the school

Word mastery comes from intimate knowledge of language. In Word Nerds:Teaching All Students to Learn and Love Vocabulary, authors Leslie Montgomery and Margot Holmes Smith take you inside classrooms where they implement creative, flexible vocabulary instruction that improves their students’ word knowledge and confidence.
With support from literacy specialist Brenda Overturf, the authors developed a five-part plan to teach all students to learn vocabulary:

• Introducing new words in context
• Adding related synonyms and antonyms
• Engaging in several days of active learning
• Celebrating new words
• Assessing vocabulary development

 
This easy-to-read reference explains how to plan, teach, and assess based on the latest research in vocabulary instruction and learning. After incorporating the authors’ plan, you can be a Word Nerd too!

Every major measure of students’ historical understanding since 1917 has demonstrated that students do not retain, understand, or enjoy their school experiences with history. Bruce Lesh believes that this is due to the way we teach history—lecture and memorization. Over the last fifteen years, he has refined a method of teaching history that mirrors the process used by historians, where students are taught to ask questions of evidence and develop historical explanations. In his book "Why Won't You Just Tell Us the Answer?": Teaching Historical Thinking in Grades 7-12, he shows teachers how to successfully implement his methods in the classroom.

Students may think they want to be given the answer. Yet, when they are actively engaged in investigating the past—the way professional historians do—they find that history class is not about the boring memorization of names, dates, and facts. Instead, it’s challenging fun. Historical study that centers on a question, where students gather a variety of historical sources and then develop and defend their answers to that question, allows students to become actual historians immersed in an interpretive study of the past.

Each chapter focuses on a key concept in understanding history and then offers a sample unit on how the concept can be taught. Readers will learn about the following:
• Exploring Text, Subtext, and Context: President Theodore Roosevelt and the Panama Canal
• Chronological Thinking and Causality: The Rail Strike of 1877
• Multiple Perspectives: The Bonus March of 1932
• Continuity and Change Over Time: Custer’s Last Stand
• Historical Significance: The Civil Rights Movement
• Historical Empathy: The Truman-MacArthur Debate

By the end of the book, teachers will have learned how to teach history via a lens of interpretive questions and interrogative evidence that allows both student and teacher to develop evidence-based answers to history’s greatest questions.
 

Editing is often seen as one item on a list of steps in the writing process—usually put somewhere near the end, and often completely crowded out of writer's workshop. Too many times daily editing lessons happen in a vacuum, with no relationship to what students are writing.

In Everyday Editing, Jeff Anderson asks teachers to reflect on what sort of message this approach sends to students. Does it tell them that editing and revision are meaningful parts of the writing process, or just a hunt for errors with a 50/50 chance of getting it right—comma or no comma?

Instead of rehearsing errors and drilling students on what's wrong with a sentence, Jeff invites students to look carefully at their writing along with mentor texts, and to think about how punctuation, grammar, and style can be best used to hone and communicate meaning.

Written in Jeff's characteristically witty style, this refreshing and practical guide offers an overview of his approach to editing within the writing workshop as well as ten detailed sets of lessons covering everything from apostrophes to serial commas. These lessons can be used throughout the year to replace Daily Oral Language or error-based editing strategies with a more effective method for improving student writing.

When was the last time you shook up your writing instruction? In Renew!: Become a Better and More Authentic Writing Teacher, author Shawna Coppola builds on the premise that our students are ever-changing, and so is our collective knowledge base. Instructional strategies that have worked in the past may need to evolve accordingly. Coppola guides K-8 writing teachers with a three-part framework for Rethinking, Revising, and Renewing their approach—and finding new energy along the way. 

Using the framework, Renew! examines the most pervasive educational practices in writing instruction and poses questions that guide teachers to revise those practices to ensure they are effective for all students. Coppola believes the work is challenging, yet critical, referencing R. Buckminster Fuller’s “Knowledge Doubling Curve:” According to Fuller's paradigm, the amount of time it takes for us to increase our collective knowledge base by 100 percent will continue to shrink the older we get. If this is true—or even close to being true—how can we, as educators, ever feel satisfied with teaching our students the same concepts, using the same methodologies and practices, that we have in the past?

The book offers a road map for renewing key aspects of our practice, including: 

• How we teach the writing process: Over time and frequent usage, some of our favorite teaching strategies can become rigid. Coppola gives a candid account of how her enthusiasm for “the writing process” as an undergraduate led her to teach writing for years as a set of pre-determined steps. Now she teaches that there are many variations of the writing process, and many twists and turns along the path. One foundational strategy used is opening up her own process as a writer—and her writer’s notebook—to students and encouraging them to think and talk about their process with classmates. 

• What we mean by “Writing:” Coppola argues that drawing isn’t an accompaniment to writing; it is writing. Its another form of composition through which students can tell stories, convey ideas, and engage readers. The book is full of visual compositions by students as well as Shawna’s wonderfully simple and evocative sketches from her writer’s notebook. 

• The tools we use to teach writing: The most ubiquitous tools used to teach writing—from anchor charts to graphic organizers to sentence starters etc.—tend to be teacher-centric rather than student-centric. Renew! invites students into the process of constructing tools that are meaningful and helpful to them. The book includes a range of examples of tools built collaboratively with students. 

•  How we assess and evaluate student writing: Coppola draws a distinction between assessment—which should be an interactive conversation with students—and evaluation, which is about judging and categorizing what students know and can do. Renew! offers a range of examples and resources that illustrate effective feedback for student writers, including online videos of teacher-student and peer-to-peer conferences. 

Renew! also offers ideas for how teachers can nurture their own writing lives and thus reinvigorate their instructional practice. Through rethinking, revising, and renewing their practice, teachers can not only strengthen students’ skills as writers, but also nurture students to become critical thinkers, problem solvers, and risk takers in the classroom and in our rapidly-changing world. 

• Name It
• Why Do It?
• Model It
• Try It
• Share It

Whether writing a blog entry or a high-stakes test essay, fiction or nonfiction, short story or argumentation, students need to know certain things in order to write effectively. In 10 Things Every Writer Needs to Know, Jeff Anderson focuses on developing the concepts and application of ten essential aspects of good writing—motion, models, focus, detail, form, frames, cohesion, energy, words, and clutter.

Throughout the book, Jeff provides dozens of model texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that bring alive the ten things every writer needs to know. By analyzing strong mentor texts, young writers learn what is possible and experiment with the strategies professional writers use. Students explore, discover, and apply what makes good writing work. Jeff dedicates a chapter to each of the ten things every writer needs to know and provides mini-lessons, mentor texts, writing process strategies, and classroom tips that will motivate students to confidently and competently take on any writing task.

With standardized tests and Common Core Curriculum influencing classrooms nationwide, educators must stay true to what works in writing instruction. 10 Things Every Writer Needs to Know keeps teachers on track—encouraging, discovering, inspiring, reminding, and improving writing through conversation, inquiry, and the support of good writing behaviors.

All teachers at all grade levels in all subjects have speaking assignments for students, but many teachers believe they don’t know how to teach speaking, and many even fear public speaking themselves.
In his book, Well Spoken: Teaching Speaking to All Students, veteran teacher and education consultant Erik Palmer shares the art of teaching speaking in any classroom. Teachers will find thoughtful and engaging strategies for integrating speaking skills throughout the curriculum. Palmer stresses the essential elements of all effective oral communication, including:

• Building a Speech: Audience, Content, Organization, Visual Aids, and Appearance
• Performing a Speech: Poise, Voice, Life, Eye Contact, Gestures, and Speed
• Evaluating a Speech: Creating Effective Rubrics,  Guiding Students to Excellence

Well Spoken contains a framework for understanding the skills involved in all effective oral communication, offers practical steps and lesson ideas that any teacher needs to successfully teach speaking in a variety of situations—from classroom discussions to  formal presentations—and includes a set of tools for students—from how to grab the audience’s attention to how to use emphatic hand gestures and adjust speed for effect.

Discover why, year after year, students returned to Palmer’s classroom to thank him for teaching them how to be well spoken. You may find, after reading this book, that you have become a better speaker, too.
 

Teacher research is an extension of good teaching, observing students closely, analyzing their needs, and adjusting the curriculum to fit the needs of all. In this completely updated second edition of their definitive work, Ruth Shagoury and Brenda Miller Power present a framework for teacher research along with an extensive collection of narratives from teachers engaged in the process of designing and carrying out research projects to inform their instruction.

This edition includes a greater variety of short contributions from a wide range of teacher-researchers -- novices and veterans from all backgrounds and parts of the country -- who speak to the growing diversity in today's classrooms. Threaded throughout the chapters and narratives is a discussion of the emergence of digital tools and their effect on both teaching and the research process, along with an expanded number of research designs.

The book has three primary components: 1.Chapters written by the authors explaining key elements of the research process: finding questions, designing projects, data collection and analysis, and more 2.Research activities that enable readers to try out the featured strategies and techniques 3.Teacher-researcher essays in which teachers share details of completed projects and discuss the impact they have had in their classrooms.

Living the Questions, Second Edition: A Guide for Teacher-Researchers will take you step-by-step through the process of designing, implementing, and publishing your research. Along the way, it will introduce you to dozens of kindred spirits who are finding new passion for teaching by "living the questions" every day in their classrooms. You will be reminded of why you became a teacher yourself.