Instructional expert Jim Knight visits Michael Covarrubias to observe a lesson on context clues, discuss the classroom management techniques he is using already, and share some ideas to increase student engagement. Michael and Jim discuss emphasizing effort, getting students attention before asking questions, using response cards, and planning back-up activities.

Teacher praise is one tool that can be a powerful motivator for students. Surprisingly, research suggests that praise is underused in both general- and special-education classrooms (Brophy, 1981; Hawkins & Heflin, 2011; Kern, 2007). This guide offers recommendations to instructors for using praise to maximize its positive impact.Effective teacher praise consists of two elements: (1) a description of noteworthy student academic performance or general behavior, and (2) a signal of teacher approval (Brophy, 1981; Burnett, 2001).

The Teacher’s Guide to Using Literature to Promote Inclusion of People with Disabilities has been designed to assist teachers who wish to use literature to promote inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of life. The Guide consists of two parts. Part 1 is a rubric for evaluating how short stories, books, poems, TV programs, movies, digital media, and other forms of literature portray characters with disabilities. Part 2 of the Teacher’s Guide to Using Literature to Promote Inclusion of People with Disabilities is a curriculum guide with learning objectives, lesson activities, and strategies for outcome evaluation. The curriculum guide is a resource for teachers who wish to design lessons using literature to teach about disabilities.

One of the most difficult aspects of writing is keeping audience in mind throughout the writing process. Developing lessons that support this strategy for writing is essential in the elementary classroom. This lesson supports first-grade students in learning about audience. Through interactive writing, students work together to create a genuine invitation letter for a group of their peers. In addition to the interactive writing experience, students work independently to create invitation letters for their families. Extension activities include conducting additional interactive writing experiences, reading books with samples of letters, and creating invitations at a learning center.

For farmers, growing crops is just one step in running a successful farm—making the farm or market garden economically viable requires another suite of skills, including finding land, planning what crops to grow, marketing the crops, and managing income and expenses. This resource builds on our experience educating hundreds of apprentice growers in organic production, farm and business planning, direct marketing at a roadside farm stand, and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) management through hands-on training in the running of our 100-member CSA program. Teaching Direct Marketing and Small Farm Viability: Resources for Instructors is organized into six units, three focusing on marketing and three covering other topics related to making a small farm economically viable. Included are lessons and resources for running a CSA project, selling at farmers' markets, forming collaborative marketing groups and grower cooperatives, and selling to restaurants. Also covered are strategies to improve small farm planning, including enterprise visioning and market assessment; creating a business plan, including marketing and crop plans; and managing cash flow. Land tenure options such as cash-rent leases from non-profits, shared ownership models, conservation easements, and community land trusts are reviewed as additional mechanisms for addressing the complex issue of the economic viability of small-scale agriculture. This resource also reviews the trends and factors that influence small-scale agriculture's economics, and provides an overview of produce marketing in the U.S. The training manual is designed for – •Instructors at college and universities, agriculture organizations, farm-training programs, apprenticeship programs •Agricultural extension personnel •Farmers with interns •Growers, teachers, and organizers at urban farms, community gardens, and food projects with direct-marketing outlets This instructor's resource features class and field demonstration outlines, trainee exercises, and resource materials, with a focus on CSA. The manual can be used in a classroom setting or adapted for other training formats, such as short courses, conferences, and field days.

**This resource is published by Teaching for Democracy Alliance.The resource includes teaching about elections and voting assessment matrix, checklist for schools and district leaders, and downloadable documents for educators and administrators.

Teaching Mathematics is nothing less than a mathematical manifesto. Arising in response to a limited National Curriculum, and engaged with secondary schooling for those aged 11 ̶ 14 (Key Stage 3) in particular, this handbook for teachers will help them broaden and enrich their students’ mathematical education. It avoids specifying how to teach, and focuses instead on the central principles and concepts that need to be borne in mind by all teachers and textbook authors—but which are little appreciated in the UK at present.
This study is aimed at anyone who would like to think more deeply about the discipline of ‘elementary mathematics’, in England and Wales and anywhere else. By analysing and supplementing the current curriculum, Teaching Mathematics provides food for thought for all those involved in school mathematics, whether as aspiring teachers or as experienced professionals. It challenges us all to reflect upon what it is that makes secondary school mathematics educationally, culturally, and socially important.

Published by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, the 600-page manual covers practical aspects of organic farming and gardening, applied soil science, and social and environmental issues in agriculture. Units contain lecture outlines for instructors and detailed lecture outlines for students, field and laboratory demonstrations, assessment questions, and annotated resource lists. Although much of the material has been developed for field or garden demonstrations and skill building, most of the units can also be tailored to a classroom setting.The training manual is designed for a wide audience of those involved in teaching farming and gardening, including colleges and universities with programs in sustainable agriculture, student farms or gardens, and on-farm education programs; urban agriculture, community garden, and farm training programs; farms with internships or apprenticeships; agriculture extension stations; school gardening programs; organizations such as the Peace Corps, US AID, and other groups that provide international training in food growing and ecological growing methods; and master gardener programs.

he Inheritance is a video game that uses storytelling to teach the ACRL framework Information Creation as a process. The game can be an engaging way for librarians to teach the abstract concept. The objective is not only about reaching the end of the game safely, but also, about gathering the necessary items along the way to solve the mystery. You will have a checklist of items that you must gather in order to make it through the game. We used Twine, an application made for game creation, to visualize our concept. This game gets quite complex as you go, so it is recommended that you keep a piece of paper on hand to track your progress. Also, if you do not make it through the game on your first play-through, it is recommended that you try again! Finally, if you choose to listen to the narration clips throughout the game, it enhances the immersive experience. Overall, have fun playing our game! The goal was to allow the user to enjoy the process, rather than putting so much emphasis on reaching the end. Now you can simply download the zip file, open it, and click on index.html. Created by students in ISI 6372 Information Literacy at the University of Ottawa, Winter 2020.

Resources to help educators enhance and enrich their teaching with accessible videos that include captions and/or audio description.

This classroom activity is aimed at an understanding of different ecosystems by understanding the influence of temperature and precipitation. Students correlate graphs of vegetation vigor with those of temperature and precipitation data for four diverse ecosystems, ranging from near-equatorial to polar, and spanning both hemispheres to determine which climatic factor is limiting growth.

This 18 day unit explicitly teaches text structures, summary, text features, reading informational text about Mesopotamia, and writing a book about Mesopotamia. Instruction moves from high scaffolding to moderate scaffolding to independent practice as students become familiar with the various text structures, how to identify them, what graphic organizer will work with each text structure, how to use notes recorded in graphic organizers to write summaries, and how to compile an informational book. Mesopotamia is the content used as an anchor.

The idea of Threshold Concepts has been widely discussed in higher education for more than a decade. As defined by Jan H.F. Meyer and Ray Land, a threshold concept “can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress”.  (Meyer, J., & Land, R. (2003). Put another way, threshold concepts are the core ideas and principles in any discipline that often become second nature to experts, but may be completely foreign to the novice. And yet, without an understanding of these core concepts, learners cannot progress in further learning in any given subject area. As with all academic disciplines, threshold concepts exist in the area of Information Literacy; grasping information literacy threshold concepts is essential for students to become effective researchers.In 2015, the American Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) replaced their Information Literacy Competency Standards, with a “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education”. The Framework is organized into six Frames, each anchored by an information literacy threshold concept and supported by a set of knowledge practices and dispositions. These six information literacy threshold concepts include:Authority is Constructed and ContextualInformation Creation is a ProcessInformation Has ValueResearch as InquiryScholarship as ConversationSearching as Strategic ExplorationBased on the research studies and experiences of academic instruction librarians who see first-hand the challenges students experience when conducting college-level research, the new Framework was developed to support information literacy instruction in the digital age. The literature suggests that most students entering college are unprepared for the rigors of academic research. (Head, A. J. (2013). If students can gain an understanding of these six threshold concepts, they will likely be better researchers and generally more successful in their academic work.What are the implications of this huge paradigm shift in college-level research instruction for school librarians? Simply put, school librarians have a wonderful opportunity to prepare students for college level research by systematically teaching information literacy threshold concepts in grades K-12. A scaffolded information literacy instruction program focused on threshold concepts along with standards and skills could help pave the way for students to be effective college researchers. With an estimated 30% of US college and university students dropping out after their first year, preparing research savvy students for the demands of college assignments could have a significant impact on student success and ultimately on college graduation rates.  Instructional ObjectivesBy the completion of Module 1, students will be able to identify a threshold concept from their field or discipline and design a learning activity that could be used to teach this concept.By the completion of Module 2, students will be able to identify one or more stumbling blocks that students encounter when conducting academic research, and describe how a better grasp of one of the six ACRL Information Literacy threshold concepts could help overcome this research barrier.By the completion of Module 3, students will be able to create a lesson plan for a K-12 classroom which teaches or reinforces the threshold concept “Research as Inquiry”. 

The transition into class can feel hectic and disorienting for students, especially if they are coming from an unstructured time like lunch or recess, if they struggle to stay organized during transitions, or if they're just having an off day. The thresholding strategy has teachers stand in the doorway of their classroom to greet students, build relationships, and provide consistency by reminding students of expectations and what they need to do to be ready for class. While each teacher should be themselves and authentic when interacting with students, this strategy will provide some tips for how to quickly connect with students and set them up for success at the start of class. This will help students feel recognized and message to them that their presence and participation in class is valued.

Students examine story elements through teacher read-alouds and independent reading and then use reader-response journals and graphic organizers to prepare for the creation of their own scary stories.

History has given us remarkable examples of cross-cultural solidarity within the context of social justice movements. These working relationships are the legacy on which today’s age of activism stands. By examining this historical/contemporary phenomenon through a diverse range of texts and media, students will hone analytical, writing, and social-emotional skills with an eye toward their collective role as a conscientious, global citizenry.

This lesson will focus on creating timelines. Students will use important dates from their lives to create a personal 5 event timeline. Students will use rulers to measure equal spaces for their timelines. This lesson will require two 1 hour sessions. The first lesson will include the lesson introduction, work on timelines and time for formative assessments as students work. The second session will be used to complete timelines, share projects, and complete exit tickets. Sample of completed timeline: Video sample of completed timeline: https://goo.gl/1JwF0I This unit was created as part of the ALEX Interdisciplinary Resource Development Summit.

Many sources you will want to use for curricular purposes have bias in them. While bias is a normal part of our existence within societies, some biases are harmful. Biases that are harmful present social norms that exclude historically and widely marginalized people.

One way to identify if a source has bias is to consider the following questions organized around social identity markers used in the United States. While having some form of bias does not immediately mean you discard the curricular resource because context matters, it is important to know how to evaluate the impact of the bias. The questions below are designed not as a checklist, but rather as a guide to begin identifying bias. Use this tool as a starting place to help you vet and assess the bias in a resource and determine whether or not the resource can be edited/modified and used.