Joyful Learning: Tools to Infuse Your 6-12 Classroom with Meaning, Relevance, and Fun is a guide for teachers seeking to energize their practice and deeply engage students. Author Stephanie Farley shows how to create student-centered learning experiences that immerse students in meaning, relevance, and joy. She shows how you can foster student engagement and motivation with a combination of choice, challenge, and play, thereby improving learning outcomes. Practical strategies are included in each chapter, such as how to write rubrics that foster effective feedback, how to incorporate performance and competency-based assessment, and how to have students grade themselves through a process of self-evaluation and reflection. Throughout, she offers tools such as targets and rubrics, checklists to guide planning, and prompts that help you apply the ideas to your own assignments and assessments. With the book’s specific, immediately applicable examples, you’ll be able to help your students feel connected to the lessons, happy about their progress, and joyfully engaged in the learning process.

Grounded in research and theory, Sparking Joyful Learning: A Teacher's Guide to Connecting Play and Reader Response highlights the connections between play and literacy and provides teachers with resources for building upon children’s playful reading responses in the PK-3 classroom. Readers will find guidance on using diverse children’s literature and ways to connect responsive play to literacy instruction, standards, and assessments. The approaches outlined in this book aim to spark imaginative learning with literacy instruction that is creative, joyful, and meaningful.

The optimal state for learning is one of safety, connection, motivation, and engagement. Every student and teacher is different, but there’s one thing each has in common: a responsive nervous system ready for action. Whether it’s a fight breaking out on the playground, a difficult conversation with a parent, or an impromptu fire drill, understanding how the nervous system responds can help keep teachers and students on an even keel. Polyvagal Theory (PVT) has had a tremendous impact on the mental health field, shedding light on how the nervous system predictably moves between different states in response to changing situations. School consultant Debra Em Wilson introduces PVT to educators and shows how using PVT-guided strategies can help create optimal learning environments. When school staff understand the role of the nervous system in learning, they can better help students develop the skills leading to increased resilience, adaptability, and flexibility: essential qualities for social, emotional, and academic success.

Discover motivating, personalized learning strategies that all of your students will love! Build an active, responsive, and inclusive classroom where every student benefits. Through step-by-step directions, reproducible handouts, classroom-tested examples, and specific guidelines, teachers and teacher teams will discover 60 activities to help you: Quickly and easily modify and adapt design instruction for diverse learners, including students with cultural, language, learning, physical, or sensory differences Transform lectures and whole-class discussions through dynamic, student-centered learning experiences Immerse students in discussion, debate, creative thinking, questioning, teamwork, and collaborative learning Flexibly co-plan and co-teach with a variety of school professionals The revised edition of this bestselling resource includes step-by-step directions, reproducible handouts, classroom-tested examples, and specific guidelines. Discover quick and easy ways to help all learners participate, contribute, and learn with this unique guide! "This book is a gold mine of strategies to increase engagement, participation, and JOY for all students in inclusive classrooms. The examples and implementation suggestions make is easy for K-12 teachers to select and apply strategies that make learning meaningful and fun." —Barb Gruber, Inclusion Facilitator Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education "One of the many things I appreciate about this new edition is the range of its examples. Regardless of grade level or subject area, all K-12 teachers will find relevant gems here." —Kelly Chandler-Olcott, Associate Dean for Research Syracuse University

College and career readiness standards demand reading, writing, and speaking proficiency from students. Learn research-based strategies that engage students in all facets of English Language Arts.

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has been steadily gaining traction in education, but little attention has been paid to its underlying assumptions. In Critiquing Social and Emotional Learning:Psychodynamic and Cultural Perspectives, Clio Stearns draws on qualitative classroom observations, teacher interviews, and analysis of prominent SEL program materials to offer a critique of SEL as a codified phenomenon. Stearns questions undergirding presumptions about children, teachers, and SEL’s interplay with cultural and educational trends. Claiming that SEL participates in cultural demands for “hegemonic positivity,” Stearns illustrates the dangers and undesirable demands of this impossible curricular regime. In particular, Stearns highlights how closeness and understanding in the classroom are repeatedly circumvented and how normative and necessary parts of life like negative affect and interpersonal conflict are disregarded. In Stearns's view, the educational community should not consider children's social and emotional worlds as fair domain for mastery or learning. Instead, we should consider social and emotional education as something without a predetermined endpoint, requiring the joint and ongoing participation of teachers and students

Learn how to use research-based practices in your classroom that can truly engage students and help them be joyful, confident learners.

Political intrigue. Environmental issues. Ethical dilemmas. Critical thinking. Problem solving. Social studies content is directly connected to real life and is filled with built-in hooks to transform tuned-out students into engaged and enthusiastic learners. Experiencing schoolwide elections, researching a cause, and participating in mock court cases are just a few ways to build the joyful self-efficacy and knowledge that students need for college, careers, and civic-minded adulthood. Springing from the insights and research in Engaging Minds in the Classroom: The Surprising Power of Joy, Erekson explains how to integrate the joyful learning approach with social studies standards, including the Common Core, the National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies, and the College, Career, and Civic Life framework. In addition to discussing how to create a student-centered classroom and develop activities that generate authentic products and meaningful outcomes, Erekson provides specific strategies that will enhance your own joy of teaching and learning. This volume completes the set of Engaging Minds, and is a welcome addition to every teacher's reference collection. James A. Erekson is a former elementary teacher and has collaborated with K-12 teachers on reading, writing, and oral language. He has successfully used social studies content to help students develop into stronger readers and writers and is an associate professor of reading at University of Northern Colorado.

In this new book from Routledge and MiddleWeb, author Rita Platt shows how you can create a joyful classroom community in which students are determined to work hard, be resilient, and never give up. She describes how to help build students’ purpose, mastery, and autonomy, so they take ownership over their work and develop a growth mindset for success. Topics covered include: Why joy and effort go hand in hand How to build a classroom climate of caring and achievement Why mastery and goal setting are important How to work with differentiated instruction How to work with cooperative and collaborative learning Why parent-teacher connection is vital How to take your practice of joy and effort beyond the classroom And much more! Each chapter includes practical tools, tips, and ideas that you can use immediately to develop these skills in students, so they find more joy and success in the learning process.

If we teach in the way that human brains learn, both students and their teachers will thrive! This book aligns evidence from the learning sciences on how and what students need to learn with classroom practice (pre-K–12). It demonstrates, with hands-on examples, how a change in educational mindset (rather than in curriculum) can improve student outcomes on both standardized tests and a breadth of 21st-century skills skills. Written collectively by classroom teachers, administrators, parents, and learning scientists, this book shows readers how to co-construct and reimagine an optimal educational system. Making Schools Work offers three case studies of schools, including a statewide system, that are all realizing a 6 Cs approach to learning focused on collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence. The text documents the ever-evolving implementation process, as well as outcomes and the ongoing work of stakeholders. Readers can use this resource to create an education for all children that is culturally responsive, inclusive, effective, and fun. Book Features: Helps educators teach in the way that human minds learn.Jointly written in accessible language by teachers, administrators, parents, and learning scientists.Offers hands-on ways to reimagine classrooms without investing in new curricula.Puts teachers in the driver’s seat, reminding them of why they teach.Provides culturally responsive, inclusive, effective, and fun strategies.Offers children the possibility of learning the skills they will need for 21st-century skills success. “Most of us agree that it is critical at this moment in time to reimagine what school could be. This reimagination must be informed by the best available science and built on current educational wisdom found in our schools. This book does just that and makes clear that more playful learning across the K–12 school system would be the most natural way to help all students learn the 21st-century knowledge and skills they need in life.” —From the Foreword by Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons 3.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? and professor of education, Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia