Skill Instruction Research

In this book, Marzano offers a useful framework for effective teaching. Marzano provides questions for teachers to help them plan and evaluate their teaching while providing ways for students to participate in the learning process. This insightful teacher book can help teachers examine and develop their knowledge and skills.

This accessible and carefully-researched volume should be required reading for anyone interested in the motivations, research, and values behind the Common Core Standards (CCS). The authors point out what the standards are---and what they are not--- and provide specific implications for instruction and school-wide adoption.

Written by the "guru" of the differentiated instruction movement, this classic text works from a definition of differentiated instruction ("teachers begin where the students are, not the front of a curriculum guide") and then explains, in considerable detail how such a classroom can be established and the instructional strategies that work.

This volume is chock full of suggestions for approaching vocabulary sensibly in the classroom. In addition to providing a considerable number of enjoyable and focused activities, the author provides an excellent suggestions for teaching brick (specialized terms) and mortar (cross-disciplinary terms) within, and beyond the content areas.

In this volume, the authors first discuss what real reading means (e.g., it's not "decoding"); then, they provide suggestions for engaging students in the reading process, making their thinking visible, completing long reading and sustained reading assignments, and assisting students to build their knowledge in the content areas.

In an accessible volume that has been very successful, these authors apply research and theory to classroom practices, answering questions such as: "What influences content literacy?" "What do good readers do?" and "How can the two types of metacognition (knowledge and task) be defined and taught?" These questions are followed by examples of applications, e.g., story problems, webs for creating a thesis, and double-entry journals.

This intelligent volume, written by a Cornell college professor, examines with knowing eyes the differences between high school and college, approaches to sustained reading, "how good writing gets written," referring to the work of others, and the remarkable variations in form and purpose in college assignments. Arguing that "the purpose of college writing is to give individuals more to say, with broader perspectives and stronger voices of their own with which they can take more active, constructive roles in the professions and public life." The author demonstrates how disciplinary contexts and other factors influence the individuals and their purposes.

This volume emphasizes the importance of understanding, analyzing, and contextualizing different types of writing in the disciplines. After explaining the contemporary definition of genre as a contextualized text that "carries significant ethical and social values and ways of being in the world," p. 1, she explains the importance of instructors' sharing, analyzing, and assigning different genres, depending upon their discipline and the class goals. Providing examples of assignments and activities in various disciplinary classrooms, she suggests how instructors of science, history, music, math and other areas of instruction can share their expertise in the classroom.

Grabe and Stoller offer practical advice for practitioners and researchers, including evidence-based teaching ideas and a multi-step iterative process for conducting meaningful action research on reading-related topics.

This light and useful book shows students how to frame their arguments in the larger context of what else has been said about their topic, providing templates to help them make the key rhetorical moves in argumentation.