Nancy Frey

Join Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher as they outline a clear-cut, realistic, and rewarding approach to formative assessment. They explain how four discrete steps work in tandem to create a seamless, comprehensive formative assessment system—one that has no beginning and no end. This ongoing approach enhances an active give-and-take relationship between teachers and students to promote learning. Where am I going? Step 1: Feed-up ensures that students understand the purpose of an assignment, task, or lesson, including how they will be assessed. Where am I now? Step 2: Checking for understanding guides instruction and helps determine if students are making progress toward their goals. How am I doing? Step 3: Feedback provides students with valuable and constructive information about their successes and needs. Where am I going next? Step 4: Feed-forward builds on the feedback from step 3 and uses performance data to facilitate student achievement. Dozens of real-life scenarios demonstrate how to apply these steps in your classroom, always focusing on the presence or absence of student learning to guide the action. By enabling teachers and students alike to see more clearly what they need to do for learning to be successful, this approach builds students' competence, confidence, and understanding. No matter what grade level you teach, The Formative Assessment Action Plan will help you make better use of assessment data so you can more quickly adjust instruction to keep every student on the path to success.

This popular guide offers a wealth of innovative, research-based strategies for making K–12 classrooms the best learning environments they can be. Easy-to-implement best practices are presented for establishing a classroom management plan, organizing procedures and materials, building a respectful community, fostering peer collaboration, and engaging students in interactive learning. Each of the 50 strategies includes step-by-step instructions, the amount of time needed to implement, and the recommended grade level. In a large-size format for easy photocopying, the book features ready-to-use reproducibles.

Are we missing the opportunity to reach struggling learners from the very beginning? Are we hastily—and unnecessarily— referring students to intervention programs that substitute for high-quality core instruction? What if we could eliminate the need for intervention programs in the first place? Response to Intervention (RTI) programs are only as powerful and effective as the core instruction on which they're built. High-quality instruction, then, is the key ingredient that helps all students excel, and it's at the heart of Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey's unique approach to the RTI model — Response to Instruction and Intervention, or RTI2. In Enhancing RTI, the authors argue that students learn best when classroom instruction and supplemental intervention mirror each other in both content and purpose. This book provides K-12 teachers with the knowledge and tools they need to implement a cohesive RTI2 system that helps all children learn by proactively addressing their needs. To this end, you will learn how to:Integrate and align core instruction and supplemental intervention. Assess your own classroom instruction, in addition to your students' responses to it. Strengthen existing school improvement efforts within an RTI2 framework. Utilize systematic feedback to raise student achievement. Fisher and Frey maintain that the RTI2 model not only promotes active student learning, but it also, when done right, promotes a culture of hardwired excellence at all levels of instruction.

The benefits of collaborative learning are well documented—and yet, almost every teacher knows how group work can go wrong: restless students, unequal workloads, lack of accountability, and too little learning for all the effort involved. In this book, educators Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and Sandi Everlove show you how to make all group work productive group work: with all students engaged in the academic content and with each other, building valuable social skills, consolidating and extending their knowledge, and increasing their readiness for independent learning. The key to getting the most out of group work is to match research-based principles of group work with practical action. Classroom examples across grade levels and disciplines illustrate how to:Create interdependence and positive interaction. Model and guide group work. Design challenging and engaging group tasks. Ensure group and individual accountability. Assess and monitor students' developing understanding (and show them how to do the same). Foster essential interpersonal skills, such as thinking with clarity, listening, giving useful feedback, and considering different points of view. The authors also address the most frequently asked questions about group work, including the best ways to form groups, accommodate mixed readiness levels, and introduce collaborative learning routines into the classroom. Throughout, they build a case that productive group work is both an essential part of a gradual release of responsibility instructional model and a necessary part of good teaching practice.

Educators today understand that literacy involves at least five processes: reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing. This thoughtful and practical book by a team of literacy experts offers classroom teachers a guide to using visual forms of information as tools for literacy development. The authors provide strategies for fostering visual and critical literacy competencies and increasing student engagement through the use of picture books, comic books, graphic novels, traditional films, anime, and other visual sources of information. Each chapter examines relevant research and theory, and presents practical applications for the classroom.

More than ever before, as they teach to an increasingly diverse population, educators need a clear, concise guide to designing and implementing responsive curriculum. This book, built around the lessons of classroom teachers, provides the 'how' of instruction design. The first section identifies the most important components of design: addressing standards, designing multiple assessments, identifying richly detailed source materials, and creating interrelated lessons and culminating activities. Section two expands on the needs of diverse learners, and the concluding section contains a completed instructional plan, easily adaptable to your content and grade level.