Synopses & Reviews
Real learning happens when middle school students are encouraged to create knowledge through classroom experiences filled with personal meaning. How can you, as a teacher, offer your classes purposeful assignments that build understanding without sacrificing the content you're required to teach? In a word, choice.
In "What Choice Do I Have?" you'll discover how giving students a voice in how they learn and what they learn from opens up your classroom to inquiry and engagement while offering authentic teachable moments. Terry Bigelow and Michael Vokoun's smart, ready-to-implement, and classroom-tested activities will find a place next to your planning book because they give you and your students multiple entry points for both the development of language arts skills and the comprehension and retention of content. Their choice-based activities and projects:
- span reading, writing, listening, speaking, and vocabulary
- contain specific directions for usage
- draw on the latest scientifically based research in support of student choice
- are illustrated by classroom vignettes that show how real teachers use them every day.
- can be used in all secondary classrooms and includes specific adaptations for
- differentiated instruction
- English language learners (ELL)
- exceptional student education (ESE)
Give your students ownership over learning and watch them engage in the most important learning, their own. Read Bigelow and Vokoun and discover the power of choice.
Synopsis
Real learning happens when middle school students are encouraged to create knowledge through classroom experiences filled with personal meaning. How can you, as a teacher, offer your classes purposeful assignments that build understanding without sacrificing the content you're required to teach? In a word, choice.
In "What Choice Do I Have?" you'll discover how giving students a voice in how they learn and what they learn from opens up your classroom to inquiry and engagement while offering authentic teachable moments. Terry Bigelow and Michael Vokoun's smart, ready-to-implement, and classroom-tested activities will find a place next to your planning book because they give you and your students multiple entry points for both the development of language arts skills and the comprehension and retention of content. Their choice-based activities and projects:
- span reading, writing, listening, speaking, and vocabulary
- contain specific directions for usage
- draw on the latest scientifically based research in support of student choice
- are illustrated by classroom vignettes that show how real teachers use them every day.
- can be used in all secondary classrooms and includes specific adaptations for
- differentiated instruction
- English language learners (ELL)
- exceptional student education (ESE)
Give your students ownership over learning and watch them engage in the most important learning, their own. Read Bigelow and Vokoun and discover the power of choice.
Synopsis
In this book you'll discover how giving students a voice in how they learn and what they learn from opens up your classroom to inquiry and engagement while offering authentic teachable moments.
About the Author
Terry Patrick Bigelow is a National Board-certified teacher (EA/ELA) at the Rampallo Downtown Initiative School, K-8. He is a teacher consultant with the Tampa Bay Area Writing Project and has presented at numerous national conferences. He lives with his infinitely patient wife, Mary, in the Southeast Seminole Heights neighborhood of Tampa. He can be contacted at
[email protected] to teach at Independent Day School's middle school eight years ago, Michael J. Vokoun found his niche. He continues to live the spirit of the lifelong learner, constantly striving to improve his knowledge base for his students' betterment by being integrally involved with the Tampa Bay Area Writing Project and by presenting nationally. His wife, April, and his son, Ian, help him live his dream of the obnoxiously happy father and husband. He can be contacted at
[email protected].
Table of Contents
Introduction In Support of Choice Choice in Reading Choice in Vocabulary Choice in Writing Choice in Speaking Just One More Thing - An End with a Bang! Appendix: 91 Ways to Respond to a Book
Works Cited
Index