Secrets of Great Teachers : 22 Strategies to Energize Middle and High School Classrooms

You can abandon rote learning with this middle and high school teaching guide. Encouraging both students and teachers to unlock their creativity, the authors provide guidance in lesson planning and ideas for creating unconventional homework, projects and tests that are cost-free and easy to implement. This book leads teachers away from endorsing competition and teacher-pleasing behavior, and offers ideas for independent thinking that will strengthen students' decision-making, deductive reasoning and emotional intelligence. Cover Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface 1. Finding the “Hot Spots” 2. Blending and Broadening Teaching 3. Moving Away from Useless Teaching 4. Choosing Less to Produce More 5. Promoting Discovery 6. Blossoming with Bloom 7. Giving Homework a Brain 8. Employing Visual Aids 9. Maximizing Children’s Books 10. Implementing Recordings and Video Clips 11. Getting Down to the Actual Lesson Plan 12. Seeing the Lesson Plan Unfold 13. Liberating the Struggling Student 14. Cutting Competition 15. Pulverizing Prizes 16. Purging Pleasing 17. Promoting Healthy Independent Thinking 18. Cultivating the Critic 19. Restocking the Shelves of Our Book Bankrupt Society 20. Putting Literacy to the Test 21. Testing and Grading Made Easy 22. Giving Specific Praise and Constructive Criticism Bibliography Index Shaking previous foundational assumptions of education, this book offers an incredible array of topics to supercharge learning in grade 5-12 classrooms. Whether you want your class to see the relevance of their learning, explore tough concepts, hone skills, or conduct classroom experiments, this book shows you how. All ideas are profound, easy to implement, and cost no money.