Teaching in the Fast Lane: How to Create Active Learning Experiences

Teaching in the Fast Lane offers teachers a way to increase student engagement: an active classroom. The active classroom is about creating learning experiences differently, so that students engage in exploration of the content and take on a good share of the responsibility for their own learning. It's about students reach­ing explicit targets in different ways, which can result in increased student effort and a higher quality of work.

Author Suzy Pepper Rollins details how to design, manage, and maintain an active classroom that balances autonomy and structure. She offers student-cen­tered, practical strategies on sorting, station teaching, and cooperative learning that will help teachers build on students' intellectual curiosity, self-efficacy, and sense of purpose.

Using the strategies in this book, teachers can strategically "let go" in ways that enable students to reach their learning targets, achieve more, be motivated to work, learn to collaborate, and experience a real sense of accomplishment.

Suzy Pepper Rollins is a passionate lifelong educator whose mission is to create academic success for ALL learners by embedding instructional practices that create energized, autonomous, focused learners. A national presenter across subject areas, she is the founder of Math in the Fast Lane, an online instructional resource for teachers of grades 3–8. In addition, she has embarked on a new project called MyEdExpert.com, which is a community of education experts who share research-based work with schools.

Rollins is the author of Learning in the Fast Lane (ASCD, 2014); this is her second book