Thinking Strategies for Student Achievement : Improving Learning Across the Curriculum, K-12

"This resource provides a repertoire of high-effect comprehension strategies. It is important for classroom teachers and school leaders to be able to justify why they are using specific strategies and what the benefits are of a specific strategy. Nessel and Graham provide this justification."
-W. Dorsey Hammond, Professor of Education
Salisbury University

Use these strategies to develop your students′ thinking skills and increase their learning in all subject areas.

How can teachers improve students′ higher level and creative thinking? The revised edition of this handbook provides strategies and sample lesson plans to help students learn to think more effectively and to raise their achievement levels.

Drawing upon past and recent research, the authors discuss the importance of actively engaging all students-including those with a history of low achievement-in higher levels of thinking. Thirty specific strategies, including K-W-L, Read and Think Math, and Reciprocal Teaching, can be readily integrated into daily lesson plans.

This step-by-step guide shows teachers how to:

• Help students develop, refine, and extend their thinking capacities
• Challenge students to creatively approach complex and unfamiliar material
• Encourage students to bring their own perspective to class assignments
• Provide students at all learning levels with appropriate support

With its user-friendly, practical approach, this important resource should be in the hands of every educator!

Denise Nessel is an associate of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education (NUA), where she focuses on teaching reading and writing as thinking processes in grades K-12. She has worked as a secondary English teacher, elementary reading specialist, reading clinician, university professor, district-level curriculum supervisor, co-director of a statewide staff development project, curriculum manager at educational software companies, and consultant to schools around the country and abroad. Nessel has conducted numerous workshops and demonstration lessons for teachers and administrators and has served as a consultant and writer for educational publishers and multimedia firms. She has written several books and classroom resources for teachers and a number of articles for professional journals.

Joyce M. Graham, Ph.D. is the Director of Professional Development for Scholastic RED, the professional development division of Scholastic, Inc. In this capacity, Joyce is responsible for recruiting and training consultants as well as developing and managing institutes and workshops. Before joining Scholastic, Joyce had her own educational consultant firm and worked with school districts across the country. She was a classroom teacher for over 15 years and brings her classroom experience to her work with teachers. Joyce has co-authored several books for classroom teachers. She has also served as editor for several books focusing on professional development.