Transformative Teaching: Changing Today's Classrooms, Culturally, Academically, and Emotionally

Support and engage the many different kinds of learners in schools. This book examines the most effective strategies for leading diverse students in developing the skills they need inside and outside the classroom. By understanding and exploring students emotional, cultural, and academic needs, educators will be better prepared to teach all students and help them become lifelong learners.

Benefits:

• Understand the journey of the teacher hero and the corresponding actions and mission.
• Recognize key traits of the nine most common types of unique learners.
• Gain six effective learning foundations to reach all learners.
• Identify emotional triggers, and explore ways to respond to problems with skills instead of emotions.
• Discover how the chunk, chew, check framework can simplify lesson design that engages all learners.
• Use resources and tools, including surveys and prompts, that can help readers effectively strategize on their heroes journeys.

Contents:
Introduction: Blaming the Lettuce
Chapter 1: Understanding Our Inner Hero
Chapter 2: Knowing Those Kids
Chapter 3: Adopting Apprenticeship Learning
Chapter 4: Learning Foundation One--A Safe Learning Environment
Chapter 5: Learning Foundation Two--Procedures and Routines
Chapter 6: Learning Foundation Three--A Growth Mindset
Chapter 7: Learning Foundation Four--Student Talk
Chapter 8: Learning Foundation Five--Student Self-Assessment
Chapter 9: Learning Foundation Six--Mindfulness
Chapter 10: Teaching With the Social-Emotional Self in Mind
Chapter 11: Teaching With the Cultural Self in Mind
Chapter 12: Teaching With the Academic Self in Mind
Epilogue: Leaving a Hero's Legacy--The Choice Is Yours

Kathleen Kryza, BA, MA, began her career as an English teacher-her dream position. Drawn to work with needy students, she left after two years of teaching English to work as a teacher in a juvenile correctional facility. For three years, she taught all subjects to twelve- to nineteen-year-old boys in the criminal sex offender program. It was also at this time that Kathleen began presenting Writers Workshop to other schools and districts.

After eighteen years in schools, Kathleen started writing books and presenting across the United States on differentiated instruction and eventually committed to working full time with her company, Infinite Horizons. Since 2001 she has worked full time as a consultant and coach and presents internationally on a variety of topics such as differentiated instruction, coteaching and inclusion, brain-based learning, and many more. Her passion is to open hearts, nourish minds, and inspire teachers and students from all walks of life on their learning journey.

MaryAnn Brittingham, BS, MS, has a love for children, and became a full-time special education teacher. MaryAnn started teaching autistic and mentally disabled students and discovered her true passion and gifts were working with emotionally handicapped students.

She has taught in a psychiatric center, board of cooperative educational services programs, rural, urban and residential schools ranging in levels from elementary through high school. During this time, she obtained a master's degree in counseling and began private counseling with students. She then began both coaching and training teachers in their classrooms. MaryAnn teaches graduate courses at the State University of New York at New Paltz, Marist College, and Southern New Hampshire University.

MaryAnn's purpose and passion are to provide teachers, students, and parents with hope and inspiration to create a safe, compassionate environment to make personal connections and develop a joy for learning. This passion led her to create her own national and international business. Brittingham Professional Development Seminars provides school districts with meaningful, inspirational training and consulting on respectful discipline, working with unmotivated students, and assemblies on mindsets. She offers teachers current and practical approaches to working with challenging behaviors while emphasizing the importance of their own internal responses and behaviors.

Alicia Duncan, BA, MA, has always had a love for cultural differences and found delight in exploring these differences as well as the fundamental similarities that all humans share.

Alicia's life as an educator began as a Spanish teacher in an elementary immersion program. Her key learning year was teaching a multiage class with seven different languages and cultures represented. Although she could not speak all seven languages, as a second-language speaker, she understood how her students' brains were processing language and content. That year, she felt her calling and began her master's degree in sociolinguistics and English as a second language (ESL) methodology.

Alicia was given the opportunity of staff developer and coordinator for her school district's ESL program. The program grew from one hundred students to over six hundred in a few short years with over forty-two languages represented. This growth provided the opportunity to be the coordinator of differentiated instruction and gifted and talented services. In this position, Alicia was able to contribute to the teacher induction program by creating a yearlong study of differentiated instruction for special needs learners. She taught and coached approximately one hundred teachers per year on methods for reaching and teaching diverse learners in the general education classroom.