This refreshingly frank handbook shows teachers how to close the achievement gap in their classrooms by teaching students innovative paths to academic success. Drawing on over twenty years’ experience, Kelley presents straightforward strategies for helping learners improve their grades and test scores and experience greater school engagement—all while streamlining the teacher’s work to yield maximum efficiency. Strategies include team-grading essays, using Socratic Seminars and sworn statements, allowing for re-dos, and ruthlessly pruning assignments, among others. Often humorous and irreverent in tone, this guide will be the talk of the break room. Includes online digital content.
ISBN: 978-1-57542-492-7
Audience: Middle school and high school teachers
Trim Size: 7.25" x 9.25"
Page Count: 208
Digital Content: Includes reproducible handouts for Socratic Seminars, information on connecting standardized testing information to curriculum and grades, and student strategies for improving grades
Praise for Teaching Smarter
“As an AVID teacher who has spent the last 15 years devoted to increasing student academic success, I find Patrick Kelley’s approach in Teaching Smarter to be a groundbreaking ‘third way’ of achieving that goal. Rather than focusing on the old twin pillars of ‘motivation’ and ‘study strategies,’ Kelley focuses on the simpler, more elegant and—I have found to be—more effective cognitive approach of challenging and transforming what students think and assume about themselves, school, and academic success.”—Christian Peters, AVID coordinator and high school teacher, Cajon High School, San Bernardino, CA
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