Now in its 3rd edition, Better Learning Through Structured Teaching is the definitive guide to the gradual release of responsibility--an instructional framework any teacher can use to help students to be more successful and self-directed learners.

To gradually release responsibility is to equip students with what they need to master content and develop new competencies. On a day-to-day basis, it means delivering lessons intentionally structured to incorporate four interrelated phases:

* Focused Instruction (I do it) that sets students up for cognitive apprenticeship by establishing lesson purpose, modeling strategies and skills, and sharing information and insight.
* Guided Instruction (We do it together) that incorporates targeted prompts, cues, and questions to scaffold understanding.
* Collaborative Learning (You do it together) that allows students to consolidate and extend understanding through accountable group tasks built on discussion and cooperative problem solving.
* Independent Learning (You do it alone) that provides students opportunities to practice and apply the skills and knowledge they've acquired to create authentic products and ask new questions.

Authors Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey detail the components of each phase, sharing proven strategies and real-life examples. You'll find a variety of useful tips for classroom implementation, along with new guidance on teacher credibility, social-emotional learning, and embedding assessment throughout all four phases. No matter what grade level or subject you teach, Better Learning Through Structured Teaching is an essential resource for improving your practice and empowering your students.

Ensure students demonstrate more than a year's worth of learning during a school year

Renowned literacy experts Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey work with John Hattie to apply his 15 years of research, identifying instructional routines that have the biggest impact on student learning, to literacy practices. These practices are visible because their purpose is clear, they are implemented at the right moment in a student's learning, and their effect is tangible.

Through dozens of classroom scenarios, learn how to use the right approach at the right time for surface, deep, and transfer learning and which routines are most effective at each phase of learning.

In this 5th Edition, the authors provide new classroom examples from their colleagues across the disciplines as well as new instructional routines that have been researched and validated since the publication of the last edition. Also, this edition has been re-organized, adding three new chapters, to focus on the ways in which teachers can use reading, writing, speaking, and listening in their classes, emphasizing reading and comprehending texts, creating graphic organizers, developing vocabulary knowledge, and writing to learn.

Are we missing the opportunity to reach struggling learners from the very beginning? Are we hastily--and unnecessarily-- referring students to intervention programs that substitute for high-quality core instruction? What if we could eliminate the need for intervention programs in the first place?

Response to Intervention (RTI) programs are only as powerful and effective as the core instruction on which they're built. High-quality instruction, then, is the key ingredient that helps all students excel, and it's at the heart of Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey's unique approach to the RTI model -- Response to Instruction and Intervention, or RTI2.

In Enhancing RTI, the authors argue that students learn best when classroom instruction and supplemental intervention mirror each other in both content and purpose. This book provides K-12 teachers with the knowledge and tools they need to implement a cohesive RTI2 system that helps all children learn by proactively addressing their needs. To this end, you will learn how to

* Integrate and align core instruction and supplemental intervention.

* Assess your own classroom instruction, in addition to your students' responses to it.

* Strengthen existing school improvement efforts within an RTI2 framework.

* Utilize systematic feedback to raise student achievement.

Fisher and Frey maintain that the RTI2 model not only promotes active student learning, but it also, when done right, promotes a culture of hardwired excellence at all levels of instruction.

• Trustworthy
• Competent
• Dynamic
• Immediate
• Forward thinking

Fisher & Frey's answer to close and critical reading

Learn the best ways to use text-dependent questions as scaffolds during close reading and the big understandings they yield. But that's just for starters. Fisher and Frey also include illustrative video, texts and questions, cross-curricular examples, and an online facilitator's guide--making the two volumes of TDQ a potent professional development tool across all of K-12. The genius of TDQ is the way Fisher and Frey break down the process into four cognitive pathways:

• What does the text say?
• How does the text work?
• What does the text mean?
• What does the text inspire you to do?

A teacher presents a lesson, and at the end asks students if they understand the material. The students nod and say they get it. Later, the teacher is dismayed when many of the students fail a test on the material. Why aren't students getting it? And, just as important, why didn't the teacher recognize the problem?

In Checking for Understanding, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey show how to increase students' understanding with the help of creative formative assessments. When used regularly, formative assessments enable every teacher to determine what students know and what they still need to learn. Fisher and Frey explore a variety of engaging activities that check for and increase understanding, including interactive writing, portfolios, multimedia presentations, audience response systems, and much more.

This new 2nd edition of Checking for Understanding has been updated to reflect the latest thinking in formative assessment and to show how the concepts apply in the context of Fisher and Frey's work on gradual release of responsibility, guided instruction, formative assessment systems, data analysis, and quality instruction.

Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey are the creators of the Framework for Intentional and Targeted (FIT) Teaching(TM). They are also the authors of numerous ASCD books, including The Formative Assessment Action Plan: Practical Steps to More Successful Teaching and Learning and the best-selling Enhancing RTI: How to Ensure Success with Effective Classroom Instruction and Intervention.

What does it feel like to walk into your school? Is it a welcoming place, where everyone feels valued? Most school improvement efforts focus on academic goals, instructional models, curriculum, and assessments. But sometimes what can make or break your learning community are the intangibles--the relationships, identity, and connections that make up its culture. Authors Fisher, Frey, and Pumpian believe that no school improvement effort will be effective unless school culture is addressed. They identify five pillars that are critical to building a culture of achievement:

1. Welcome: Imagine if all staff members in your school considered it their job to make every student, parent, and visitor feel noticed, welcomed, and valued.

2. Do no harm: Your school rules should be tools for teaching students to become the moral and ethical citizens you expect them to be.

3. Choice words: When the language students hear helps them tell a story about themselves that is one of possibility and potential, students perform in ways that are consistent with that belief.

4. It's never too late to learn: Can you push students to go beyond the minimum needed to get by, to discover what they are capable of achieving?

5. Best school in the universe: Is your school the best place to teach and learn? The best place to work?

Drawing on their years of experience in the classroom, the authors explain how these pillars support good teaching and learning. In addition, they provide 19 action research tools that will help you create a culture of achievement, so that your school or classroom is the best it can be. After reading this book, you'll see why culture makes the difference between a school that enables success for all students and a school that merely houses those students during the school day.

How can teachers guarantee that what they teach results in students learning what they really need to know? In The Purposeful Classroom: How to Structure Lessons with Learning Goals in Mind, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey present a variety of strategies that teachers at all levels can use to ensure that students clearly understand the purpose behind every lesson. They provide step-by-step guidance to help teachers

* Understand the difference between standards, objectives, and purpose statements, and craft the latter in terms that students can easily grasp.

* Involve students in understanding and owning the purpose of every lesson.

* Motivate students by conveying the relevance of content to students' lives.

* Develop classroom activities and assessments that allow students to demonstrate both their mastery of lesson content and their understanding of the lesson's core purpose.

From initiating lesson plans to evaluating student work, all aspects of lesson development and implementation are discussed in this lively and practical book. Filled with specific examples of effective purpose statements, assignments, and tests across grade levels and content areas, The Purposeful Classroom is essential reading for all teachers who want their students to truly understand what they are learning and why.

50 Instructional Routines to Develop Content Literacy, 3/e helps adolescents read more and read better. Middle and high school teachers can immediately put to use its practical information and classroom examples from science, social studies, English, math, the visual and performing arts, and core electives to improve students' reading, writing, and oral language development. Going above and beyond basic classroom strategies, the instructional routines recommend simple changes to teachers' everyday procedures that foster student comprehension, such as thinking aloud, using question-answer relationships, and teaching with word walls.

Fisher & Frey's answer to close and critical reading

Learn the best ways to use text-dependent questions as scaffolds during close reading and the big understandings they yield. But that's just for starters. Fisher and Frey also include illustrative video, texts and questions, cross-curricular examples, and an online facilitator's guide--making the two volumes of TDQ a potent professional development tool across all of K-12. The genius of TDQ is the way Fisher and Frey break down the process into four cognitive pathways:

• What does the text say?
• How does the text work?
• What does the text mean?
• What does the text inspire you to do?

What is FIT Teaching? What is a FIT Teacher?

The Framework for Intentional and Targeted Teaching(R)--or FIT Teaching(R)--is a research-based, field-tested, and experience-honed process that captures the essentials of the best educational environments. In contrast to restrictive pedagogical prescriptions or formulas, FIT Teaching empowers teachers to adapt the most effective planning, instructional, and assessment practices to their particular context in order to move their students' learning from where it is now to where it should be. To be a FIT Teacher is to make a heroic commitment to learning--not just to the learning of every student in the classroom, but to the professional learning necessary to grow, inspire, and lead.

This book introduces the powerful FIT Teaching Tool, which harnesses the FIT Teaching approach and presents a detailed continuum of growth and leadership. It's a close-up look at what intentional and targeting teaching is and what successful teachers do to

• Plan with purpose
• Cultivate a learning climate
• Instruct with intention
• Assess with a system
• Impact student learning

Designed to foster discussion among educators about what they are doing in the classroom, the FIT Teaching Tool can be used by teachers for self-assessment; by teacher peers for collegial feedback in professional learning communities; by instructional coaches to focus on the skills teachers need both onstage and off; and by school leaders to highlight their teachers' strengths and value. Join authors Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Stefani Arzonetti Hite for an examination of what makes great teachers great, and see how educators at all grade levels and all levels of experience are taking intentional steps toward enhanced professional practice.

Student learning communities (SLCs) are more than just a different way of doing group work. Like the professional learning communities they resemble, SLCs provide students with a structured way to solve problems, share insight, and help one another continually develop new skills and expertise.

With the right planning and support, dynamic collaborative learning can thrive everywhere. In this book, educators Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Almarode explain how to create and sustain student learning communities by

- Designing group experiences and tasks that encourage dialogue;
- Fostering the relational conditions that advance academic, social, and emotional development;
- Providing explicit instruction on goal setting and opportunities to practice progress monitoring;
- Using thoughtful teaming practices to build cognitive, metacognitive, and emotional regulation skills;
- Teaching students to seek, give, and receive feedback that amplifies their own and others' learning; and
- Developing the specific leadership skills and strategies that promote individual and group success.

Examples from face-to-face and virtual K-12 classrooms help to illustrate what SLCs are, and teacher voices testify to what they can achieve.

No more hoping the group work you're assigning will be good enough--or that collaboration will be its own reward. No more crossing your fingers for productive outcomes or struggling to keep order, assess individual student contributions, and ensure fairness. Student Learning Communities shows you how to equip your students with what they need to learn in a way that is truly collective, makes them smarter together than they would be alone, creates a more positive classroom culture, and enables continuous academic and social-emotional growth.

Huge numbers of our students are caught in storms of trauma--whether stemming from abuse, homelessness, poverty, discrimination, violent neighborhoods, or fears of school shootings or family deportations. This practical book focuses on actions that teachers can take to facilitate learning for these students. Identifying positive, connected teacher-student relationships as foundational, the authors offer direction for creating an emotionally safe classroom environment in which students find a refuge from trauma and a space in which to process events. The text shows how social and emotional learning can be woven into the school day; how literacies can be used to help students see a path through challenges; how to empower learners through debate, civic action, and service learning; and how to use the vital nature of the school community as an agent of change. This book will serve as a roadmap for creating uniformly consistent and excellent classrooms and schools that better serve children who experience trauma in their lives.

Book Features:

• Makes a clear case for the need and responsibility of schools to equip students with tools to learn despite the trauma in their lives.
• Shows practical classroom instructional and curricular interactions that address trauma while advancing student academic learning.
• Uses literacy and civic action as pathways to empowerment.
• Provides a method and tools for developing a coherent plan for creating a trauma-sensitive school.