Too often, students who fail a grade or a course receive remediation that ends up widening rather than closing achievement gaps. According to veteran classroom teacher and educational consultant Suzy Pepper Rollins, the true answer to supporting struggling students lies in acceleration. In Learning in the Fast Lane, she lays out a plan of action that teachers can use to immediately move underperforming students in the right direction and differentiate instruction for all learners-even those who excel academically. This essential guide identifies eight high-impact, research-based instructional approaches that will help you * Make standards and learning goals explicit to students. * Increase students' vocabulary-a key to their academic success. * Build students' motivation and self-efficacy so that they become active, optimistic participants in class. * Provide rich, timely feedback that enables students to improve when it counts. * Address skill and knowledge gaps within the context of new learning. Students deserve no less than the most effective strategies available. These hands-on, ready-to-implement practices will enable you to provide all students with compelling, rigorous, and engaging learning experiences.

Every child wants to be successful, even those who have gotten behind. It may not look that way, with their heads propped up on their elbows in feigned disinterest. This is boring, they proclaim. Or I could do it if I wanted.

Weeks and months pass. Sometimes, even with academic interventions, the gaps remain, or even expand.

Enter acceleration, an academic process that provides a fresh start for learners. Captivating experiences provide just enough prior knowledge to set up success in class today. What about all those gaps? Remediation occurs, but just in time for new learning. That way, students apply those revisited skills and can realize success.

The Promise of Acceleration is a professional development workbook that blends research and next-day practice. Leaders and teachers engage with the text. Through responses and conversations, an acceleration plan will emerge. A strength-based plan tailored just for academically vulnerable learners that can rebuild academic confidence and genuine success.

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 reach-ing 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-cen-tered, 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.

When schools fail to address the problems of struggling students, the consequences can be dire: course failures, absenteeism, suspensions or expulsions, dropouts. Those effects continue to ripple after school with lower rates of college attendance and graduation, underemployment and lower wages, and even incarceration.

Yet many of these students can experience a very different trajectory when their learning difficulties are addressed. Whether it's a student with ADHD who has trouble sitting still, a student just arrived from the Dominican Republic who speaks no English, or a traumatized student who dissociates in class, there are strategies that have proven effective in overcoming the hurdles they face. This guide will help teachers recognize the most common barriers to learning and apply solutions that will work in their classrooms.

From Suzy Rollins, author of Teaching Vulnerable Students, a collection of effective practices to move students forward in a positive way when they have gaps in learning, whether due to the COVID-19 slide or other factors. In this QRG in the new set of Strategies for Distance Learning Guides, Rollins outlines how to tactically address academic gaps in the context of new learning situations, using well-tested strategies:

• Learning maps
• Scaffolding devices
• Prior knowledge activation
• Vocabulary-building
• Cooperative learning
• Motivational techniques

With extensive tips for how to maintain these goals in both synchronous and asynchronous learning activities, this guide will be a go-to resource for teachers of newcomers and English learners.

Each 8.5 x 11 multi-panel guide is laminated for extra durability and 3-hole-punched for binder storage.