You can make a difference! * Feeling overwhelmed by the fast-paced changes sweeping America's high schools? * Does it seem as if high school is much more complicated for your teen than it was for you? * Interested in becoming more involved at your teen's school but don't know where to start? If recent media stories about tougher high school graduation requirements and high stakes state tests have led you to wonder how you can help your teen succeed in this challenging new academic environment, High Stakes High School can help. Written by three high school teachers with a combined fifty years of experience working with students and families, this guide will show you how to: * Have a truly effective meeting with your teen's teacher using a valuable checklist of important questions. * Communicate with the principal and other administrators at your teen's school about standardized testing, past score results, school policies, and academic issues important to your child. * Understand your teen's learning style and play a more meaningful role in his or her high school experience. * Become involved at your local high school in ways that will benefit your teen. High Stakes High School will take you from perplexed to prepared.

High Stakes High School: A Guide for the Perplexed Parent

Education & Teaching

Zmuda, Allison

Tomaino, Mary

Schools & Teaching

Kaplan Publishing

Written by teachers for teachers, this enlightening book describes the cross-disciplinary journey of two high school teachers trying to align curriculum, assessment, and performance standards in their classrooms. With a focus on the importance of constantly inspiring students, the authors troubleshoot issues surrounding content standards, instructional objectives, and the aims of curriculum. This user-friendly guide:
<ul>
<li> Helps readers consider the main concepts surrounding creative teaching and ways of helping students take ownership of their learning</li>
<li> Provides insight into what it takes for teachers to learn about, work with, and benefit from standards work</li>
<li> Gives teachers practical advice for achieving greater success in the classroom</li>
<li> Targets the connections between essential questions, content, assessments, and performance standards</li>
</ul>
This creative and informative guide will inspire any educator who wrestles with how to make classroom learning meaningful to students and who cares about academic achievement and success.

The Competent Classroom : Aligning High School Curriculum, Standards, and Assessment--A Creative Teaching Guide

Teachers' College Press

Uses a fictional school setting with representative characters to discuss the essential principles of school improvement efforts.

Transforming Schools: Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Kuklis, Robert

Association for Supervision & Curriculum

A real-world action plan for educators to create personalized learning experiences Learning Personalized: The Evolution of the Contemporary Classroom provides teachers, administrators, and educational leaders with a clear and practical guide to personalized learning. Written by respected teachers and leading educational consultants Allison Zmuda, Greg Curtis, and Diane Ullman, this comprehensive resource explores what personalized learning looks like, how it changes the roles and responsibilities of every stakeholder, and why it inspires innovation. The authors explain that, in order to create highly effective personalized learning experiences, a new instructional design is required that is based loosely on the traditional model of apprenticeship: learning by doing. Learning Personalized challenges educators to rethink the fundamental principles of schooling that honors students' natural willingness to play, problem solve, fail, re-imagine, and share. This groundbreaking resource: <ul>
<li>Explores the elements of personalized learning and offers a framework to achieve it</li> <li>Provides a roadmap for enrolling relevant stakeholders to create a personalized learning vision and reimagine new roles and responsibilities</li> <li>Addresses needs and provides guidance specific to the job descriptions of various types of educators, administrators, and other staff</li> </ul>
This invaluable educational resource explores a simple framework for personalized learning: co-creation, feedback, sharing, and learning that is as powerful for a teacher to re-examine classroom practice as it is for a curriculum director to reexamine the structure of courses.

Learning Personalized: The Evolution of the Contemporary Classroom

Curtis, Greg

Ullman, Diane

Jossey-Bass

Association for Supervision & Curriculum Deve

"What the teacher wants me to say is more important than what I want to say." "If I get too far behind, I will never catch up." "What I'm learning doesn't have much to do with my life, but it isn't supposed to--it's school." These are just some of the many pernicious axioms that keep students from achieving to their potential. In Breaking Free from Myths About Teaching and Learning, Allison Zmuda analyzes and promptly dispels these and other harmful untruths that have inhibited student learning for decades and offers a wealth of ideas for combating them, including * Refocusing learning environments with students' best interests in mind. * Designing engaging lessons that spark students' imaginations. * Motivating students to learn for the joy of it, not just for the grade. * Developing authentic assessments that truly capture the extent of students' progress. * Creating effective school missions that provide both educators and students with achievable objectives. In addition to these strategies, Zmuda offers tips from prominent creative thinkers in a variety of fields on how to approach projects creatively and stimulate fresh thinking. Students have been captive to falsehoods about learning for far too long. This provocative and insightful book shows why it's vital for administrators and teachers to help students shed their faulty assumptions and offers a blueprint for creating more innovative, inviting, and effective schools.

Breaking Free from Myths About Teaching and Learning: Innovation as an Engine for Student Success

ASCD

Students following directions, dutifully completing assignments, and quietly cooperating. For some teachers, this kind of compliance is a goal worth pursuing, but for you, it's not enough. You want real engagement a classroom filled with students who ask intriguing questions, immerse themselves in assignments, seek feedback on their performance, and take pride in their progress. So even as you race to cover a demanding curriculum and address standards, you're wearing yourself out searching for the hooks that will inspire your students and make them eager to learn. It's not that you're not doing enough to motivate your students; it's that you're probably focusing on the wrong things. In this book, Allison Zmuda and Robyn R. Jackson explain the four keys to real engagement: clarity, context, challenge, and culture. Their smart, concrete strategies for improving classroom assignments, assessments, and environments will help you create learning experiences that are rigorous, meaningful, and rewarding for your students and yourself.

Real Engagement: How do I help my students become motivated, confident, and self-directed learners? (ASCD Arias)

Jackson, Robyn R.

Educators' most important work is to help students develop the intellectual and social strength of character necessary to live well in the world. The way to do this, argue authors Bena Kallick and Allison Zmuda, is to increase the say students have in their own learning and prepare them to navigate complexities they face both inside and beyond school. This means rethinking traditional teacher and student roles and re-examining goal setting, lesson planning, assessment, and feedback practices. It means establishing classrooms that prioritize
<ul>
<li>
Voice—Involving students in "the what" and "the how" of learning and equipping them to be stewards of their own education.</li>
<li>
Co-creation—Guiding students to identify the challenges and concepts they want to explore and outline the actions they will take.</li>
<li>
Social construction—Having students work with others to theorize, pursue common goals, build products, and generate performances.</li>
<li>
Self-discovery—Teaching students to reflect on their own developing skills and knowledge so that they will acquire new understandings of themselves and how they learn.</li>
</ul>
Based on their exciting work in the field, Kallick and Zmuda map out a transformative model of personalization that puts students at the center and asks them to employ the set of dispositions for engagement and learning known as the Habits of Mind. They share the perspectives of educators engaged in this work; highlight the habits that empower students to pursue aspirations, investigate problems, design solutions, chase curiosities, and create performances; and provide tools and recommendations for adjusting classroom practices to facilitate learning that is self-directed, dynamic, sometimes messy, and always meaningful.

Students at the Center: Personalized Learning with Habits of Mind

Kallick, Bena

Personalized learning is a progressively student-driven model of instruction that amplifies student voice, co-creation, social construction, and self-discovery. In this useful guide, authors Allison Zmuda and Bena Kallick explain the four attributes of personalized learning, provide tips to build student readiness in the classroom, and describe the seven elements of progressively student-driven learning. The true goal of personalized learning is for all students to become self-directed learners who design and manage the development of their own learning experiences. This guide will show you how to get there. 8.5"" x 11"" 3-panel foldout guide (6 pages), laminated for extra durability and 3-hole-punched for binder storage.

Personalizing Learning in Your Classroom (Quick Reference Guide)

A game-changing resource for educators looking to elevate their unit and lesson plans, increase student engagement, and improve home-school communication. 
With so many standards to address and templates to fill out, curriculum design and lesson planning can be cumbersome and overwhelming. And every teacher knows the struggle of trying to cover all the required content, which may or may not resonate with their students. 
In Streamlining the Curriculum, experts Heidi Hayes Jacobs and Allison Zmuda take a hard look at our overburdened, dated curricular practices and offer a better way—one built on the power of narrative. Their storyboard approach casts students as the heroes of the learning journey. Instead of passive recipients, they become protagonists, activity engaged in exploring new ideas, solving problems, finding connections, enlisting allies, and acquiring new skills and understandings to apply to both present and future challenges. 
This innovative book teaches you how to 
* Decide what to cut out, cut back, consolidate, and create in your lessons and units. 
* Find the throughlines in your required content and approach lesson design and teaching as storytelling, no matter what subject area or grade level you teach. 
* Apply genre lenses to make courses, units, and lessons more compelling. 
* Communicate clear learning targets to your students and their families. 
* Create space for exploring essential questions, investigating intriguing ideas, and conducting projects that feel relevant and important. 
* Determine purposeful and authentic evidence of learning. 
Filled with examples and insights, this book shows educators how to break free from the tyranny of templates and start streamlining curriculum, assessment, and planning to make learning experiences more immersive, interesting, and emotionally resonant.

Streamlining the Curriculum: Using the Storyboard Approach to Frame Compelling Learning Journeys

Jacobs, Heidi Hayes

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Zmuda, Allison. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Zmuda, Allison

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Zmuda, Allison. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

High Stakes High School: A Guide for the Perplexed Parent

The Competent Classroom : Aligning High School Curriculum, Standards, and Assessment--A Creative Teaching Guide

Transforming Schools: Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Learning Personalized: The Evolution of the Contemporary Classroom

Transforming Schools: Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Breaking Free from Myths About Teaching and Learning: Innovation as an Engine for Student Success

Real Engagement: How do I help my students become motivated, confident, and self-directed learners? (ASCD Arias)

Students at the Center: Personalized Learning with Habits of Mind

Personalizing Learning in Your Classroom (Quick Reference Guide)

Streamlining the Curriculum: Using the Storyboard Approach to Frame Compelling Learning Journeys