Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School

"There are steps teachers and administrators can take--tweaks, if you will--that make a classroom or school a place that's safe for children, one where every student feels noticed and known, one that challenges kids and entices them with the intrinsic rewards of real work done well." --Nancie Atwell Since 1990, Nancie Atwell and the faculty of the K-8 Center for Teaching and Learning have charged themselves with a mission. "Our job is to innovate for the good of children," Nancie writes, "and then to pass along to other teachers the lessons we learn about instruction that makes a difference." Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School makes CTL's powerful innovations accessible to every teacher and administrator. Nancie and her colleagues have created a culture of engagement and excellence by combining smart practices and policies with rich, community-building traditions and rituals. Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School introduces essential practices such as CTL's: daily morning meetings student-generated bill of rights school-wide "You can't say you can't play" rule outreach to parents spiraling K-8 curriculum in science and history student--and teacher--self-assessment and goal-setting student-led evaluation conferences systems for school and classroom management workshop approaches to teaching math, reading, and writing--including warmups, mini-lessons, conferences, and rigorous yet kid-friendly expectations based on the research and experience of a faculty of master teachers. Nancie invites you to: reflect on your own practice and goals view CTL's systems at work on the accompanying DVD read about her school's solutions to common problems of teaching access resources--forms, guidelines, and protocols--developed by the CTL faculty. "If we want students to feel a sense of belonging to something that's bigger than they are," Nancie observes, "it's essential that their teachers feel that way, too." Join your own colleagues, along with long-distance colleagues at the Center for Teaching and Learning, to discover how Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School can help turn your teaching ideals into a practical, successful reality. Read a sample chapter, and watch a sample video clip.

About the Author :
Nancie Atwell is one of the most respected educators in the U.S. and across the world. Winner of the Varkey Foundation's inaugural Global teacher Prize, she donated the $1 million award to the Center for Teaching and Learning, the K-8 demonstration school she founded in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990. Nancie's classic In the Middle, now in its third edition, has inspired generations of teachers; in it she describes her teaching journey and the practices she developed that led to her nomination. Thomas Newkirk calls In the Middle "the greatest book on literacy teaching ever written in this country." Visit Heinemann.com/InTheMiddle for more about the book and Nancie. A middle school English teacher for almost forty years, Nancie is also the first classroom teacher to be awarded the NCTE David H. Russell Award and the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize, both for distinguished research in the teaching of English. She was also honored as NCTE's Outstanding Middle School English Teacher and as the River of Words Poetry Teacher of the Year. She has received honorary doctoral degrees from Middlebury College and the University of New Hampshire. Nancie's books for Heinemann include Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School, which takes teachers inside her award-winning school to learn about the innovations that make the biggest impact on achievement and community; Lessons That Change Writers, a year's worth of instruction straight from Nancie's file cabinets; and Naming the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons, which helps teachers to jumpstart their teaching of writing and literature each day by unpacking a poem with their students. Her DVDs Writing in the Middle and Reading in the Middle give teachers a seat in her workshop as she presents lessons and conducts conferences that transform her students' literacy - and their lives.