The Not This, But That series aims to replace some common, existing teaching practices with approaches that are more effective—healthier, perhaps—for our students. Each text is collaboratively written by authors to bring professional wisdom to important instructional topics. From early literary researchers, educators, advocates, and practitioners, these texts offer strategies and tools to support you in improving student learning. Explore some titles below!
Reading
No More Reading for Junk
Pizza. Pez dispensers. Nerf balls. When we give students “junk” to reward reading, we are focusing their intention away from the act of reading and from their own independence as readers. Instead, we can create classrooms where reading is seen as its own reward. In this book, esteemed researcher Linda Gambrell provides a research-based context for cultivating children’s intrinsic motivation to read and identifies three essential principles, the “ARC” of motivation:
- access: giving kids a wealth of reading materials and opportunities to discuss texts
- relevance: offering high interest, moderately challenging and authentic reading experiences
- choice: allowing students to self-select texts and reading activities
What exactly do those principles look like in action? Reading specialist and researcher Barbara Marinak shares the strategies and techniques that make a difference for student readers’ motivation, turning disengaged readers into passionate ones. “Pizza and Pez dispensers are short lived,” Linda and Barbara write, “but confident and empowered readers are likely to remain motivated for life.”
No More Teaching a Letter a Week
“Letter-a-week” may be a ubiquitous approach to teaching alphabet knowledge, but that doesn’t mean it’s an effective one. In No More Teaching a Letter a Week, early literacy researcher Dr. William Teale helps us understand that alphabet knowledge is more than letter recognition, and identifies research-based principles of effective alphabet instruction, which constitutes the foundation for phonics teaching and learning. Literacy coach Rebecca McKay shows us how to bring those principles to life through purposeful practices that invite children to create an identity through print.
Children can and should do more than glue beans into the shape of a “B”; they need to learn how letters create words that carry meaning, so that they can, and do, use print to expand their understanding of the world and themselves.
No More Summer Reading Loss
Everyone loves summer—except reading teachers. Kids take a vacation from books and those with limited access to books lose ground to their peers. You may have thought there’s nothing you can do about it, but there is. No More Summer-Reading Loss shows how to ensure that readers continue to grow year round.
School-based practitioners Carrie Cahill and Kathy Horvath join with renowned researchers Anne McGill-Franzen and Dick Allington to help you make summer readers out of every student.
Classroom Management & Teaching Profession
No More Mindless Homework
While schools around the nation reconsider homework policies, teachers, students, and parents continue to ride the wave of either too much, too little, too easy, or too hard homework assignments. In the expectation that children complete homework, sometimes they are assigned mindless “busy work.” Kathy Collins and Janine Bempechat take on the stormy topic of homework by re-focusing the conversation from “to assign or not to assign” to how we can design engaging homework that harnesses children’s interests and fosters their learning. “Janine and I give you a research-based rationale and a more expansive view of homework that enables you to envision meaningful alternatives to worksheets, packets, and tasks that simply occupy children’s afterschool time,” Kathy writes. As Janine notes, “More than just ‘getting it done,’ homework can be an opportunity to foster positive beliefs about learning, establish meaningful habits of mind, and forge an academic identity.”
With strategies for adding choice, differentiation, relevance, and authentic feedback into homework assignments, you’ll discover how to reimagine homework in ways that promote lifelong learning habits in your students.No More Telling as Teaching
The truth is, when we rely on lecture in an effort to cover content, we’re doing students a disservice. Although lecture can be engaging and even useful, lecture alone cannot give kids real opportunities to learn, retain, and transfer the disciplinary ideas, skills, and practices we’re trying to teach.
Cris Tovani and Elizabeth Moje help us translate the time spent lecturing into powerful learning experiences where students interact and inquire into topics that matter. Their research-based alternatives help you create the conditions for engaging, relevant work that’s inherently interesting and sparks critical thinking.
Elizabeth Moje helps us understand the latest research on how people learn, and shows powerful evidence that teachers can increase student learning with more purposeful student participation. Veteran teacher and instructional coach Cris Tovani provides a practical model for instruction that’s backed by the current research and puts student engagement at the center of your teaching. Her examples of problem-based learning activities include connections to national standards and topics that matter outside the classroom walls. Together, Elizabeth and Cris make a convincing argument that when we minimize teaching-as-telling and transition to planning for kids to do the work, student engagement soars—and so does learning.
Technology with Intention
Educational software can do many things—assess a student’s reading skill, give instruction and practice at the student’s level, and assess again to determine progress. But software cannot build a relationship with a child and it cannot look at a child’s face and recognize understanding or confusion. It still comes down to teaching students, not technology. EdTech cannot replace a knowledgeable and skilled teacher, but it can support effective literacy learning and be your assistant in creating powerfully literate students and citizens.
With constant upgrades, innovations, and new capabilities, in some ways technology has never been more overwhelming. It’s easy to get lost in the abundance of options and steadily increasing administrative demands. Suzanne and Beth offer a path that puts teachers in charge, pairing research on literacy and technology with practical, actionable advice to help you bring quality instruction and technology together.
While there are books that show you how to include tech, Technology with Intention also addresses how to decide whether to use tech at all. Intentional is the key word for integrating technology into instruction, and you will find helpful guidelines and prompts to help you decide when, how, and why to use technology with your students.
Cut through the noise and focus on what matters most—teaching students, not technology. Learn to how to use technology to enhance, not replace, quality teaching and learning, and consider the best choices for the specific content and the students in front of you. How will you use tech with intention?
Tuned-In Teaching
Meaningful teaching is something educators strive for each day. Educators also know that there is no such thing as a perfect classroom. Despite our best intentions, our classrooms sometimes feel like they’re stuck, or out of tune.
In Tuned-in Teaching, Antero Garcia and Ernest Morrell offer a road map for creating a classroom that is transformative for your students and revitalizing for you. They explain why students play an integral role in turning classrooms into spaces for greater engagement and innovation. By tuning in to youth culture and the lives of students, we become more connected to their needs and ways of learning.
The authors examine critical research and discuss the connection to specific aspects of teaching. They also offer six important considerations for teachers who want to build more active, just, and tuned-in learning environments:
- Students at the Center: How are you ensuring you are fully seeing who your students are?
- Authenticity as a Standard: How do students’ interests and expertise get to shine?
- Get in Touch with Student’s Digital Lives: How can technology be used meaningfully in your instruction?
- Keep It Playful: How is student curiosity cultivated in your classroom?
- Center Action: Who are the audiences your students communicate with?
- Put It All Together: How do you assess learning in your classroom?
This book is an invitation to learn and grow alongside the suggestions and research presented. It offers guidance for more meaningful teaching in the present, and critical pedagogy for transforming classrooms for the societies of the future.
Social Emotional Learning
No More Taking Away Recess
Frustrated by ongoing difficult student behavior? You’re not alone: classroom management issues are a leading cause of teacher burnout. But there is a solution. No More Taking Away Recess and Other Problematic Discipline Practices shows how to promote good behavior, address interruptions, and keep everyone moving forward.
“Management and control are not the same,” write teacher and school leader Gianna Cassetta and noted researcher Brook Sawyer. If trying harder to exert control is sapping your energy, watch as they show how to transition away from the roles of disciplinarian or goody dispenser and toward an integrated, professionally satisfying model for classroom management.
No More Teaching Without Positive Relationships
Teachers know the importance of strong relationships with their students, but sometimes connecting with them feels challenging. No More Teaching Without Positive Relationships reviews the teacher-student relationship research and provides practices for building relationships that make a difference.
To learn, students need positive relationships with their teachers. So what gets in the way and how can we do better? Since there is no one way to make every relationship positive, authentic, sustainable, and trusting, the authors provide a range of strategies for building and maintaining connections with students. They also discuss critical considerations such as:
- Learning about students’ backgrounds and interests
- Communicating with parents and caregivers
- Developing culturally responsive content
- Understanding the importance of race and ethnicity
- Building and protecting students’ self-esteem
Positive teacher-student relationships do not just transform student learning—they also create more stimulating and caring classrooms. A true relationship is dynamic, often requiring a change in behaviors and mindsets. It can be intense work, but it is the kind of work that can change a student’s life.
Trauma-Responsive Pedagogy
Trauma and adversity are increasingly common experiences for students and educators, with growing poverty, income inequality, social injustice, institutional inequity, and the global pandemic worsening the situation. Now more children are attending school while experiencing significant chronic and acute stressors. What can educators do to support students, help them learn, and ensure they reach their full potential? Trauma-informed schools are lauded as one way to address this challenge, but trauma-informed pedagogy can be hard to define and, consequently, difficult for teachers and schools to implement.
Trauma-Responsive Pedagogy explores the research and practices around trauma-informed education in an easy-to-digest, actionable text that elevates the healing and wellness of both the children and the adults in our classrooms. It describes the challenges of a classroom that does not attend to adversity and trauma, then presents the research on trauma-responsive classrooms, and finally provides an inclusive framework that supports educators in centering the whole child in their classrooms—offering a recipe for what to do next period, next week, and next school year. Pedagogy that is trauma-responsive invites us to heal alongside our students while explicitly elevating evidence-informed teaching methods and practices and facilitating the necessary inner work to bring our whole being to the profession in healthy ways. Our students’ challenges are not a deterrent to their learning. Together, we can turn wounds into wisdom.
Math / Science
No More Math Fact Frenzy
No More Math Fact Frenzy examines this research and concludes that our approaches to math fact instruction are often ineffective. We want our students to know their math facts. We know they’re better mathematicians when they’re comfortable with them. Yet the ways we ask students to learn them in many classrooms remain unproductive.
To address this, the authors outline three phases for helping students master their math facts.
- Building foundational concepts and strategies
- Learning more efficient reasoning strategies
- Meaningful, ongoing practice leading to full fact fluency
Then they share recommendations for all three phrases: activities and games that build number sense, strategies that lead to flexible thinking, and ways to create and sustain a classroom culture of fluency. This kind of teaching helps students learn their math facts more successfully—and with less stress and anxiety.
No More Science Kits or Texts in Isolation
It is common to engage students in the process of science, using mostly hands-on activities, and equally common to provide students with only science knowledge through mostly text-based experiences. Neither of these approaches is authentic to how scientists make sense of the world. Both fail to connect those experiences to the larger purpose of science. In this book Jacquey and Gina show you why, and how integrating science and literacy instruction supports students’ understanding of and engagement in both.
Using research as their guide, Jacquey and Gina show you how to integrate science and literacy learning in a way that reflects the authentic ways scientists work. The authors have identified three key principles supporting this integration:
Principle #1: Frame student investigations with a scientific purpose.
Principle #2: Integrate “hands-on” science with literacy to support science learning.
Principle #3: Help students engage with text in science.
Throughout the book, they describe research that supports each principle and share examples of effective integration in the classroom that enhance students’ science learning, reading and writing growth, and motivation. To avoid the trap of textbook-only science or inquiry-only science, we need to aim for synergy – engaging students in using firsthand experiences and text-based experiences as connected parts of investigating questions about the natural world.
Administration
No More Culturally Irrelevant Teaching
Every child is a cultural being with a unique history and rich cultural practices; a member of communities in and outside of school. Yet too many children spend their days inside classrooms where they rarely find their voices, values, and cultural practices reflected in curriculum materials, much less embraced and celebrated through instructional practices.
Culturally relevant teaching is essential, now more than ever. If we want children to develop as successful learners, we must communicate that they belong in our classrooms. They need to see themselves, their cultures, their families, and their communities reflected in the materials and resources they find there.
Culturally relevant teachers honor students’ identities by positioning them at the center of teaching and learning. Each and every day, they make sure children and their families feel that they belong in school. They include multiple perspectives and points of view in the curriculum.
No More Random Acts of Literacy Coaching
Teacher-coach collaboration is critical to teacher effectiveness and student learning, but sometimes the in-the-moment response rate required when supporting several teacher requests at once can make literacy coaching appear to be, well, rather random.
No More Random Acts of Literacy Coaching looks at the common obstacles and misconceptions that can prevent effective coaching, and offers strategies that literacy coaches, teachers, and principals can employ to make wise use of their time together. The authors offer practical steps to create a climate of positive professional learning that include:
- Providing responsive coaching in varied settings
- Identifying coaching activities that have the greatest impact
- Matching goals and priorities to coaching cycles
- Honoring teachers as co-designers of the work.
When literacy coaching is intentional, carefully planned, and a collaborative team effort with teachers and principals, the results are dramatic. Student literacy growth increases, and the number of students needing intervention decreases. Learn how your team can work together to accelerate student success.
