Classroom Catalysts: 15 Efficient Practices That Accelerate Readers’ Learning

Some learners need to make more than one academic year’s worth of growth in an academic year. We need instructional techniques that provide more bang for our buck and accelerate student growth.

-Michael Opitz and Michael Ford

When readers need more from us, we need more juice from our teaching. Classroom Catalysts shares a power pack of 15 instructional accelerators for meeting students’ needs and closing grade-level gaps.

Michael Opitz and Michael Ford show how to help jump-start learning so students not only make progress but reach proficiency. They present accelerators for whole-group, small-group, and individual instruction. These simple but surprisingly powerful techniques can actually create additional teaching time by bringing extra instructional energy to existing practices as well as seemingly noninstructional moments.

For each of their 15 accelerators, Opitz and Ford show you how it fuses differentiation and acceleration. They offer getting-started suggestions, share reproducible templates, and provide ways to adapt the idea to your own situation.

Reaching more readers with more of what they need and putting students on a path to make more than a year’s progress isn’t impossible. Begin by charging up your teaching with Classroom Catalysts.