Student Teams That Get Results: Teaching Tools for the Differentiated Classroom

Busy teachers struggle daily with the demands of increased accountability and the need to develop skill and proficiency in diverse groups of learners. Focused on the power of student teams to advance learning, this book shows how students working together and expressing ideas with one another can clarify their thinking and deepen their understanding of essential concepts. Combining effective grouping strategies with other research-based practices, this resource for the differentiated classroom demonstrates how teachers can raise achievement and critical thinking by showing students how to practice three key skills: attentive listening, accepting others’ ideas, and disagreeing with ideas rather than people. Student Teams That Get Results shows teachers how to prepare students for deeper and more successful thinking on assessments using an innovative collection of best-practice teaching tools that help learners: scaffold critical layers of meaning; generalize and infer; integrate content; identify patterns; and, increase adaptive and analytic reasoning. This book offers more than 100 reproducible lesson planners, assessment tools, checklists, graphic organizers, and more. Each teaching tool - used as presented or customized to meet learners’ unique needs - includes a reproducible template, examples of the teaching tool in action across grade levels and content areas, and a brief how-to-use-it description.