Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School by Nancie Atwell

Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School by Nancie Atwell

"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 Schoolmakes 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 Schoolcan help turn your teaching ideals into a practical, successful reality.

Read a sample chapter, and watch a sample video clip.

Nancie Atwell is a well-known educator in the United States. and all throughout the world She dedicated the $1 million award she received from the Varkey Foundation's inaugural Global Teacher Award to the Center for Teaching and Learning, the K-8 demonstration school she built in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990. Nancie's classic, now in its third edition, In the Middle, has inspired generations of teachers; in it, she discusses her teaching experience and the strategies she created that led to her nomination. In the Middle has been dubbed the greatest book on literacy education ever written in this nation by Thomas Newkirk.

For more information on the book and Nancie, go to Heinemann.com/InTheMiddle. Nancie has been teaching middle school English for almost forty years and is the first classroom teacher to receive the NCTE David H. Smith Award. Mina P. Russell Award and MLA Russell Award Both for excellent research in the teaching of English, the Shaughnessy Prize.

She was also named Distinguished Middle School English Teacher by NCTE and River of Words Poetry Teacher of the Year by River of Words. Middlebury College and the University of New Hampshire have both awarded her honorary doctorates. Nancie's Heinemann books include Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School, which takes teachers inside her award-winning school to learn about the innovations that have the greatest impact on achievement and community; Lessons That Change Writers, a year's worth of teaching straight from Nancie's file cabinets; and Name the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons, which encourages teachers to name the world through poetry and lessons. Writing in the Middle and Reading in the Middle are two DVDs that allow teachers to join her in her workshop as she gives lessons and holds conferences that improve her students' literacy - and their lives.