This book has been written to guide teachers and prospective teachers as they develop a vision and learn the needed skills to create classrooms where cooperation is a way of being that helps to empower their students and themselves as learners. Chapters in this text primarily address organizing and managing a classroom in which the students work in groups. Evaluating children's books is a major theme in all chapters as well as teaching strategies for primary, intermediate, and middle school children. This text presents effective teaching methods that were collected from over 25 years of classroom research. This resource addresses issues related to multi-age classrooms such as classroom and curriculum management, instruction, and assessment.
Reproduceable pages provide ready-made materials for teachers to utilize in their classrooms.
Advantages of student involvement, types of participation, and various strategies are presented. Each chapter contains an application section that describes activities for a cumulative project. In this book, a combination of theory and practice helps students learn and develop the teaching skills and techniques needed to prepare the for a successful career in teaching. In a truly integrated approach, theory, classroom applications, and field-based connections relate and synthesize pedagogical practice into theory and help students develop and articulate a personal instructional philosophy. This book is written for teachers who are looking for ways to expand their classroom repertoire in a more cooperative direction.