Obviously, students’ knowledge of words is critical to their success as readers, writers, and speakers. But vocabulary affects much more than communication. The truth is, teaching vocabulary directly to our students is one of the most important instructional decisions we can make. In fact, research suggests that vocabulary instruction focused on key academic terms can lead to gains as high as 33 percentile points on subject area tests.

Word Works: Cracking Vocabulary’s CODE gives teachers a simple but powerful way to plan and teach instructional units while helping students develop the skills essential to learning new vocabulary. At the center of this approach is a four-phase teaching and learning framework known as CODE. By building lessons and units using CODE, you can help your students

Connect, or “grab onto” new words and terms.
Organize new terms into meaningful frameworks that clarify important relationships within the content.
Deep process the most important words to ensure they find their way into long-term memory.
Exercise new words by using them in writing and speech.

Questions are at the heart of teaching and learning, In fact, teachers may spend as much as 60% of their instructional time asking questions, listening to answers, and providing feedback. Countless studies over the last three decades have shown that effective questioning practices lead to higher achievement in every setting.

Questioning Styles and Strategies is designed to help you “up your game” when it comes to classroom questioning. More specifically, it shows you how to

• Assess your current questioning practices and identify “best bets” for raising student achievement.
• Use different styles of questions to increase engagement and reach all learners.
• Implement classroom-ready questioning tools to vary your questioning practices and meet a wide variety of instructional purposes.
• Use questions to design lessons and units that motivate students.

Making good notes is essential to academic success. Unfortunately, in too many classrooms, notes involve little more than copying what the teacher writes or says. We call this note taking. Notemaking is something else entirely. It is an active process that requires students to identify important details, analyze big ideas, raise questions, explore personal reactions and feelings, and make connections to their prior knowledge and experiences.

From Note Taking to Notemaking will help you change your students’ perceptions of notes while empowering them to master one of the most vital academic skills. Learn how to

• Get students excited about making notes.
• Make teaching and learning more active and engaging by integrating simple notemaking tools into your everyday practice.
• Use notes to improve students’ study skills, reading comprehension, planning and decision- making capacities, and writing skills. 

This PLC Guide focuses on inference, or the ability to examine information, generate hypotheses, and draw conclusions that are not explicitly stated. Making inferences is a crucial foundational process that underlies higher-order thinking and 21st century skills. This PLC Guide walks readers through four research-based, classroom-tested strategies that help develop students’ inferential thinking skills:

• Inductive Learning helps students draw inferences by grouping data, labeling the data groups with descriptive titles, and using the groups to generate and test hypotheses.
• Mystery presents students with a puzzling question or situation and has students examine clues that help them explain the mystery.
• Main Idea teaches students how to use inferential thinking to construct main ideas that are not explicitly stated.
• Investigation directs students to use various problem-solving approaches that require inference.

This PLC Guide focuses on Compare & Contrast, a critical thinking strategy unique in its capacity to build students’ memories, eliminate confusion, and highlight crucial similarities and differences.

Research shows that comparative thinking strategies are the single most effective way to improve student learning. Compare & Contrast takes the natural human capacity to make comparisons and maximizes its effectiveness by leading students through a four-phase learning process that involves

• Describing each item separately using criteria.
• Capturing key similarities and differences on a comparison organizer.
• Forming and discussing generalizations and conclusions.
• Synthesizing learning by completing a relevant task.

This PLC Guide focuses on Reading for Meaning, a reading and reasoning strategy that helps students understand new ideas, make inferences, and support their thinking with evidence. The strategy is designed around research showing that proficient readers use a specific set of thinking skills to build deep understanding of the texts they read and apply those skills in three distinct phases: before reading, during reading, and after reading. Reading for Meaning gives all students the opportunity to practice this three-phase approach by

• Using simple statements to preview and predict before reading.
• Actively searching for relevant evidence during reading.
• Reflecting on and synthesizing both their learning and their thinking process after reading.