Engaged Classrooms

The Art and Craft of Reaching and Teaching All Learners

Engaged Classrooms presents a compelling set of evidence-based strategies that support engaging and equity-centered classrooms. These discrete and interrelated strategies foster caring and high-performing classroom communities. They also strengthen the social, emotional, and learning competencies that are linked to increases in academic engagement and achievement, and are essential to success in school, work, and life.
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Engaged Classrooms book cover

Supporting Resources: 
Key Infographics
Classroom Snapshot: Integrating Learning and Life Competencies
Embedding SEL in High School Classrooms (2019 white paper)

Activators

Classroom Strategies for Engaging Middle and High School Students

This unique resource presents a deep dive into a core teaching practice that incorporates individual think time with purposeful social interaction. It features concrete, hands-on activities called Activators that help students improve their emotional, cognitive, and behavioral engagement in learning. In addition to clear descriptions of over 20 Activators and facilitation tips, content area examples for English Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies, and World Languages accompany each Activator.
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The Advisory Guide

Designing and Implementing Effective Advisory Programs in Secondary Schools

The Advisory Guide helps secondary educators design and implement an advisory program tailored to their school’s needs and goals. The design chapters present snapshots of various advisory models and help planning teams think through nine major issues that should be addressed in order for advisory program coordinators and advisors to get off to a good start. The implementation chapters offer facilitation tips, suggestions for using 15 different formats and over 130 sample activities organized around advisory themes, including student orientation, community building, goal-setting and assessment, life skills, and career exploration.
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Supporting Resources: 
Advisory Program Self-Assessment
Conditions Necessary for Effective Implementation
Four Core Advisory Routines
The Advisory Design Puzzle

Getting Advisory Right

Video Series and Professional Learning

This resource supports the effective and sustainable implementation of advisory programs. Getting Advisory Right features 12 fully scripted professional development sessions, three in each of the areas of Creating Community, Academic Advisement, Postsecondary Support, and Social and Emotional Learning. It includes 12 corresponding videos of best practices in action, filmed in three diverse districts, which align with each session.
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Getting Advisory Right video series

Shifting Gears

Recalibrating Schoolwide Discipline and Student Support

Shifting Gears presents a systematic approach to schoolwide discipline and student support and the research and theory that inform it. It describes eight “gears” that, when calibrated, create an effective system. Examples of gears include classroom practices, essential teams, the right data, and schoolwide initiatives. Chapters on each gear provide guidance, recommendations, and “how-to” information, detailed protocols, training tools, examples, scripted agendas, checklists, readings, and interactive elements to support users to construct their own schoolwide discipline system.
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Supporting Resources: 
Systems Change: The Gears
Restorative Conversations
Recalibrating Climate, Culture, and Discipline (Miller Lieber & Tissiere in Principal Leadership Oct. 2015)

Code of Character, Conduct, and Support

Addressing Punitive and Disproportional Discipline

Step-by-step guidance and examples for school districts to develop and implement a new or revised Code that provides structure for a restorative, accountable, and equitable approach to discipline and student support.
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Supporting Resources: 
Introduction Slide Deck
Disciplinary Response Cycle
Shifting Gears Chapter 6