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Join the #educoach Summer Book Study!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Linda Jordan 🙂

Summer is the perfect time to catch up on personal and professional reading! If you are looking for a book to read this summer that will strengthen your teaching and/or instructional coaching, consider joining the #educoach Summer Book Study.

#Educoach is a Twitter chat for anyone interested in the area of instructional coaching. The chat draws coaches, administrators, teachers and other educators together for support and encouragement. We meet each Wednesday evening at 9:00 CST. Each chat revolves around a predetermined topic. Stating on July 18 and running for several weeks we will be holding our 2nd virtual book study. During our first book study we discussed Unmistakable Impact by Jim Knight. Our upcoming book study will be about the book Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning by John Hattie.

Publishers Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group describe Hattie’s book as follows:

“In November 2008, John Hattie’s ground-breaking book Visible Learning synthesized the results of more than fifteen years research involving millions of students and represented the biggest ever collection of evidence-based research into what actually works in schools to improve learning.

Visible Learning for Teachers takes the next step and brings those ground breaking concepts to a completely new audience. Written for students, pre-service and in-service teachers, it explains how to apply the principles of Visible Learning to any classroom anywhere in the world. The author offers concise and user-friendly summaries of the most successful interventions and offers practical step-by-step guidance to the successful implementation of visible learning and visible teaching in the classroom.

This book:

  • links the biggest ever research project on teaching strategies to practical classroom implementation
  • champions both teacher and student perspectives and contains step by step guidance including lesson preparation, interpreting learning and feedback during the lesson and post lesson follow-up
  • offers checklists, exercises, case studies and best practice scenarios to assist in raising achievement
  • includes whole school checklists and advice for school leaders on facilitating visible learning in their institution
  • now includes additional meta-analyses bringing the total cited within the research to over 900
  • comprehensively covers numerous areas of learning activity including pupil motivation, curriculum, meta-cognitive strategies, behaviour, teaching strategies, and classroom management.

Visible Learning for Teachers is a must read for any student or teacher who wants an evidence based answer to the question; ‘how do we maximize achievement in our schools?’”

We are currently working on a discussion schedule for this virtual book study. Each Wednesday’s chat will be devoted to a section of the book. Moderators @principalj, @shiralebowitz and myself (@kathyperret) will generate some open-ended discussion questions to guide the chat. Participants are encouraged to come to the chat with their own questions as well. A page on the #educoach Wiki has been devoted to our book study. Feel free to join the wiki and add resources you think would be beneficial to others.

Come join us!