Showing posts with label Joyce VanTassel-Baska. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joyce VanTassel-Baska. Show all posts

Monday, January 7, 2013

Changing Tomorrow 2: Leadership Curriculum for High-Ability Middle School Students Grades 6-8, by Joyce VanTassel-Baska, Ed.D. and Linda D. Avery, Ph.D.

Changing Tomorrow 2:

Leadership Curriculum for High-Ability Middle School Students
Grades 6-8
Authors: Joyce VanTassel-Baska, Ed.D. and Linda D. Avery, Ph.D.
Editor: Jennifer Robins
Publisher: Prufrock Press
Publication date: November 1, 2012
Buy Now on Amazon.ca
Changing Tomorrow 2 outlines an entire unit plan for teachers on the theme of leadership, with lesson plans that include in-depth study of several famous leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Pablo Picasso, Charles Darwin and more. Students are asked, through a series of lessons and projects, to learn more about each person and assess the ways in which each does or does not exemplify the qualities of leadership. This leaves a lot of room for class discussion and critical thinking because even though all of the people included in the book are exemplary in many ways, even great humans have their flaws and their detractors. The lesson plans in the book encourage students to ponder whether a person's positive contributions to society outweigh their bad decisions, or whether it is even necessary for them to do so in order for us to rightly admire them as great leaders.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Jacob's Ladder Reading Comprehension Program - Primary Level 2 (1-2), by Joyce VanTassel-Baska and Tamra Stambaugh


Jacob's Ladder Reading Comprehension Program - Primary Level 2 (1-2)
What a wonderful book! I'm a preschool teacher and my partner is a junior high English teacher, so we are both interested in reading comprehension resources but we don't usually read ones specifically aimed at elementary school teachers. Nonetheless, we both found this book very easy to use and very scale-able. The ideas for questions and activities for each of the recommended poems, stories and novels could be adapted for younger children just learning to read or for older children who are having difficulty with reading. They're also open-ended enough to provide good ideas for lesson plans for books and programs not included in the guide.