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LearningLeads:
Research-based K 12 Instructional Resources
Welcome
to LearningLeads™!
LearningLeads™
provides instructional resources for K-12 teachers and parents who seek
more. Improving students' understandings, whether in the classroom or
at home, relies on our own understanding—of what the research tells
us about how students learn and what instructional strategies are most
effective—and our capacity to translate our understanding into instructional
designs that work. To achieve this goal, LearningLeads™
works from the ground up. On these pages, you will find articles with
that provide synthesized research, explanations of the strategies that
have been found to produce real learning, and ideas, activities, and standards-aligned
designs that help you put those strategies to work with your students.
LearningLeads™ resources are updated over time through
additions to its two principal strands—curriculum and learning, and
instructional strategies. Watch for new materials as they become available,
and don't forget to sign up for the quarterly
updates.
Feature curriculum and learning strand: Safe Schools,
Safe Kids
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Address
safety in your school and community—in your curriculum, in
your policies, in your system.
Start
by looking into complete programs that address your needs. Review
our research synthesis on each, and the alignment to authorized
activities in the U.S. Dept. of Ed.'s Safe and Drug-Free Schools
and Communities Act. Check out Effective
SDFS Programs.
Interested
in lessons that infuse safety learning into activities in core subject
areas? Check out the Better
Tomorrow Series.
Interested
in infusing your curriculum with home safety routines and tips.
Make it exciting. Get Safety
Smart. Students in grades 4-8 go behind the scenes at Underwriters
Laboratories® and discover how products that use electricity
are tested to keep us safe. Students from kindergarten through grade
3 join Timon and Pumbaa, the lovable characters from The Lion
King, with UL safety checklists in hand as they investigate
a new home to see if it a safe place to live.
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Curriculum and learning strand: Teaching Socio-scientific
Issues
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Engage
your students in real scientific inquiry. It's messy, argumentative,
full of fun, and far removed from the simplistic processes of what
textbooks call the scientific method.
Start
with a look into the controversy surrounding Mitochondrial Eve.
Check out Mapping
Eve!
Interested
in the issues surrounding genetically modified foods, antibiotics,
nuclear energy, and more? Check out Designed Instruction's cutting
edge teacher guides in The
Eyes of Nye.
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Curriculum and learning strand: Measurement, Geometry,
and Spatial Sense
Curriculum and learning strand: Learning Through Context
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Get
the research and read about the usefulness of building context when
working with source materials from the past.
Go
to the Learning
Through Context overview page.
Like
working with historical source documents in your classroom? Go to
the CASE
(Context Analysis Source Explorations) overview page.
And
how about the present for a little context? In the hit ABC News
series below, Designed Instruction provides you with video clips
organized according to key standards, making it easy to bring the
context to students within your present curriculum. The questions
can come alive: What is the legacy of tension in North
Korea, and how could it be a threat to us today? How is China
emerging, and why should the United States take notice? Are
we at the root of the global
warming, and if so, what can we do about it?
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Curriculum and learning strand: Reading Comprehension
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Often
called the "essence of reading," it is crucial to future
success in any discipline. Fortunately, the body of research evidence
regarding reading comprehension instruction has grown in recent
years. Go to the overview for Reading
Comprehension, or directly to the articles to read about teaching
for vocabulary
and text understanding, then find out about the implications
of oral
reading (K-2) or story
structure instruction (3-6) on students' abilities to comprehend
what they read.
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Feature instructional strategy strand: Questioning
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Questioning...
an age-old instructional strategy whose potential has never been
fully tapped (and there's a reason). From the overview page on Questioning,
you can access articles that describe how to teach students to generate
operational questions in domain-specific fields (e.g., science and
history), utilize strategies such as eliciting prompts and dialogic
talk to spur question generation, and assess the quality of student-generated
questions.
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Instructional strategy strand: Modeling
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Models
are used as learning tools by specialists in fields from medicine
to physical sciences, mathematics to engineering, and history to
literature. Since early mankind, we've connected interrelated ideas
and components through functional models, cast them physically into
a variety of representations, and used them to explain and test
ideas, concepts, processes, and phenomena. Do our students get the
same opportunities?
Check out Modeling
for Learning: Addressing Student Misconceptions for a few great
tips on putting models to work in your class.
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