I love this book! It provides practical information to support all our teachers as they shift all or some of their instruction to distance learning. It is the best of what Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey have to teach us about great instruction, all packaged up in a hands-on tool to guide teachers as they plan for the upcoming year. From teacher self-care to feedback, assessment and grading, it’s all addressed here. It’s right on time and it will be a foundational tool to help shape our instructional focus at my school this year.
As we charter the unfamiliar territory of a blended learning platform, we turn to the experts who have gone before us. Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie remind us that the focus is not technology, learning management systems, or devices, but the focus remains student learning. This book serves as a safe haven, as it reminds us what effective teaching and learning entail, and it rewraps it around a digital learning framework.
Echoing through the pages of this timely book is the message: Effective teaching is effective teaching, no matter where it occurs. Teacher voices and classroom examples animate core principles of research-based teaching and learning, enabling the reader to visualize practices in both face-to-face and online learning environments. Multiple self-assessments and templates for reflection support reader interaction with the content.
We are in a place in history where we desperately need answers to questions that will determine the future of our nation's most precious possession -- our children. The Distance Learning Playbook is an incredible resource with a wealth of practical support for teachers and administrators, and it will fill a huge information gap that many schools are experiencing in educating students in a virtual setting.
The year 2020 will be forever etched as the Era of Distance Learning. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused cascading changes that have shifted our educational institutions. This concerted seismic move has elevated the need for robust internet connections and meaningful virtual interactions. The Distance Learning Playbook is an invaluable resource to prepare our teachers to provide a powerful learning environment through technology, while promoting the most powerful tool available to educators -- a caring and challenging relationship with students.
Never has there been another time in history where the majority of educators around the world jumped into action to reinvent how schools and classrooms function. Using current research of what constitutes ‘best practice,’ The Distance Learning Playbook helps guide us all through ‘pandemic teaching.’ This book is filled with ideas and insight from real educators as they reflect on what they themselves need and what students will need to learn within a new teaching and learning environment.
The book provides instructional strategies that will help prepare teacher candidates to the entering classrooms impacted by the pandemic currently and those in the future.