Inviting Students to Learn: 100 Tips for Talking Effectively with Your Students

by Jenny Edwards

(ASCD, 2010)

Reviewed by Cindi Rigsbee, NBCT

Middle Grades Literacy (NC)

Teacher Leaders Network

I was drawn into this book by Jenny Edwards because the title suggests something I’d never really thought consciously about: talking with my students. Sure, I talk to them, and not as part of a dictatorship in a classroom but as part of a relationship, a culture of family. But do I talk with them? I know I have to read this book to find out.

When I think about a second master’s degree in my future, I often think of studying linguistics. I love words and therefore became more and more interested in Inviting Students to Learn as I read along. I was pulled in as early as the Acknowledgments, where the author thanks someone who taught her “precision in language.” Then she mentions something called “neuro-linguistic programming.” I’m getting excited...

I calm down at the Foreword, though, which I find to be a little too heavy on sharing language instruction and less about giving the big picture of the book’s merits. Over the course of several pages, only two paragraphs are devoted to actually framing and promoting the book’s usefulness. But on I go, thinking back to the acknowledgments and still sensing that this book is full of possibilities for this language lover.

I don’t have long to wait. The introduction makes me feel as if the author knows me: she’s included a poem, “A Language That Expresses Care,” at the beginning of the book! Early on, she’s hit me where it really matters. Then Plato and Mahatma Gandhi are quoted, and research is referenced. Dr. Edwards knows her stuff on the relationship between students and language and knows how to share it in a way that isn’t clinical and tasting like medicine.

The first chapter defines skills needed to “communicate invitationally” with students — but really, the tips on posture, gestures, tone of voice, etc. should be considered when communicating with anyone. Then, in Chapter Two, Edwards gives suggestions on ways to communicate, everything from the seamless and easy (compliments, positive notes, emails) to those that require 21st century technology and understanding: for example, MUVES (Multiuser Virtual Environments, MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Player Games), podcasts, wikis, Twitter, and more. Meanwhile, the explanations in this chapter are reader-friendly and non-threatening, a surefire way to keep an audience engaged and turning pages.

No education book is complete without a discussion of how to make the advice work for any student in any class. Chapter Three takes us through language tips for special needs students, diverse populations, students of different ages, and even a relatively new group of students — the online learners — a refreshing addition that is commonly included, if at all, as an afterthought. In Edwards’ schema, digitally oriented students are given as much consideration as any other set of learners with special characteristics..

Chapter Four connects Edwards’ ideas to various purposes: building relationships, teaching, planning for the future, encouraging students, etc., and I’m becoming more and more impatient: where are they? What are these tips she keeps mentioning? Then I turn the page – “100 Tips for Talking Effectively with Your Students.”

I can barely turn the pages quickly enough: there are lists of adverbs to use when communicating, for example, and that’s just the beginning. The “tips” range in length from a third- to a full page, and at the end of each tip you’ll find a list of possible connections with Edwards’ discussion in earlier chapters.
There are literally hundreds of examples of words and phrases that will intentionally enable students to learn. I tried to select a favorite one or two for the purposes of this review (“Words that Change Minds,” “Magic Words” etc.) but there are just too many. If you’d like to see a sample selection of tips, download this PDF from the ASCD website.

Jenny Edwards has taken research on language, combined it with common sense and what she’s seen work with students, and shared it with her readers. She adds book recommendations and references other authors and researchers for additional study. Now I’m hooked and would like to read more on the topic of using language to “invite” our students to learn. I’ll start by re-reading this book. It’s so rich with information, I need to approach it in stages — try a couple of the tricks and then dive back into it again.

This book will be useful to anyone who communicates with anyone about anything. I’m going to begin by using some of the tips while talking with my husband. I bet he won’t even pick up the remote.

Cindi Rigsbee is a middle grades literacy teacher and coach in Orange County, North Carolina. She was a finalist for National Teacher of the Year in 2009, writes poetry and is the author of Finding Mrs. Warnacke. (Jossey Bass, 2010). She’s currently a teacher on loan to the N.C. Department of Public Instruction. She blogs at The Dream Teacher.

Meeting Students Where They Live: Motivation in Urban Schools
by Richard L. Curwin
(ASCD, 2010)

Reviewed by Dave Orphal
World History Teacher (CA)
TLN New Millennium Initiative

Richard Curwin kicks off his advice book for urban teachers with a story about a king looking for a teacher for the young Prince. After testing all of the teachers in the land, the king selects the three finalists. One has the best content knowledge; another has the strongest classroom management and discipline. You have probably already guessed that it is the third teacher who wins the job — not the strongest in either category but an individual who combines great skills with the philosophy that it is a teacher’s role to serve and guide, on behalf of both the pupil and society at large.


Curwin’s summary conclusion: Teachers, including those in urban schools, are charged with helping our students learn and find a love of learning. To accomplish this, the co-author of the widely discussed Discipline with Dignity (1988, 2008), makes five recommendations for teachers and those who support them:

First, curriculum should be tailored to meet each child’s individual needs. Teachers should use diagnostic evaluations to assess a child’s knowledge and skills on any given topic, then guide that child toward increased knowledge and stronger skills. Here, Curwin challenges current-trend thinking that says that curriculum should be more closely articulated, so that teachers in a similar discipline are teaching nearly the same material on a given day, enabling those teachers to later collaborate on student results. Curwin’s counter argument is not to challenge the data that is driving this current trend, but rather to trouble that way of thinking with the query: “Maybe it does work, but at what costs?” Curwin wants teachers, administrators, parents and law makers to wonder, “Is getting high test scores worth it, if learning is forgotten or if children learn to hate learning?”

Second, expectations should be high, but attainable for every student. Expectations that are too high lead to frustration and failure for struggling students. They learn to dislike the subject and many decide to misbehave as a result. Curwin imagines a child thinking, “If I am so bad at being good or smart, then at least I can be really good at being bad.” Conversely, expectations that are too low lead to boredom.

Third, evaluations should diagnostic in nature. Little is accomplished, Curwin posits, when we use summative evaluations to rank children, rewarding the best and punishing the worst. In fact, he argues, this approach runs contrary to motivation. Those students who need little motivation get lots of encouragement from the rewards, and those who need motivation rebel against the punishments.

Fourth, everything a school does should be geared toward getting kids to want to learn. Contained within this concept are Curwin’s theories about discipline and classroom/school management. If the point of school is for children to learn, then it makes little sense to remove a child from a learning environment if the child is misbehaving. Instead, Curwin advises teachers to refer children to the principal only as a last resort. Curwin offers numerous tips and ideas about how to redirect misbehavior and offers perhaps his most interesting idea: the Altruism Consequence. Consequences are not punishments, Curwin states. Rather, they are the natural outcome of actions. When we hurt someone, the consequence is doing something nice for that person or for the class/school. Curwin believes that giving difficult youth opportunities to be good and help others will, in turn, heal the hurt and lead to higher levels of motivation for school.

Fifth, students need freedom and flexibility to explore their strengths and needs. In traditional schooling, adults decide on how children will spend their time, and how they will compete against one another for rewards and grades. Here, Curwin argues that some learning is better than no learning. There is little to be lost when a teacher lowers the bar for a child who has been stubbornly refusing to jump at all. Curwin believes that schools are currently over-emphasizing achievement, which ranks and kills motivation for low-achieving students. Instead, he thinks that teachers, principals and schools should emphasize effort, because achievement is the outcome of effort and, Curwin surmises, effort is the only factor that we can really control.

While many of Curwin’s ideas and strategies would work in any school, his focus is on low-achieving, unmotivated urban youth. He is not arguing that urban youth are necessarily low-achieving or unmotivated, nor does he argue that there are no low-achieving or unmotivated youth in the suburbs and the country. Instead, he recognizes that there are some conditions exasperated by urban poverty and violent neighborhoods. He recognizes that many students living in urban poverty have lost hope that their lives can be better than they are — that their lives can be better than the lives their parents live — or that education may be a way to pave a road to a brighter future.

David Orphal teaches World History at urban Skyline High School in Oakland (CA) Unified School District. He also serves as a mentor for the Center for Teaching Quality’s New Millennium Initiative in the San Francisco Bay area.

Teaching As Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher's Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap
By Steven Farr
(Jossey-Bass, 2010)

Reviewed by Alex Diamond
English Teacher (South Korea)
Teacher Leaders Network

This fall 4,500 teachers will take the same path to their first-ever classrooms. The vast majority of these will come in with no completed traditional coursework in the field of education. All will teach in some of the toughest schools in some of the toughest neighborhoods in the country, where students lag as many as a few years behind their more-privileged peers in reading level and other academic skills. Yet Teach for America (TFA), the organization that selects and places these teachers, believes an intensive five-week summer training institute is enough to prepare them.

Whatever you think of this claim— and there's an ongoing and very much unresolved debate over whether TFA teachers are better than the alternative—Teach for America has spent considerable time and energy studying the most effective teachers to design an impressive condensed teacher-training program. And now they have brought their approach public for the first time in a new book by Steven Farr, Teaching as Leadership: The Highly Effective Teachers' Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap.

Reading Teaching as Leadership was for me likely a different experience than it would be for many classroom teachers. As of this writing it's been less than three months since I finished my two-year commitment to TFA. I've been through TFA's summer training and received ongoing support based around the same teaching principles. Though criticisms of the length of TFA's training are warranted, the principles behind their training have a lot of value and the book is therefore full of helpful, specific and practical suggestions.

The book is organized around six principles that characterize the most effective teachers. They are:

1. Set big goals
2. Invest students and families
3. Plan purposefully
4. Execute effectively
5. Continually increase effectiveness; and
6. Work relentlessly

Some of these may seem obvious (of course you should plan with a purpose) but the book gets into the practical nitty-gritty of how good teachers do these things. For planning, it suggests beginning with a vision of success (what will students be able to do?), turning that vision into an assessment of some form, and only then writing a daily lesson plan. For daily planning they recommend a basic "I do, we do, you do" model as a starting point. Certainly, TFA didn't invent all of these teaching approaches, but the organization has twenty years of experience working with effective teachers to draw on to explain them.

Indeed, the strength of the book is the dozens of teachers' anecdotes sprinkled throughout every chapter that illuminate the practice behind the theory. Not sure how to involve parents? The book includes a diversity of examples, from weekly newsletters and phone calls celebrating high quiz grades to having students keep binders with work to show their family. Not sure what an appropriate big goal would be? You can read a number of examples from different subject matters and age groups, with an analysis of how these goals led to achievement. Not sure what effective execution actually looks like? Teaching as Leadership pairs an explanation with a number of ideas of how to, for example, check for student understanding in the middle of the lesson. As I read the book, there were multiple times when specific ideas jumped out at me and I thought, "I could do that." Perhaps just as important, many of the anecdotes are inspiring (they are usually paired with impressive achievement data) and keep the book focused around students.

In addition to being a source of good ideas, Teaching as Leadership caused me to reflect on my own teaching. There were times throughout my reading (a good example is its insistence on a classroom management plan that is both predictable and consistent) that I had the discomfort of realizing ways my own teaching practice could be improved. As part of continually increasing effectiveness, the book argues that good teachers see teaching as a series of learnable skills, and embrace errors as opportunities to grow. Teaching as Leadership is appropriate for anyone either undertaking a project of teaching self-reflection or seeking a toolkit of specific suggestions for improvement.

Throughout the book, Farr is very clear that these teaching principles, while broadly applicable, are intended specifically for teachers working at the wrong end of the achievement gap. Though the book is full of examples of teachers whose classes make exceptional gains, it makes no bones about the efforts that this may require. Part of working relentlessly, according to the book, is expanding the time teachers spend influencing students. Though this may include inspiring students to study flashcards as they wait in lunch line, Farr also writes about teachers wading through floodwater to teach 12 students in their backyards or spending evenings at the local McDonald's to tutor students/fry cooks during breaks. Though I have observed this level of commitment from fellow TFAers, it's worth asking whether it's realistic to expect it from people for whom teaching represents a lifelong profession rather than two years of intensive service.

While Teaching as Leadership doesn't respond to this criticism, it anticipates at least one other. A large part of the book (including most teachers' success stories, most of the discussions of goal-setting, and the assumed starting points for teachers' self-reflection as they strive to increase their effectiveness) is based on a quantitative, standards-driven measure of learning. Farr admits there is an open debate about the standards movement in education but writes (correctly) that "whatever your view of learning standards, all states and districts now use them to guide instruction, and it is important to think about your role as a teacher within that reality." True as this assessment may be, it is possible that the book will put off teachers who object to the growing emphasis on standardized testing in education.

Whether you are a fan or detractor of Teach for America, the organization has in 20 years become a significant force in public education. Facing the need to quickly train teachers for some of the toughest placements in the country, they have compiled an impressive body of research on what principles hold true for effective teachers. Teaching as Leadership is undeniably oriented toward a specific view of achievement, one based on tests, numbers and state standards. Nonetheless, it includes both teaching theory and specific suggestions that can improve any teacher's practice.

Alex Diamond teaches English at Gyeonggi English Village in South Korea.  From 2008-10, he taught World History and World Geography at Melrose High School in Orange Mound, Memphis, TN as a member of Teach for America. His article “Do I Really Teach for America: Reflections of a Teach for America Teacher” appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Rethinking Schools. He welcomes email at akdiamond08@gmail.com

Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us about Motivation and Mastery
by Kathleen Cushman and the students of What Kids Can Do
(Jossey-Bass, 2010)

Reviewed by Kathie Marshall
Middle Grades Literacy (CA)
Teacher Leaders Network

When I first picked up my copy of Fires in the Mind, the latest of several books written by Kathleen Cushman to bring more transparency to adolescent thinking, I looked first at the appendix where the author lists books by other authors as resources for the reader.

I was delighted to find the names of many authors I’ve learned from, including Howard Gardner, Alfie Kohn, Mel Levine, Robert J. Marzano, Carol Ann Tomlinson, and Rick Wormeli. I was especially excited that she mentioned Carol S. Dweck’s work on mindset and Brainology. I had the privilege of hearing Dweck speak three years ago, and ever since I have incorporated into my first-week activities Brainology and other exercises about a growth mindset that values effort.

As I dug into Cushman’s new work, I had in the back of my mind the fact that over the summer I wanted to reflect on some of my lessons and revise/improve them — especially my yearlong magazine publishing project. I was hoping that Cushman’s book would support that intention, and I was not disappointed. It’s all about discovering what motivates students to seek mastery of something.

Cushman worked closely with students through the “Practice Project,” a program of the What Kids Can Do organization funded by MetLife Foundation. It began with an investigation of whatever skills students felt they possessed, as the first step in finding out “how you get good at something.” Cushman writes:
A simple question, it reverberates at many levels. It matters equally to youth and adults, rich and poor, professional, artist, and tradesperson. Its answers have the potential to transform our schools and communities. And exciting research on the question of developing expertise has emerged in recent decades from the field of cognitive psychology. Powerful new evidence shows that opportunity and practice have far more impact on high performance than does innate talent.

Cushman’s student co-authors helped her identify several key pieces of the puzzle by examining:

• how they got started (it looked fun, others they liked were doing it, they were encouraged by someone to try it),

• why they kept going when the effort was challenging,

• and what setbacks and satisfactions they experienced.
Along the way, students also interviewed other experts to help them more fully understand the process of deliberate practice in order to get good at something. Eventually they were able to compile a list of experts’ habits that are worthwhile in any learning situation, including but not limited to, asking good questions, considering other perspectives, revising repeatedly, persisting, and knowing your own best work styles. These are important concepts for students to understand and apply to new learning situations both inside and outside of the classroom, and we teachers can certainly use them to make our classrooms better communities of practice.

One key statement I made note of was the following: The most compelling school experiences involved hands-on projects in which they could work in teams toward an outcome that mattered to them. (p. 9)  I couldn’t help but think about how, at least in my school system, the total focus on accountability mechanisms is driving teachers away from critical but time-intensive learning experiences for students and toward constant drill and preparation for high-stakes testing.

However, I soldiered on, looking for express ways in which I might improve the magazine project I reinstated last year with my sixth grade English students. In this inquiry learning activity, students choose an area of study and can work alone or with a partner and the contents of the magazine must be tied to sixth grade English standards. It was very helpful to think about our magazine project in the light of Fires in the Mind. I saw clearly what I had done right as well as ways I might revise the project to help students better reach mastery by drawing on the wisdom of Cushman’s kids.

Throughout the book, the author provides a number of questionnaires and checklists, which are also downloadable at this Resources page. These include questionnaires for students to think about as well as for teachers to use in their planning. Later chapters in the book use the lens of deliberate practice to explore homework, interdisciplinary projects, and performance as evidence of mastery.

No matter what stage we’re at as educators, I believe every teacher can mine this book for many helpful nuggets to support student mastery. As a student named Avelina told Kathleen Cushman: “If teachers knew what gave us that driving force to do better, they could apply that, so that everyone can do things to the best of their ability.”

We can help ignite “fires in the minds” of our kids, and this wonderful book makes excellent fire starter.

Kathie Marshall teaches middle grades language arts in the Los Angeles Unified School District. A former school-based literacy coach, she writes frequently about instructional practice and the teaching life. To engage more deeply in the work of the Practice Project, visit the Fires in the Mind website.

Teaching Grammar: What Really Works
Amy Benjamin and Joan Berger
Eye on Education, (2010)

Reviewed by Marti Schwartz
Literacy consultant and teacher (DE)
Teacher Leaders Network

Raise your hand if you want your students to be better writers. Good – now raise your hand if you feel, somewhere in your conscience or your gut, that you should be teaching more grammar. Gotcha!


So — how about a book that will allow you to accomplish both goals at once? Teaching Grammar: What Really Works by Amy Benjamin & Joan Berger could be just the solution. Their (combined) experience of 70 years in middle and high school classrooms suggests that these folks truly know what they are talking about.

The authors’ clear explanations of nominal phrases, clauses, coordinating conjunctions and participial phrases helped make many things clear to me. Mind you, I “learned” these lessons back in 7th grade (in Mr. Galuska’s class, where we diagrammed sentences on chalkboards), and then promptly forgot them because they seemed so irrelevant.

Now that I’m teaching high school English to students who hope to become the first in their families to go to college, grammar matters. Raising the quality of their written language is hugely important. What Benjamin and Berger have done is made grammar accessible through some very interesting lessons, detailed explanations, and handy downloads (accessible via a code in the book) which will further help your students and save you the time of creating them.

No longer do I need to puzzle over why Microsoft Word is correcting my ridiculously long sentences; now I know! Using colons and semi-colons has become crystal clear: through examples and activities rather than the dreaded fill-in-the-blank worksheets. How does this translate into better writing? Easily: by naming the function of words, phrases, and clauses, students can identify how to add them in (or remove them) as needed. Here’s an example:
Expanding noun phrases demonstrates to students how to go from: a friend, to a former friend, a former friend who broke my heart, and then a former friend who broke my heart in a million pieces. (54)

Or the idea of embedding a specific number of sentence variations in an assignment (after modeling it in class) and giving students the starting sentence, “The worried mother sat in the waiting room,” which becomes the lead for a paragraph written at home that will include three participial phrases generated from a list of clues describing the woman waiting for news about her sick child. This seems especially effective, as repeatedly urging students to Show, Don’t Tell has, as the authors point out, historically not done the job.

One other aspect I really like in this text is the authors’ inclusion of ways to apply these writing strategies to work outside of the ELA classroom.

Write a paragraph describing a historical problem or period or a science experiment or concept that you discussed during class. In your writing, include and label at least one of the following:

• A compound sentence with a comma and coordinate conjunction
• A compound sentence with a semicolon and hitching word
• A sentence with an adverb clause first
• A sentence with an adverb clause second (119)
And the handout includes both a model paragraph of a historical problem and one of a science experiment, with each of the bulleted items underlined and identified. This is smart teaching!

More good ideas

By mimicking what other writers do well, students can learn to do it, too. Thus students are off collecting examples of sentence types from their reading assignments, and then these sentences are posted as models, alongside student writing.

Techniques such as having students collect all the plurals in an article, or changing all the pronouns to plurals (resulting in massive verb changes), or creating a list of actions such as how to eat pizza, and then rewriting the activity in the past tense — these are all active ways for my students to read real text and yet begin to understand how language functions.

This is huge for the ELL students for whom I am developing oral and written language skills simultaneously. Consistent verb tense is something that troubled many of my sophomores on a recent assignment; Benjamin and Berger take a paragraph of narrative text (from The Watsons Go to Birmingham) and have students rewrite it in the present tense. Bingo! Kids get to see for themselves how it works.

Making charts of verbs and verb tenses isn’t startlingly new practice, but knowing that there are 75 verbs that form the past tense irregularly and then the past participle in a different irregular form is pretty useful stuff! (Think: blow-blew-(has) blown, fly-flew-(has) flown, shake-shook-(has shaken) And by the way, there are only 10 verbs which form their past tense regularly but use an –n ending for the participle (mow/mowed/mown, swell, swelled, (has) swollen). No wonder kids get mixed up! Making this explicit is a sensible strategy so that kids have this skill in their toolkit.

Sure, some of Benjamin and Berger’s ideas are a little offbeat: Villages of Verbs and an Owner’s Manual advising users on how to apply each part of speech seems a little hokey, but if it helps then I’m all for it!

Some other highlights

The first section of the book basically includes all you need to know about the parts of speech with many specific ideas about how to get those concepts across to students.

In the second section, “Guidebook for Embedding Grammar in Writing Instruction,” there is a calendar organizing the authors’ lessons into two full years of teaching. This will make coordinating with my fellow ELA teachers much easier. In addition there are several actual lesson series (with the number of days it will take to accomplish the goal), all designed to embed the grammar WITHIN the writing process, not in isolation. This makes good sense to me and gives me hope that I can and will actually use this little gem!

Honestly, the lessons sound both fun and productive. There are points where the authors point out “the art of teaching” in the lessons, helping novice teachers to explicitly SEE the gradual release of responsibility model which is so artfully crafted into these lessons. Games, movement, group work, and homework assignments are spelled out for six specific concepts: Compound Sentences, Adverb Clauses, Appositives, Adjective Clauses, Participial Phrases, and Absolute Phrases.

The progression of lessons really does ensure that student writing will vastly improve. Explicitly labeling what good writers do, and using the language of grammar, this book and its methods certainly have the potential for students to understand and display good writing craft in a much deeper way.

As a retired elementary teacher called back into high school service,
I’m confident saying the book will be of interest to ELA and literacy
teachers across many grades, from upper elementary through high school. Coupled with two of my other favorites, Everyday Editing by Jeff Anderson and Grammar for High School: A Sentence-Composing Approach, by Don Killgallon and Jenny Killgallon, I feel well-armed and excited about teaching grammar next fall!

Marti Schwartz taught at various levels of elementary school for 30 years, chiefly in Smithfield, RI and now offers professional development workshops in literacy. She is also the creator and co-facilitator of NETWorking (Novice and Experienced Teachers Working Together) at Brown University, and currently serves as  Literacy Consultant to an urban charter high school.