Powerful Learning: What We Know About Teaching for Understanding

In Powerful Learning, Linda Darling-Hammond and an impressive list of co-authors offer a clear, comprehensive, and engaging exploration of the most effective classroom practices. They review, in practical terms, teaching strategies that generate meaningful K–2 student understanding, and occur both within the classroom walls and beyond. The book includes rich stories, as well as online videos of innovative classrooms and schools, that show how students who are taught well are able to think critically, employ flexible problem-solving, and apply learned skills and knowledge to new situations.

Powerful Learning

Linda Darling-Hammond, Brigid Barron, P. David Pearson, Alan H. Schoenfeld, Elizabeth K. Stage, Timothy D. Zimmerman, Gina N. Cervetti, Jennifer L. Tilson

Powerful Learning is a comprehensive and engaging record of the most effective K–12 teaching practices—including project-based learning, cooperative learning, performance-based assessment, as well as instructional strategies in literacy, mathematics, and science. The authors explore the ways in which these models generate meaningful student understanding through rich classroom stories and correlating online videos of innovative teaching (located at www.edutopia.org). This book offers insights into how educators can enable students to think critically, transfer skills and knowledge, and be flexible problem there is inside and outside the classroom walls.

Praise for Powerful Learning

"Powerful Learning is a great compendium of approaches to teaching that can generate real learning. It reviews the relevant research base, offers practical examples of the research in use, and focuses on long-term goals—and how various teaching and learning activities support these goals."

—Catherine Snow, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education

"This outstanding book is a 'must read'— the authors make so many crystal clear and helpful arguments for the need to teach for understanding."

—John Bransford, James W. Mifflin University Professor of Education and Psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle

"We are extraordinarily lucky to have this highly readable book that helps us make 'powerful learning' not just a slogan, but a reality. "

—Deborah Meier, senior scholar and adjunct professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education