Whole-Class Teaching: Minilessons and More

No matter your style of teaching, at critical moments throughout the school day it's most effective to teach everyone at once. Whole-Class Teaching offers learning-centered ways to maximize entire-class instruction by creating energizing, engaging teaching that everyone will find useful.

Whether you're stepping into your first classroom or you've taught for years, Whole-Class Teaching presents wise, purposeful ideas for using language, modeling skills and techniques, and establishing community when you're teaching everyone at once. Janet Angelillo (author of Writing About Reading and Writing to the Prompt) helps you avoid the pitfalls of traditional direct instruction that inhibit learning and shows you high-quality practices for whole-class teaching opportunities such as:

• morning meetings
• minilessons
• read-alouds
• share times
• celebrations
• extended coaching sessions.

Angelillo's ideas create personal and intellectual connections by validating students' experiences, and they build structure into your day while promoting student responsibility by balancing routines with independence. Best of all Whole-Class Teaching demonstrates how to adjust the teaching of minilessons to optimally support specific goals such as inquiry, coaching, and demonstration. Angelillo even provides detailed tools for self-assessment and for finding out more through teacher study groups.

You already have powerful instructional moments with small groups and individual students. Now let Whole-Class Teaching gives you the chance to turn every moment of your day into an opportunity to change a kid's life and learning - and to help you make the most of your teaching time, too.

No matter your style of teaching, at critical moments throughout the school day it's most effective to teach everyone at once. Whole-Class Teaching offers learning-centered ways to maximize entire-class instruction by creating energizing, engaging teaching that everyone will find useful.

Whether you're stepping into your first classroom or you've taught for years, Whole-Class Teaching presents wise, purposeful ideas for using language, modeling skills and techniques, and establishing community when you're teaching everyone at once. Janet Angelillo (author of Writing About Reading and Writing to the Prompt) helps you avoid the pitfalls of traditional direct instruction that inhibit learning and shows you high-quality practices for whole-class teaching opportunities such as:

• morning meetings
• minilessons
• read-alouds
• share times
• celebrations
• extended coaching sessions.

Angelillo's ideas create personal and intellectual connections by validating students' experiences, and they build structure into your day while promoting student responsibility by balancing routines with independence. Best of all Whole-Class Teaching demonstrates how to adjust the teaching of minilessons to optimally support specific goals such as inquiry, coaching, and demonstration. Angelillo even provides detailed tools for self-assessment and for finding out more through teacher study groups.

You already have powerful instructional moments with small groups and individual students. Now let Whole-Class Teaching gives you the chance to turn every moment of your day into an opportunity to change a kid's life and learning - and to help you make the most of your teaching time, too.

Janet Angelillo is the author of the Heinemann titles Whole-Class Teaching (2008), Writing to the Prompt (2005), and Writing About Reading (2003). She also wrote A Fresh Approach to Teaching Punctuation (2002) and Making Revision Matter (2005). A middle and upper grades classroom teacher for years, Janet is a literacy consultant who has worked throughout the U.S. and Canada. She was a senior staff developer for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and worked beside teachers in New York city schools. Janet has taught advanced sections and given keynote addresses at the Teachers College Summer Institutes and other institutes around the country. She has also presented at many conferences, including NCTE, IRA, and the New York State, Connecticut, and Delaware Reading Associations.