Books about Proficiency from Amazon.com

New Edition of Best Seller!

"In Cultural Proficiency, there is clarity about the values and common sense underpinning the need for cultural proficiency, and about how to develop that proficiency in a way that will serve us all.
Marlin Foxworth, Superintendent
Milpitas Unified School District, Hayward, CA

"The book is appropriate for educational leaders in almost any setting, since it raises issues that face us all as we seek to move beyond being merely competent to becoming proficient in understanding the complex connections between culture and schooling."
Carol Bartell, Dean
School of Education, California Lutheran University

"Cultural Proficiency, Second Edition asks individuals and organizations to come to a deep understanding of their own culture and how it affects others. Each chapter contains crucial insights, cogent discussion, and activities that that delve deeply into who we are, the impact of culture, and how organizations can understand and integrate the dynamics of difference."
Kirk P. Perucca, President/CEO
Project Equality, Inc.

"This book is an essential and invaluable guide for those brave enough to venture into unchartered waters. It gave me hope that cultural competency is attainable."
Marsha Jacobs, Former Executive/Clinical Director
Southern California Counseling Center

A proven approach for educators dealing with the challenges of diversity— now updated!

Time and time again, proof has been shown that, given a high quality of teaching and nurturing, all children may succeed regardless of IQ, socioeconomic status, neighborhood, and ethnicity. Simply put, teachers and leaders who are well prepared, motivated, and culturally proficient produce high-achieving students. Learn to develop positive, productive responses to the diverse populations in your school and community. The benefits are wide-reaching and impressive: enhanced student ability to learn and teacher ability to teach, students prepared to find their own places in the global community, positive school-community relations, and students prepared for outstanding citizenship.

Cultural Proficiency, Second Edition, incorporates suggestions and feedback from the authors' colleagues, readers, clients, and students, resulting in an easier-to-use format and updated features, including 39 structured activities for developing cultural proficiency. With this invaluable resource, you will add the tools of cultural proficiency to your leadership toolkit, as you, your staff, and your students can learn how to:

• Avoid unintentional cultural or ethnic slights
• Understand how historical distrust affects present-day interactions
• Accept that each culture finds some values and behaviors more important than others
• Use the diversity of your school community as an educational resource

The authors have also taught many organizations how to use the tools of cultural proficiency, including hospitals, government agencies, and not-for-profit organizations. Moving far beyond an "educational trend," cultural proficiency has proven to be an effective approach for society at large.

See Facilitator's Guide to Cultural Proficiency, Second Edition

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Price: $36.43 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"With all the offerings that Margo Gottlieb provides in this book, she makes us yearn to not only cross the bridge of assessment, but also to feel confident when we get to the other side."
-From the Foreword by Else Hamayan
Illinois Resource Center

"This book is long overdue! Appropriate assessment and placement of ELLs is the most basic of all instructional processes. Without this, we cannot be sure we can measure student progress or address individual instructional needs."
-Margarita Calderón, Research Scientist
Center for Data-Driven Reform, Johns Hopkins University

"Here, finally, we have a text that empowers teachers by giving them practical strategies for harnessing assessments of language and content in ways that benefit their teaching and their students' learning."
-Timothy Boals, WIDA Consortium Director, Wisconsin Dept. of Public Instruction

"Assessing English Language Learners includes a multitude of evaluation instruments that readers can use as they assess their students. Margo Gottlieb helps teachers adjust assessment to different language proficiency levels and then evaluate language proficiency and content learning appropriately."
-David E. Freeman, Yvonne S. Freeman, Professors, Curriculum and Instruction, University of Texas, Brownsville

Discover how to bridge the gap between equitably assessing linguistic and academic performance!

Student assessment is the cornerstone of standards-based education. For the growing population of English Language Learners, however, measuring their acquisition and learning is a multifaceted process. This well-documented text examines the unique needs of English Language Learners and describes strategies for implementing instructional assessment of language and content.

With both depth and breadth, this practical resource covers how to equitably and comprehensively assess the language proficiency and academic achievement of English Language Learners. Both practicing and aspiring educators will benefit from

• Rubrics, charts, checklists, surveys, and other ready-to-use tools
• Professional development activities
• An integrated approach to teaching standards, language, and content
• Guidance on how best to address standardized testing and grading

Use this timely text to advance the academic language proficiency of English Language Learners through enhanced teaching and assessment techniques.

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Price: $29.36 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Writing Smarter! provides 106 detailed lesson plans with reproducibles to help students begin writing better immediately! These writing improvement materials are complete and self-contained, can be used with individual students or an entire class in any order, and are organized into 13 sections: Orientation, Description, Character Sketch, Sentence Structure, Personal Narratives, Persuasion, Research, Interviews, The News, Writing Letters, Short Fiction, Poetry, and Peer Editing..
Price: $18.40 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This combination intermediate-level Spanish text/writer's manual offers a reader-centered, holistic approach that focuses on developing proficiency in speaking, reading, writing, and listening, and integrates coverage of literature and composition with grammar review. Each chapter of the text consists of an authentic reading selection, instruction into writing strategies and tips, followed by activities with specific roles for understanding and exploring the text. The manual's chapters align with the text and review grammatical structures, provide additional focus on oral proficiency, editing and assessment exercises, and offer an appendix of extra materials, from sample editorial keys to a dictionary of rhetorical terms. ¿Yo, autor? Definiciones y espejos. Escritor fotógrafo. Escritor escultor. Escritor reportero. Escritor pintor. Escritor cuentista. Escritor crítico. Escritor abogado. Escritor crítico literario. Escritor sociólogo. Escritor inventor. Escritor escritor. For readers with intermediate-level proficiency inSpanish who want to further their skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening..
Price: $48.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In California, students age 16 and older and adults who pass the CHSPE receive a certificate that is the legal equivalent of a high school diploma This updated manual prepares test takers for that exam with a diagnostic test, a detailed subject review, and two full-length model tests with answer keys and answer explanations. The subject review presents separate chapters on the basics of writing, reading, and mathematics. The basics of writing chapter offers a short grammar review plus detailed advice on answering the CHSPE essay question. The reading chapter presents reading comprehension selections with questions for practice and review. The math chapter reviews arithmetic, algebra, graphs, measures, and geometry..
Price: $10.30 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For secondary reading specialist and English teachers, this unique resource provides over 200 ready-to-use exercises to help you introduce and reinforce basic literary and reading concepts and develop essential thinking and interpretive skills with students of varying abilities.

The activities are organized into 12 sequential units and build naturally to higher levels of reading proficiency. Each unit also includes reproducible reading selections plus an introductory section with suggestions for teaching the skills in that unit. Here's just an overview of unit topics with sample worksheet titles:

1. THE GOOD READER IN ACTION presents a variety of warm-up exercises, such as "Filling in Famous Quotations," to help students become more flexible in working with words.

2. ALL WORDS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL focuses on different kinds of reading in activities such as "Reading for Proof" and "Search & Scan Exercise."

3. WHEN TO USE A DICTIONARY features activities to help students determine when to use a dictionary, for example, "Making an Educated Guess" and "What's in a Name?"

4. A MEETING OF MINDS teaches students to look beyond the surface for the writer's meaning through exercises such as "Recognizing Charged Words" and "Dealing with Doublespeak."

5. THE READER AS REPORTER provides 20 exercises focusing on a reporter's five W's and an H (how) to develop the habit of looking for answers to these things in reading.

6. WHEN COMPLICATIONS ARISE prepares students for reading literary masterpieces that might otherwise overwhelm them with activities such as "Breaking Up Busy Sentences."

7. COMING TO TERMS WITH TECHNIQUES OF LITERATURE features exercises to build students' understanding of literary techniques, for example, "Seeing the Logic in an Analogy."

8. THE TRUTH IN LITERATURE develops understanding of differences and similarities between nonfiction and fiction through exercises such as "Taking Sides in a Conflict."

9. SETTING & POINT OF VIEW focuses on some of the elements readers can absorb from the first paragraph in activities like "Omniscient or Outside Observer"

10. PLOT introduces the basics of plot and types of fiction passages in exercises such as "Plotting the Action" and "Drawing Conclusions from Dialogue."

11. CHARACTER: THE HEART OF THE STORY presents various methods by which authors achieve effective characterization through activities such as "Shades of Differences."

12. SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT feature authorial comments, elements of symbolism, and thematic references in activities such as "And the Moral is..." and "Familiar Symbols."

For easy use, all material is printed in a big lay-flat binding that folds flat for photocopying of the reproducible pages. And complete answer keys to all activities are provided at the end.

You can use individual activities in conjunction with your classroom literature assignments'to introduce a concept or reinforce specific skills-or as an integrated program to focus on your students' special needs. In Reading Smarter! you'll find a wealth of exercises and ideas that not only prepare students for higher level reading, but also help them approach reading as a lively art!.
Price: $17.09 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $22.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This volume of Ready-to-Use Writing Proficiency Lessons & Activities gives classroom teachers and language arts specialists a powerful and effective tool for addressing curriculum standards and competencies at the eighth-grade level and preparing their students for comprehensive assessment testing.

Writing Proficiency Lessons & Activities books are also available from Jossey-Bass at the fourth-grade level and the tenth-grade level.

Included are a variety of easy-to-use, reproducible activity sheets that provide application and review the basic language skills as well as extensive practice in producing the types of writing called for in standardized tests.

For easy use, the 240-plus student activity sheets are printed in a big 8-1/2" x 11" format that lays flat for photocopying. The activities are organized into nine sections. Here is just a sample of the topics covered in Sections 1-5:

• CHOOSING THE RIGHT WORD: words often confused, prefixes, suffixes, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, adverbs vs. adjectives, sensory words, similes, metaphors, and double negatives
• MAKING MECHANICS AND USAGE WORK FOR YOU: apostrophes, hyphens, end marks, commas, semicolons, colons, quotation marks, titles, and misplaced modifiers.
• WRITING SENTENCES: subjects and predicates, subject-verb agreement, simple and compound sentences, complex sentences, sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and sentence types
• WRITING PARAGRAPHS: writing a topic sentence, writing a concluding sentence, developing the topic, using tense consistently, using transitional words, and staying on the topic
  
• ESSAY-WRITING TECHNIQUES: brainstorming, clustering, outlining, writing an introductory paragraph with a question or a surprising statement, developing the topic using examples, avoiding irrelevant details, writing a concluding paragraph, proofreading, and writing a five-paragraph essay.

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Price: $18.34 [Notify me when price goes down.]