Learning for Keeps

Teaching the Strategies Essential for Creating Independent Learners

How can teachers help students develop the literacy and problem-solving skills critical to becoming independent learners ready to tackle not only their immediate academic challenges but also the real-world problems they will face as adults? Asking students to memorize and recite facts isn’t the answer. Instead, says Rhoda Koenig, educators must deliberately cultivate thinking skills and build the strategies that empower students to boost their own learning--for keeps.In this highly practical book, Koenig combines explicit strategy lessons and coaching techniques that prepare teachers to “skate alongside” learners, give feedback, support them when they stumble, and gradually let go. Through the use of explanations, reflective exercises, demonstrations, and sample lessons, teachers will learn how to• Teach with a dual agenda of process (how) and product (what) in a workshop setting• Recast lessons to foster students’ metacognition and mental self-management• Analyze the steps taken when using key strategies with students• Craft model strategy lessons• Observe and assess students’ use of important strategies• Coach students and mediate as they learn procedural knowledge• Gradually release control to the learnerThis research-based, scaffolded approach is embedded in the curriculum and aligns three elements that support students’ success: preparedness for mandated assessments; the use of meaningful problem-solving experiences, purposeful writing, and high-quality fiction and nonfiction reading; and the promotion of higher-order thinking, self-efficacy, and self-direction. In Learning for Keeps, Koenig demystifies the complex processes involved in learning to read, write, and think well, reminding readers that if we pay inadequate attention to these bedrock processes, we shortchange the next generation and put our future at risk.