Description

Catching Kids Up: Learning Focused Strategies for Accelerating Learning

The research says that the longer a student is in a traditional remedial program, the further they fall below grade level.

So what do you do with students who are 1, 2, even three grade levels behind?

Well there’s this little-known strategy called ACCELERATION. When we first learned about acceleration from our friends at Learning Focused, the concept blew our minds!

Hardly anybody is talking about it. But when you learn it and use it, you’ll see a huge difference in your efforts to support struggling learners and how fast you can help them catch up and keep up.

You see, Acceleration addresses the ROOT cause of learning difficulty for many students — lack of prior knowledge, vocabulary, and experiences that are necessary to connect to know knowledge and skills.

When you do, not only can you help students catch up quickly, you can prevent future failure from happening.

In Catching Kids Up, you’ll learn how to successfully implement acceleration in your classroom.

You’ll get:

• Sample Schedules to help you create an acceleration program for your school and classroom including plans for elementary, middle, and high schools, summer school at all levels, and plans for special education programs. That way, you’ll have everything you need to start right away in your own classroom or get everyone in your school on board.
• Research-based vocabulary strategies. Use these and you can increase student achievement by up to 33 percentile points! (Marzano, et. al, 2001).
• Advance Organizers you can use to direct students to the essential information ahead of the unit or lesson. That way, you’ll be able to bridge the gap between students’ prior knowledge and new knowledge.
• Strategies to activate prior knowledge. With these you’ll never have students who are “lost.”
• A complete 5-step plan to set up the Acceleration Model in your classroom.
• Step-by-step implementation guides for over 20 different instructional strategies.

“It was magic, just pure magic,” is one special education teacher described the effects of accelerating her 7th and 8th grade students with learning disabilities. “the other students in their English and Math classes thought my students were gifted because they knew the vocabulary before anyone else and they always had a cool strategy for understanding their math concepts.”

Catching Kids Up is a school-wide instructional model that addresses the “root cause” of learning difficulties for many students – the lack of prior knowledge, vocabulary, and experiences that are necessary to connect to new knowledge and skills.

Rather than relying on remediating students in ways that keep them always behind, these acceleration strategies provide a foundation and scaffold for new learning allowing students to build confidence in their own ability to perform and achieve. Students gain strategies for organizing, storing and internalizing knowledge and/or skills.

This book is a great companion to How to Support Struggling Students.

“Since our school began implementing acceleration and previewing the level of discourse in my classroom has risen tremendously. The students know what we are discussing and want to contribute, The at-risk students and special education students are truly a part of the classroom now.” 8th grade English/Language Arts teacher.