Eric P. Jensen

Read with a discussion group of teachers in my district. The guiding principle here is to take 100% responsibility for the learning of your students. Every problem we find in our classroom (poor motivation, retention, behavior, comprehension, etc.) is due to poor teaching on our part, nothing more.
This was difficult to accept, but since I'm not particularly confident in my teaching ability (half of my students perform poorly), I was willing to take it. There are many methods, strategies, show more and tips that will help us motivate our students to succeed, and they were applicable to elementary and middle school students (some even for high school, but fewer).

A quick and beneficial read for any teacher. show less

Every great teacher and teacher librarian has a bag of tricks in their head that usually work or that can be modified in a moment’s notice to adapt to learners of various types and in various situations. At first glance, our authors are headed directly there and are right on target. They present a model that pushes students toward more than surface learning. First, they suggest that teachers begin with the standards statements, then build knowledge of the group you are working with, show more developing positive student engagement strategies, activate their prior knowledge, and then they provide a plethora of strategies for activating and thinking about what they are learning ending in evaluation. Most ideas are for engaging students in text and we liked the many worksheets that force the learner to interpret and think about what they are reading and doing. However, these authors need a good teacher librarian who would introduce them to the world of information and technology adding strategies not only for various information types but also information literacy and so what activities as the culmination of what they know and how they learned it. So, if you need text-based engagement strategies, this is a book to purchase and study. However, for a collaborative tool that pushes kids into the real world of the Internet, film, and web 2.0, I am looking for something much deeper. Not recommended. show less

This is great. Much of the details in the book make sense when I think about classroom conditions and why kids act the way they sometimes do. Also, there are sensible ideas about how to best reach all students, keeping how their brain development is controlling some of their reactions and natural proclivities. I like how the chapters are arranged leading the reader through the basics to more detailed understanding of brain-based learning.

New teachers losing their way? Getting bored? Thinking that their time-tested strategies no longer work with the groups of learners they have? Eric Jensen is a prominent speaker about the research-based practices all great teachers possess in reaching their students. He lists six characteristics of what he terms fierce teaching used as the acronymn: BE Fierce:
• BE –Body and emotional connections
• F – Feedback and error correction
• I – Input to output ratio
• E – Elaboration show more for depth
• R – Recall and memory management
• C – Content Coherence
• E – Environmental management
This is a book that a professional learningcommunitycould read in bits and pieces – everyone reading one of the chapters since they are fairly short and then spending 10-15 min. discussing the ideas presented and applying them to everyday teaching strategies. It would be a chance for the successful teachers to provide tips in a non-threatening atmosphere, and who knows, some troubled faculty just might hear and apply some of the tips It is worth a try and while the list seems a bit clouded by the terms used here, the common sense backed up by research will be a good review for anyone. Recommended as a chapter, thing, next chapter, think… show less