Year 3: What You Must Know Before YouPress Go!

Parental investment is critical to our success. We simply cannot educate scholars without parents. Your job as a teacher and an advisor is to insist that scholars are at school on time and in uniform, with their reading log and homework done. Their conduct needs to be stellar at school and outside of school. Parents must also be super responsive.

If parents are not fulfilling their responsibilities, you must meet with them. If you are still not successful, manage up to your leader.

Excellent behavior management, though necessary, is insufficient for high levels of learning when done in isolation. We know that scholars need to put forth their best intellectual effort to succeed.

You will work strategically to ensure that all learners achieve in your classroom. First and foremost, you must get 100% of your scholars participating actively in class and completing all classwork each day.

You must get to know ALL of your kids as thinkers and learn about their immediate struggles. You will use all of this to set simple goals for them. You are not creating 30 different goals!

Determine each scholar’s greatest area of growth, model the habit, and then have the scholar practice. Make sure that you circle back to the scholar to hold him or her accountable for incorporating your feedback.

We do not believe that children with IEPs are any less capable of achieving success, but they do need additional or different support to meet the same goals. All teachers must master differentiation of instruction and implement it every day. You will work strategically to ensure that all learners achieve in your classroom. By presenting content in a variety of ways, allowing diverse groups of learners to explore and learn together, leveraging your high fliers, maintaining high expectations for thinking and participation, and employing expert questioning, you will ensure that all scholars succeed in your classroom.

At Success Academy, we believe that students are capable of mastering rich historical content and that the best way for them to do that is through inquiry learning. We expose students to primary sources at an early age and ask them to wrestle with both the meaning of particular documents from the past and also big historical questions, including the rise and fall of civilizations, the origins of war and the settlement of peace, the evolution of the role of government, and the economic and social motivations of global events. As a history teacher, your job is to guide scholars as they evaluate primary and secondary sources. You must help them build historical arguments, marshaling specific evidence to support their historical claims. Fundamentally, your role is to teach scholars how to think historically, not what to think. We present scholars with a diverse range of voices and source material in our curriculum to dispel any one-sided story of history, and we expect scholars to evaluate these competing narratives to have a broader and more complete understanding of the past. Your role is also that of a content expert and facilitator: You must demand nuanced thinking that acknowledges multiple points of view, evaluate scholar arguments, ask thoughtful questions, and expect scholars to use accurate historical evidence to defend their ideas. While you are entitled to your own interpretation of history outside of the classroom, you must guard against imposing your personal beliefs on scholars or disregarding arguments that challenge your worldview. This inquiry-based approach to history requires that you embrace mastery of content. It is critical that your scholars understand key dates and the chronology of major historical events in order to unpack larger political, social, economic, and cultural ideas over time. An inquiry-based method for studying history also demands that scholars avoid presentism — looking at the world through our current values and morals. Instead, they must seek to understand how people thought and acted in the past. You must consistently challenge scholars to study the source of historical evidence and to consider how the context, audience, purpose, and period influenced individuals and societies through time. And of course, the study of history requires scholars to read critically, drawing upon evidence to construct convincing arguments and then expressing those arguments clearly both orally and in writing. So history teachers are literacy teachers too!

5 Habits of Great Historians

Great historians and teachers of history focus on five key habits:

1. Great historians always build background knowledge to understand the essential facts about a
2. Great historians always notice the source of a historical document and evaluate its reliability by considering the audience, purpose, language, and point of
3. Great historians always consider the historical context and how time and place impact individuals and their
4. Great historians always identify big ideas in history and the evidence used to support
5. Great historians always examine historical evidence to find similarities and differences between accounts and to determine what most likely happened and

5 Habits of Great Readers

Great readers and teachers of reading, focus on five key habits every time they read:

1. Great readers always make mind movies. In other words, readers always create pictures in their minds and envision the story happening as they
2. Great readers always look for the big idea and the evidence to support it. They think about what is happening or what they learned, and what this makes them think about the main point of the book or They think about the details the author employs to support the big idea.
3. Great readers always read the title and think about the title as they They think about how the events or information in the text connect back to the title.
4. Great readers always notice vocabulary words whose meaning they don’t They use the context of the word in the sentence or on the page to figure it out.
5. Great readers always notice interesting language and structures that support the big Authors make purposeful choices when crafting their pieces. The writer’s use of imagery, word choice, conventions, text features, or structure for the text all work to develop the big idea the author is conveying.

5 Habits of Great Writers

Great writers and teachers of writing, focus on five key habits every time they write:

1. Great writers always have a strong They always have an idea they want to convey before putting pencil to paper.
2. Great writers always include evidence that develops, supports, or proves their idea. They know an idea isn’t enough — they must convince their
3. Great writers always organize their writing so that it’s simple and clear and avoids They understand that to make a point, quality is better than quantity.
4. Great writers always reread their writing and make it better by They get rid of anything that isn’t doing something useful.
5. Great writers always check that their grammar, punctuation, and spelling are correct. They know that great writing will be ignored if it is riddled with