Developing Expert Learners
A Roadmap for Growing Confident and Competent Students
- Michael McDowell - Author/Presenter and Co-Owner of Hinge Education
Foreword by James Nottingham, Afterword by Shirley Clarke
Corwin Teaching Essentials
Primary Professional Studies
Finally— a roadmap for growing students’ confidence and competence in learning.
We strive to empower our students to lead their own inquiry, discover knowledge, and construct approaches to solving real-life challenges. Often, though, we make the mistake of designing learning experiences that burden students with the unrealistic expectation of expertise that hasn’t yet been developed. The solution: proper scaffolding for surface, deep, and transfer learning.
Building upon the groundwork from Michael McDowell’s book Rigorous PBL by Design, this new resource provides practices that strategically support students as they move from novices to experts in core academics. You’ll learn high-impact strategies that ensure students develop ownership and confidence in their learning, plus essential tools to build your own efficacy and support your colleagues in building collective expertise. Chock full of mission-critical guidance, this book
- Provides an actionable framework for developing student expertise
- Offers practical strategies, tools, and routines for creating a culture that cultivates expertise and builds student efficacy
- Gives a simple, effective unit and lesson template that clarifies the steps students must take to build, deepen, and apply core content knowledge and skills
- Ensures your students’ progress in their learning through a process for selecting instructional, feedback, and learning strategies
- Includes strategies for improving your professional expertise individually and collectively
Elizabeth Alvarez, Chief of Schools
Chicago Public Schools
Supplements
Developing Expert Learners is a practitioner guide for the research-based classroom teacher. McDowell does an exemplary job of providing powerful strategies that can transform any classroom into a learning laboratory.
The book is filled with these strategies, relevant school-based examples, and educator testimonials that inspire. McDowell focuses on the importance of both the learner and the teacher in helping to co-construct a learning community that empowers learners to attain high levels of expertise and efficacy. The book is a wonderful balance between theory and practice and a must have for any educator trying to move their students from surface to deep understanding. McDowell brings action to research.
Michael McDowell provides practical examples in designing learning for students. Developing Expert Learners is a must-read for educators to build student expertise in a meaningful way, with many wonderful thoughts and ideas to support teachers in developing clarity for their students.
The information provided is good for early levels- though initially planned as a level 5/6 text- not adopted but recommended to learners for our level 4 programmes