Jenning Prevatte, M.Ed.

I love learning! I am what you call an "education geek!" One of my favorite pastimes was reading educational research and literature. This past summer, I read Teaching for Deeper Learning Tools to Engage Students in Meaning Making by Jay McTighe and Harvey F. Silver.

This is a must-read if you are looking for a practical guide to help your students achieve deeper learning. This book proposes a solution to the problem of superficial learning that fails to prepare students for real-world challenges by teaching students to make meaning for themselves. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found the information incredibly valuable to my teaching practice. I instantly had ideas on how and what to add to my courses to support my college students. The authors highlight seven higher-order thinking skills facilitating students' information acquisition for excellent retention, retrieval, and transfer. These skills are comparing, classifying, induction, deduction, error analysis, constructing support, and abstracting.

In addition to offering seven essential teaching and learning skills, the authors also share strategies for concept-based curriculum design. I implemented this curriculum design philosophy into my teaching, learning, and technology class, which worked like a charm! What is concept-based curriculum design? The authors describe it as "focusing curriculum around conceptually important and transferable ideas" so teachers can help students better understand concepts. This curriculum design approach works at all educational levels.

The book also provides tools and strategies to help teachers target each thinking skill in the classroom, design lessons and units that foster deeper learning, and build students' capacity to use this strategy independently. I used what I learned in this book to help me develop my note-making handout, which can be found in my Teach Brilliantly Toolkit.