Student scores on standardized tests are one of the leading measures of student achievement and educator accountability today. What this means is that teachers must know how to prepare their students with all the necessary skills for solid success on state exams. In this new handbook by award-winning educators Donna Walker Tileston and Sandra K. Darling, teachers will find a step-by-step guide to accomplishing that critical goal. In five concise chapters, the authors clarify and simplify for teachers the process of unpacking their own state standards, using a data base that aligns best practices to all of the state standards and ranks those instructional practices according to their effectiveness. Their text provides a model to help teachers determine what benchmarks really require students to know and be able to do at different grade levels. By the end of the book, educators will have a framework for how to teach so that lesson plans and assessments will map to the standards and benchmarks, with the goal of deeper learning and higher student achievement. The book includes ready-to-use strategies and a collection of reproducible templates, resources, bibliography, and index.á