What Schools are for
Author: John I. Goodlad
Publisher:
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 152
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Forward by Ralph W. Tyler.
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Schools for Thought
Author: John T. Bruer
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 342
ISBN-13: 9780262521963
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Schools for Thought provides a straightforward, general introduction to cognitive research and illustrates its importance for educational change. If we want to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for all children, we must start applying what we know about mental functioning--how children think, learn, and remember in our schools. We must apply cognitive science in the classroom. Schools for Thought provides a straightforward, general introduction to cognitive research and illustrates its importance for educational change. Using classroom examples, Bruer shows how applying cognitive research can dramatically improve students' transitions from lower-level rote skills to advanced proficiency in reading, writing, mathematics, and science. Cognitive research, he points out, is also beginning to suggest how we might better motivate students, design more effective tools for assessing them, and improve the training of teachers. He concludes with a chapter on how effective school reform demands that we expand our understanding of teaching and learning and that we think about education in new ways. Debates and discussions about the reform of American education suffer from a lack of appreciation of the complexity of learning and from a lack of understanding about the knowledge base that is available for the improvement of educational practice. Politicians, business leaders, and even many school superintendents, principals, and teachers think that educational problems can be solved by changing school management structures or by creating a market in educational services. Bruer argues that improvement depends instead on changing student-teacher interactions. It is these changes, guided by cognitive research, that will create more effective classroom environments. A Bradford Book
America's Public Schools
Author: William J. Reese
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2011-04-01
Total Pages: 378
ISBN-13: 1421401037
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this update to his landmark publication, William J. Reese offers a comprehensive examination of the trends, theories, and practices that have shaped America’s public schools over the last two centuries. Reese approaches this subject along two main lines of inquiry—education as a means for reforming society and ongoing reform within the schools themselves. He explores the roots of contemporary educational policies and places modern battles over curriculum, pedagogy, race relations, and academic standards in historical perspective. A thoroughly revised epilogue outlines the significant challenges to public school education within the last five years. Reese analyzes the shortcomings of “No Child Left Behind” and the continued disjuncture between actual school performance and the expectations of government officials. He discusses the intrusive role of corporations, economic models for enticing better teacher performance, the continued impact of conservatism, and the growth of home schooling and charter schools. Informed by a breadth of historical scholarship and based squarely on primary sources, this volume remains the standard text for future teachers and scholars of education.
Schools on the Move
Author: Jay Westover
Publisher: Corwin Press
Published: 2022-02-10
Total Pages: 233
ISBN-13: 1071822403
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"The greatest influence on school district improvement is the extent to which school leaders and teachers collectively transform climate, develop culture and build capacity for the purpose of creating coherence. Districts on the Move (DOTM) paved the way for system change by establishing coherent cultures of learning. Now that DOTM has been written and district leaders can establish the context for positive system change, this new book, Schools on the Move (SOTM), will delve into bringing that vision to life and realizing school improvement at the building level. At the heart of this matter is a foundational principle that schools are the unit of change for systemic improvement. It is imperative to reduce the variances in climate, culture, capacity and coherence that exist among and within school sites if school districts are to create a coherent system of continuous improvement. This book will provide practical tools and guidance to help schools create coherent systems (and thereby improve the whole district) in these four domains: 1. Shared Leadership: partnering with teachers and staff to develop a culture of co-learning 2. Clarity of Focus: creating a strategic focus on equitable student growth 3. Collective Expertise: developing instructional coherence through cycles of collaborative inquiry 4. Continuous Improvement: maintaining a focus on evidence and impact Collaborative inquiry is the vehicle through which this change is realized. Collaborative inquiry "shapes a common mindset" (Donohoo) and allows educators to develop collective efficacy through mastery of shared learning experiences"--
Schools That Heal
Author: Claire Latane
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2021-06-03
Total Pages: 282
ISBN-13: 164283078X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →What would a school look like if it was designed with mental health in mind? Too many public schools look and feel like prisons, designed out of fear of vandalism and truancy. But we know that nurturing environments are better for learning. Access to nature, big classroom windows, and open campuses consistently reduce stress, anxiety, disorderly conduct, and crime, and improve academic performance. Backed by decades of research, Schools That Heal showcases clear and compelling ways--from furniture to classroom improvements to whole campus renovations--to make supportive learning environments for our children and teenagers. With invaluable advice for school administrators, public health experts, teachers, and parents Schools That Heal is a call to action and a practical resource to create nurturing and inspiring schools for all children.
Schools for All Kinds of Minds
Author: Mary-Dean Barringer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2010-03-29
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 047050515X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book shows how schools can--and must--develop expertise in "learning variation" (understanding how different kinds of minds learn) and apply this knowledge to classroom instruction in order to address the chronic learning challenges and achievement gap faced by millions of students. Barringer shows how using what we know about learning variation with a focus on discovering learning strengths, not just deficits, can help schools create plans for success for those students who often find it elusive. The book specifically addresses how school leaders can incorporate this knowledge into instructional practice and school-level policy through various professional development strategies. Schools for All Kinds of Minds: Provides a readable synthesis of the latest research from neuroscience, cognitive science, and child and adolescent development as it relates to understanding learning and its many variations. Links this information to strategies for understanding struggling learners and adapting school practices to accommodate a wider array of learning differences in a classroom. Demonstrates how this understanding of learning variation can change the way teachers and others help students succeed in various academic and content areas and acquire necessary 21st century skills. Includes discussion questions and facilitator guidelines for staff developers and teacher education programs; downloadable forms that accompany exercises from within the book; an action plan for schools to implement the ideas found in the book; and more.
Using Data in Schools to Inform Leadership and Decision Making
Author: Alex J. Bowers
Publisher: IAP
Published: 2014-11-01
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 1623967880
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Our fifth book in the International Research on School Leadership series focuses on the use of data in schools and districts as useful information for leadership and decision making. Schools are awash in data and information, from test scores, to grades, to discipline reports, and attendance as just a short list of student information sources, while additional streams of data feed into schools and districts from teachers and parents as well as local, regional and national policy levels. To deal with the data, schools have implemented a variety of data practices, from data rooms, to data days, data walks, and data protocols. However, despite the flood of data, successful school leaders are leveraging an analysis of their school’s data as a means to bring about continuous improvement in an effort to improve instruction for all students. Nevertheless, some drown, some swim, while others find success. Our goal in this book volume is to bring together a set of chapters by authors who examine successful data use as it relates to leadership and school improvement. In particular, the chapters in this volume consider important issues in this domain, including: • How educational leaders use data to inform their practice. • What types of data and data analysis are most useful to successful school leaders. • To what extent are data driven and data informed practices helping school leaders positively change instructional practice? • In what ways does good data collection and analysis feed into successful continuous improvement and holistic systems thinking? • How have school leadership practices changed as more data and data analysis techniques have become available? • What are the major obstacles facing school leaders when using data for decision making and how do they overcome them?
Excellence for All
Author: Jack Schneider
Publisher:
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 190
ISBN-13: 9780826518118
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →By the early twenty-first century, a startling consensus had emerged about the overall aim of American school reform. In an era of political discord, and in a field historically known for contentiousness, the notion of promoting educational excellence for all students was a distinct point of bipartisan agreement. Shaped by a corps of entrepreneurial reformers intent on finding "what works" and taking it to scale, this hybrid vision won over the nation's most ambitious and well-resourced policy leaders at foundations and nonprofits, in state and federal government, and in urban school districts from coast to coast. "Excellence for all" might, at first glance, appear to be nothing more than a rhetorical flourish. Who, after all, would oppose the idea of a great education for every student? Yet it is hardly a throwaway phrase. Rather, it represents a surprising fusion of educational policy approaches that had been in tense opposition throughout the twentieth century--those on the right favoring social efficiency, and those on the left supporting social justice. This book seeks to understand why the "excellence for all" vision took hold at the time it did, unpacks the particular beliefs and assumptions embedded in it, and details the often informal coalition building that produced this period of consensus. Examining the nation's largest urban school districts (Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York), the author details three major reform efforts in chapters titled "The Right Space: The Small Schools Movement"; "The Right Teachers: Teach for America"; and "The Right Curriculum: Expanding Advanced Placement."
How The Other Half Learns
Author: Robert Pondiscio
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2020-06-02
Total Pages: 386
ISBN-13: 0525533753
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An inside look at America's most controversial charter schools, and the moral and political questions around public education and school choice. The promise of public education is excellence for all. But that promise has seldom been kept for low-income children of color in America. In How the Other Half Learns, teacher and education journalist Robert Pondiscio focuses on Success Academy, the network of controversial charter schools in New York City founded by Eva Moskowitz, who has created something unprecedented in American education: a way for large numbers of engaged and ambitious low-income families of color to get an education for their children that equals and even exceeds what wealthy families take for granted. Her results are astonishing, her methods unorthodox. Decades of well-intended efforts to improve our schools and close the "achievement gap" have set equity and excellence at war with each other: If you are wealthy, with the means to pay private school tuition or move to an affluent community, you can get your child into an excellent school. But if you are poor and black or brown, you have to settle for "equity" and a lecture--about fairness. About the need to be patient. And about how school choice for you only damages public schools for everyone else. Thousands of parents have chosen Success Academy, and thousands more sit on waiting lists to get in. But Moskowitz herself admits Success Academy "is not for everyone," and this raises uncomfortable questions we'd rather not ask, let alone answer: What if the price of giving a first-rate education to children least likely to receive it means acknowledging that you can't do it for everyone? What if some problems are just too hard for schools alone to solve?
What Every Principal Needs to Know to Create Equitable and Excellent Schools
Author: George Theoharis
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Published: 2015-04-25
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 0807772267
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →School leaders who succeed at creating a high-achieving learning community must also be committed to creating an equitable environment for all students. In this new book, key scholars across the content areas show how to put into practice a commitment to equity and excellence across the Pre-K12 spectrum. Readers learn directly from experts in each of the content domains (literacy, mathematics, science, social studies, music, early childhood, special education, English language learners, world languages, and physical education) how a commitment to social justice and equity can be grounded in core subject areas, why each has a place in the school, and what they need to know and do in each subject area. This book is a critical instructional leadership resource for new and veteran principals who want to see all students succeed. Contributors: Antonio J. Castro, Julie Causton-Theoharis, Virginia Collier, Katherine Delaney, Catherine Ennis, Virginia Goatley, Beth Graue, Rochelle Gutirrez, Kathleen A. Hinchman, Anne Karabon, Christi Kasa, Dave McAlpine, Mitchell Robinson, Victor Sampson, Sherry A. Southerland, and Wayne Thomas
