Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers


Lucy Crehan - 2016
    The ‘top performing’ schools were designing education in completely different ways from the UK and from each other, and yet, despite their differences, they were all getting top marks.Determined to find answers she couldn’t get from reports and graphs, Lucy set off on a journey around the globe to see these schools and students for herself.Cleverlands is the story of her journey through Finland, Canada, Japan, China and Singapore – five countries regularly at the top of the education charts. She spent three weeks immersed in classrooms in each country – living with teachers, listening to parents, teaching, watching and asking questions.The result is a guided tour of the world’s best educational systems and a reflection on what success in the UK might look like in light of these varying possibilities… not just what our politicians would have us believe.

Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry Out Instructional Units


Peter Smagorinsky - 2007
    Its week-by-week suggestions for in- and out-of-class activities support students as they learn to design units for use in their first classrooms.Peter Smagorinsky, the leading scholar and researcher of his generation in the field of English education, shows English teachers how to turn every hour of classroom instruction into an authentic and powerful learning experience in his inspiring new book, Teaching English by Design. It's a wonderful book and represents a challenge to all of us to teach better than we usually do. Sheridan Blau Author of The Literature WorkshopPeter Smagorinsky, a highly respected figure in English Education, here offers new teachers principled and practical ways of authoring curriculum, even in traditional settings. Randy Bomer Author of Time for MeaningMany books on English/language arts instruction describe the teaching of units, but how many of them actually show how to create the units, make them meaningful to students, and use them to support your curriculum from September to June? Teaching English by Design does it all. It helps avoid a fragmentary curriculum by providing the rationale and the process for not only teaching well but also for producing integrated units that encourage students to deepen their thinking across the school year.Teaching English by Design is two books in one: a primer for teaching secondary English and a comprehensive guide to creating and using four to six-week instructional units. Peter Smagorinsky shares important insight about students, how they learn, and what kinds of classrooms support their achievement in reading and writing. Then he uses those findings to open up the key ideas of unit design to every teacher. Smagorinsky's units are organized around key concepts in English, such as: reading strategies writing strategies genres periods, regions, and movements in literature themes the works of a significant author. From original idea to construction, to implementation and beyond, Smagorinsky's practical advice supports teachers in extending, connecting, and integrating their units to increase the cohesion and power of the curriculum.Incorporating curricular theory, educational psychology, and fourteen years of high school teaching experience, Peter Smagorinsky's advice is both theoretically sound and grounded in the daily realities of today's teacher. Complemented by a wealth of web-based illustrations, Teaching English by Design is the ideal resource for preservice teachers as well as those in the classroom who want to take charge of their curriculum and find new energy in it.

Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making


Deborah Stone - 1997
    Through a uniquely rich and comprehensive model, this revised edition continues to show how real-world policy grows out of differing ideals, even definitions, of basic societal goals like security, equality, and liberty. The book also demonstrates how these ideals often conflict in policy implementation. In this revised edition, Stone has added a full-length case study as an appendix, taking up the issue of affirmative action. Clear, provocative, and engaging, Policy Paradox conveys the richness of public policy making and analysis.

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life


William Deresiewicz - 2014
    His students, some of the nation’s brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively, and how to find a sense of purpose.Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics and computer science, students are losing the ability to think in innovative ways. Deresiewicz explains how college should be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success, so they can forge their own path. He addresses parents, students, educators, and anyone who's interested in the direction of American society, featuring quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and clearly presenting solutions.

The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers


John Gardner - 1984
      John Gardner was almost as famous as a teacher of creative writing as he was for his own works. In this practical, instructive handbook, based on the courses and seminars that he gave, he explains, simply and cogently, the principles and techniques of good writing. Gardner’s lessons, exemplified with detailed excerpts from classic works of literature, sweep across a complete range of topics—from the nature of aesthetics to the shape of a refined sentence. Written with passion, precision, and a deep respect for the art of writing, Gardner’s book serves by turns as a critic, mentor, and friend. Anyone who has ever thought of taking the step from reader to writer should begin here.

Subjects Matter: Exceeding Standards Through Powerful Content-Area Reading


Harvey Daniels - 2014
    This book is about making those encounters as compelling as we can make them." -Harvey "Smokey" Daniels and Steven ZemelmanWe are specialists to the bone-in science, math, social studies, art, music, business, and foreign language. But now, the Common Core and state standards require us to help our students better understand the distinctive texts in our subject areas. "Nobody's making us into reading teachers," write Smokey Daniels and Steve Zemelman, "but we must become teachers of disciplinary thinking through our students' reading."If this shift sounds like a tough one, Subjects Matter, Second Edition is your solution. Smokey and Steve, two of America's most popular educators, share exactly what you need to help students read your nonfiction content closely and strategically: 27 proven teaching strategies that help meet-and exceed-the standards how-to suggestions for engaging kids with content through wide, real-world reading a lively look at using "boring" textbooks motivating instruction that's powered by student collaboration specifics for helping struggling readers succeed.Subjects Matter, Second Edition enables deep, thoughtful learning for your students, while keeping the irreverent, inspiring heart that's made the first edition indispensable. You'll discover fresh and re-energized lessons, completely updated research, and vibrant vignettes from new colleagues and old friends who have as much passion for their subjects as you do."We'll be using methods particular to our fields as well as engaging reading materials that help students understand and remember our content better," write Smokey and Steve. "We can realize that vision of the light going on in kids' heads and maybe fill them with enthusiasm about the amazing subject matter that we have to offer. Sound good? Let's get to work." Read a sample chapter from Subjects Matter, Second Edition.

Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education


Ken Robinson - 2015
    Now, the internationally recognized leader on creativity and human potential focuses on one of the most critical issues of our time: how to transform the nation’s troubled educational system. At a time when standardized testing businesses are raking in huge profits, when many schools are struggling, and students and educators everywhere are suffering under the strain, Robinson points the way forward. He argues for an end to our outmoded industrial educational system and proposes a highly personalized, organic approach that draws on today’s unprecedented technological and professional resources to engage all students, develop their love of learning, and enable them to face the real challenges of the twenty-first century. Filled with anecdotes, observations and recommendations from professionals on the front line of transformative education, case histories, and groundbreaking research—and written with Robinson’s trademark wit and engaging style—Creative Schools will inspire teachers, parents, and policy makers alike to rethink the real nature and purpose of education.

How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing


Paul J. Silvia - 2007
    Writing is hard work and can be difficult to wedge into a frenetic academic schedule.This revised and updated edition of Paul Silvia's popular guide provides practical, light-hearted advice to help academics overcome common barriers and become productive writers. Silvia's expert tips have been updated to apply to a wide variety of disciplines, and this edition has a new chapter devoted to grant and fellowship writing.

Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners: The SIOP Model


Jana Echevarria - 2007
    For twelve years, educators have turned to Jana Echevarria, MaryEllen Vogt, and Deborah Short for an empirically validated model of sheltered instruction. In the Third Edition of this best-seller, the authors include new research findings and studies on the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP(R)) Model, which offers school administrators, teachers, teacher candidates, coaches, university faculty, and field experience supervisors a tool for observing and quantifying a teacher's implementation of quality sheltered instruction. Ringing Endorsements "A framework that will engage, support, and increase the academic achievement of our culturally and linguistically diverse students. The SIOP Model went] from good to great ""--Socorro Herrera, Kansas State University" "Readability, organization, and practicality The SIOP addresses precisely the needs that my beginning teachers face...the CD for SIOP...makes it all understandable. I love the book ""--Danny Brassell, California State University, Dominguez Hills" Take a Glimpse Inside the Third Edition: New, user-friendly format of the SIOP(R) protocol. Background Sections include descriptions of the eight components and thirty features of the SIOP(R) Model, and are updated to reflect recent research and best practices to help readers plan and prepare effective sheltered lessons. Practical Guidelines to help readers develop effective language and content objectives. Discussion Questions have been rewritten and are appropriate for portfolio development in pre-service and graduate classes, for professional development workshops, or for teacher reflection and application. A groundbreaking CD-ROM with video clips, interviews of the authors, and reproducible resources (e.g., lesson plan formats), make this the perfect professional development asset for any grade level or content area teacher

A Challenge For The Actor


Uta Hagen - 1991
    He will learn to face himself, to hide nothing from himself -- and to do so takes an insatiable curiosity about the human condition. from the Prologue Uta Hagen, one of the world's most renowned stage actresses, has also taught acting for more than forty years at the HB Studio in New York. Her first book, Respect for Acting, published in 1973, is still in print and has sold more than 150,000 copies. In her new book, A Challenge for the Actor, she greatly expands her thinking about acting in a work that brings the full flowering of her artistry, both as an actor and as a teacher. She raises the issue of the actor's goals and examines the specifics of the actor's techniques. She goes on to consider the actor's relationship to the physical and psychological senses. There is a brilliantly conceived section on the animation of the body and mind, of listening and talking, and the concept of expectation. But perhaps the most useful sections in this book are the exercises that Uta Hagen has created and elaborated to help the actor learn his craft. The exercises deal with developing the actor's physical destination in a role; making changes in the self serviceable in the creation of a character; recreating physical sensations; bringing the outdoors on stage; finding occupation while waiting; talking to oneself and the audience; and employing historical imagination. The scope and range of Uta Hagen here is extraordinary. Her years of acting and teaching have made her as finely seasoned an artist as the theatre has produced.

Doing Grammar


Max Morenberg - 1991
    The author employs insights from contemporary linguistic theories and builds them into a coherent system firmly rooted in traditional models. Focusing on the idea that students learn grammar by actually doing grammar, he provides down-to-earth explanations about the composition of English sentences, illustrating them at every step with diagrams and other visual models. The author constructs a sensible, even hospitable, approach to grammar. Doing Grammar, 3/e, features real, provocative, and intelligent sentences as examples and exercises. This new edition offers expanded coverage of parts of speech, using both traditional and descriptive explanations to provide definitions of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions. It also features updated sentence exercises, clear diagrams, and an appendix containing answers to half the exercises.

How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction


Anne Curzan - 2005
    This engaging introductory language/linguistics textbook provides more extensive coverage of issues of particular interest to English majors and future English instructors. It invites all students to connect academic linguistics to the everyday use of the English language around them. The book's approach taps students' natural curiosity about the English language. Through exercises and discussion questions about ongoing changes in English, How English Works asks students to become active participants in the construction of linguistic knowledge.

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past


John Lewis Gaddis - 2002
    The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today.Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. In doing so, they combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. So who's really being scientific and who isn't? This question too is one Gaddis explores, in ways that are certain to spark interdisciplinary controversy.Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E.H. Carr, The Landscape of History is at once an engaging introduction to the historical method for beginners, a powerful reaffirmation of it for practitioners, a startling challenge to social scientists, and an effective skewering of post-modernist claims that we can't know anything at all about the past. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.

The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work


Miliann Kang - 2010
    Encounters like this occur thousands of times across the United States in nail salons increasingly owned and operated by Asian immigrants. This study looks closely for the first time at these intimate encounters, focusing on New York City, where such nail salons have become ubiquitous. Drawing from rich and compelling interviews, Miliann Kang takes us inside the nail industry, asking such questions as: Why have nail salons become so popular? Why do so many Asian women, and Korean women in particular, provide these services? Kang discovers multiple motivations for the manicure-from the pampering of white middle class women to the artistic self-expression of working class African American women to the mass consumption of body-related services. Contrary to notions of beauty service establishments as spaces for building community among women, The Managed Hand finds that while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.

Teaching English As A Foreign Language (Teach Yourself English As A Foreign Language S.)


David Riddell - 2001
    It should provide you with the basic teaching skills, background knowledge and awareness that will enable you to enter the classroom with confidence and develop your skills. The book contains: advice on effective teaching techniques; tips on classroom management, lesson planning and using coursebooks; appraoches to teaching different kinds of lessons; tasks and review sections in each unit to help you remember what you have learnt; and lots of information about job hunting and career development.