Average schools don’t inspire greatness—and greatness is what our world needs if we are going to produce world-changing learners. In Culturize, author and education leader Jimmy Casas shares insights into what it takes to cultivate a community of learners who embody the innately human traits our world desperately needs, such as kindness, honesty, and compassion. His stories reveal how these “soft skills” can be honed while meeting and exceeding academic standards of twenty-first-century learning. You’ll learn... * How to reach those who seem unreachable * What to do when students disengage or drop out of school * How to ensure your learners feel cared for and empowered * How to create an environment where all learners are challenged and inspired to be their best ______ “Jimmy Casas guides readers to understand that school culture must be a daily focal point for all school leaders.” —Beverly Hutton, Ed.D., Deputy Executive Director, National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) “No matter your title or profession, page after page of this book will inspire you.” —Kayla Delzer, CEO, Top Dog Teaching Inc. “Read this book to culturize your school and to live your excellence—every day.” —Thomas C. Murray, Director of Innovation, Future Ready Schools

    Yet our curricula are largely print-based, and students must develop effective reading behaviours to be successful in school. This book provides middle school and high school educators with the resources they need to meet this challenge: literacy development strategies that emphasize effective learning in content contexts.

    KEY TOPICS: Specific, practical strategies include ways to get students active from the start through activities that build teamwork and immediately get them thinking about the subject matter. 101 activities include ice-breakers for the beginning of class, strategies for the middle of a lesson, and concluding exercises to foster student reflection and future application. In addition, these activities are designed to enliven learning, deepen understanding, and promote retention. Designed for the preservice and inservice teacher, this book is effective for anyone teaching in middle schools, high schools, colleges, and centers for adult education. For professionals working in middle school/secondary school education.

    Student Engagement Techniques is a comprehensive resource that offers college teachers a dynamic model for engaging students and includes over one hundred tips, strategies, and techniques that have been proven to help teachers from a wide variety of disciplines and institutions motivate and connect with their students. The ready-to-use format shows how to apply each of the book's techniques in the classroom and includes purpose, preparation, procedures, examples, online implementation, variations and extensions, observations and advice, and key resources. "Given the current and welcome surge of interest in improving student learning and success, this guide is a timely and important tool, sharply focused on practical strategies that can really matter." ?Kay McClenney, director, Center for Community College Student Engagement, Community College Leadership Program, the University of Texas at Austin "This book is a 'must' for every new faculty orientation program; it not only emphasizes the importance of concentrating on what students learn but provides clear steps to prepare and execute an engagement technique. Faculty looking for ideas to heighten student engagement in their courses will find usefultechniques that can be adopted, adapted, extended, or modified." ?Bob Smallwood, cocreator of CLASSE (Classroom Survey of Student Engagement) and assistant to the provost for assessment, Office of Institutional Effectiveness, University of Alabama "Elizabeth Barkley's encyclopedia of active learning techniques (here called SETs) combines both a solid discussion of the research on learning that supports the concept of engagement and real-life examples of these approaches to teaching in action." ?James Rhem, executive editor, The National Teaching & Learning Forum

    In our networked society, students need to learn how to leverage social media to connect to people, passions, and opportunities to grow and make a difference. Social LEADia offers insight and engaging stories to help you shift the focus at school and at home from digital citizenship to digital leadership.

     Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12 helps teachers implement 14 optimal practices for thinking that create an ideal setting for deep mathematics learning to occur. This guideProvides the what, why, and how of each practice Includes firsthand accounts of how these practices foster thinking Offers a plethora of macro moves, micro moves, and rich tasks to get started

    Christopher LehmanSit down with Christopher Lehman as he shares the strategies he has used to make research reading and writing real and motivating for students. Chris draws on his experience with the Reading and Writing Project and as co-author of Pathways to the Common Core to help you tailor your instruction to your students' needs, get to the heart of the Common Core State Standards, and, most importantly, challenge your students to become driven, inquisitive thinkers who can meet the demands of school and life in the 21st century.Energize Research Reading and Writing provides a menu of fresh, classroom-tested strategies for teaching research across all contents as well as:at-a-glance guides for differentiation-ways to ramp up strategies for experienced researchers and ways to make them accessible for emerging researchers samples of grade level language for each strategy and tips for content-area teachers ideas for using the strategies to build plans for the short and long research projects that the CCSS requires a quick-reference chart that links each strategy to the CCSS so you can quickly turn to the strategies that aim to align with a particular standard. Use this book as a complete research unit plan or as a source for targeted strategies. Energize Research Reading and Writing has all the tools you need to transform your students into engaged and independent researchers.

    Can small artists still thrive in the Internet era? Can giant record labels avoid alienating their audiences? This is a book about the pitfalls and the opportunities that creative industries (and individuals) are confronting today — about how the old models have failed or found new footing, and about what might soon replace them. An essential read for anyone with a stake in the future of the arts, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free offers a vivid guide to the ways creativity and the Internet interact today, and to what might be coming next.

    Each case, written in a narrative, literary style, presents a complex, yet common, classroom situation in which an inequity or injustice is in play. These cases allow educators to practice the process of considering a range of contextual factors and sociopolitical complexities, checking their own biases, and making immediate- and longer-term decisions affecting their classroom practice.The book begins with a seven-point process for examining case studies. Largely lacking from existing literature, this all-important context guides readers through the process of identifying, examining, reflecting on, and taking concrete steps to resolve challenges related to diversity and equity in schools. The cases themselves then present everyday examples of racism and sexism, homophobia and heterosexism, poverty and classism, language bias and linguicism, and religious-based oppression. They involve classroom issues that are relevant to all grade levels and all content areas, allowing instructors significant flexibility in their use. Although organized topically, the intersection of these issues are stressed throughout all cases, reflecting the more complex and multi-faceted way they play out in real life. All cases conclude with a section of facilitator notes and a series of questions to guide exploration and discussion. Suggested further readings also encourage continued exploration and reflection on relevant topics.

    Seaward Park High School, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, has been ranked among the worst 10 percent of high schools in the state--yet 92 percent of its graduates go on to higher education. The reason is dedicated teachers, one of whom, English instructor Jessica Siegel, is the subject of Freedman's unforgettably dramatic humanization of the education crisis. Following Siegel through the 1987-88 academic year, Freedman not only saw a master at work but learned from the inside just how a school functions against impossible odds. Small Victories alternates Jessica's experiences with those of others at Seaward Park, and as we cone to know intimately a number of the astonishing students and staff, Small Victories reveals itself as a book that has the power to change the way we see our world.

     Combining robust evidence from a range of fields with the practical wisdom of experienced, effective classroom teachers, this is a must-read for trainee and experienced teachers wishing to enhance their skills in teaching English.

    In this explosive book, Bryan Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skill but to certify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity—in other words, to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As and casually forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for the average worker but instead in runaway credential inflation, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely if ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy.Caplan draws on the latest social science to show how the labor market values grades over knowledge, and why the more education your rivals have, the more you need to impress employers. He explains why graduation is our society's top conformity signal, and why even the most useless degrees can certify employability. He advocates two major policy responses. The first is educational austerity. Government needs to sharply cut education funding to curb this wasteful rat race. The second is more vocational education, because practical skills are more socially valuable than teaching students how to outshine their peers.Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense — The Case against Education points the way.

    We’re a little taller or shorter than the average, our salary is a bit higher or lower than the average, and we wonder about who it is that is buying the average-priced home. All around us, we think, are the average people—with the average height, the average salary and the average house.But the average doesn’t just influence how we see ourselves—our entire social system has been built around this average-size-fits-all model. Schools are designed for the average student. Healthcare is designed for the average patient. Employers try to fill average job descriptions with employees on an average career trajectory. Our government implements programs and initiatives to serve the average person. For more than a century, we’ve believed that the best way to run our institutions is by focusing on the average person. But when you actually drill down into the numbers, you find an amazing fact: no one is average—which means that our society built for everyone is actually serving no one.In the 1950s, the American Air Force found itself with a massive problem—performance in expensive, custom-made planes was suffering terribly, with crashes peaking at seventeen in a single day. Since the state-of-the-art planes they were flying had been meticulously crafted to fit the average pilot, pilot error was assumed to be at fault. Until, that is, the Air Force investigated just how many of their pilots were actually average. The shocking answer: out of thousands of active-duty pilots, exactly zero were average. Not one. This discovery led to simple solutions (like adjustable seats) that dramatically reduced accidents, improved performance, and expanded the pool of potential pilots. It also led to a huge change in thinking: planes didn’t need to be designed for everyone—they needed to be designed so they could adapt to suit the individual flying them.The End of Average shows how success lies in customizing to our individual needs in all aspects of our lives, from the way we mark tests to the medical treatment we receive. Using principles from The Science of the Individual, it shows how we can break down the average to create individualized success that benefits everyone in the long run. It's time we stopped settling for average, and in The End of Average, Todd Rose will show you how.

    They also argue that it should be taught in the simplest way possible. Drawing on twenty years of experience, the authors present the Question Formulation Technique, a concise and powerful protocol that enables learners to produce their own questions, improve their questions, and strategize how to use them.Make Just One Change features the voices and experiences of teachers in classrooms across the country to illustrate the use of the Question Formulation Technique across grade levels and subject areas and with different kinds of learners.

    These are the children and grandchildren of Appalachian families who migrated to northern cities in the 1950s to look for work. They make up this largely "invisible" urban group, a minority that represents a significant portion of the urban poor. Literacy researchers have rarely studied urban Appalachians, yet, as Victoria Purcell-Gates demonstrates in Other People's Words, their often severe literacy problems provide a unique perspective on literacy and the relationship between print and culture.A compelling case study details the author's work with one such family. The parents, who attended school off and on through the seventh grade, are unable to use public transportation, shop easily, or understand the homework their elementary-school-age son brings home because neither of them can read. But the family is not so much illiterate as low literate--the world they inhabit is an oral one, their heritage one where print had no inherent use and no inherent meaning. They have as much to learn about the culture of literacy as about written language itself.Purcell-Gates shows how access to literacy has been blocked by a confluence of factors: negative cultural stereotypes, cultural and linguistic elitism, and pedagogical obtuseness. She calls for the recruitment and training of "proactive" teachers who can assess and encourage children's progress and outlines specific intervention strategies.