Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It’s a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for—and sacrificing—in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today’s self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.

    Clear lessons and straightforward language reveal how to measure discipline in a classroom environment, as well as how to handle difficult situations, such as transition times, assemblies, lunchtime, and field trips. A separate chapter for school administrators explains how to support classroom teachers in creating discipline and how to evaluate those teachers.

    Along the way, the reader will find out: * What is a sign?* Which codes do we take for granted?* What is a text?* How can semiotics be used in textual analysis?* Who were Saussure, Peirce, Barthes and Jakobson - and why are they important?Features include a glossary of key terms and realistic suggestions for further reading. There is also a highly-developed and long-established online version of the book at: www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B.

    Valenzuela argues that schools subtract resources from youth in two major ways: firstly by dismissing their definition of education and secondly, through assimilationist policies and practices that minimize their culture and language. A key consequence is the erosion of students' social capital evident in the absence of academically oriented networks among acculturated, U.S.-born youth.

    Like its predecessor, this edition of Academic Writing for Graduate Students" explains understanding the intended audience, the purpose of the paper, and academic genres." includes the use of task-based methodology, analytic group discussion, and genre consciousness-raising." shows how to write summaries and critiques." features "language focus" sections that address linguistic elements as they affect the wider rhetorical objectives." helps students position themselves as junior scholars in their academic communities.The Commentary has also been revised and is available.

    But sometimes what can make or break your learning community are the intangibles--the relationships, identity, and connections that make up its culture. Authors Fisher, Frey, and Pumpian believe that no school improvement effort will be effective unless school culture is addressed. They identify five pillars that are critical to building a culture of achievement:1. Welcome: Imagine if all staff members in your school considered it their job to make every student, parent, and visitor feel noticed, welcomed, and valued.2. Do no harm: Your school rules should be tools for teaching students to become the moral and ethical citizens you expect them to be.3. Choice words: When the language students hear helps them tell a story about themselves that is one of possibility and potential, students perform in ways that are consistent with that belief.4. It's never too late to learn: Can you push students to go beyond the minimum needed to get by, to discover what they are capable of achieving?5. Best school in the universe: Is your school the best place to teach and learn? The best place to work?Drawing on their years of experience in the classroom, the authors explain how these pillars support good teaching and learning. In addition, they provide 19 action research tools that will help you create a culture of achievement, so that your school or classroom is the best it can be. After reading this book, you'll see why culture makes the difference between a school that enables success for all students and a school that merely houses those students during the school day.

    Fresh-mouthed and free-spirited, the irrepressible Madame Esmé—as she prefers to be called—does the cha-cha during multiplication tables, roller-skates down the hallways, and puts on rousing performances with at-risk students in the library. Her diary opens a window into a real-life classroom from a teacher’s perspective. While battling bureaucrats, gang members, abusive parents, and her own insecurities, this gifted young woman reveals what it takes to be an exceptional teacher.  Heroine to thousands of parents and educators, Esmé now shares more of her ingenious and yet down-to-earth approaches to the classroom in a supplementary guide to help new teachers hit the ground running. As relevant and iconoclastic as when it was first published, Educating Esmé is a classic, as is Madame Esmé herself.

    Offering a rich array of examples, he describes different approaches to the teaching of the arts and shows how these refine forms of thinking that are valuable in dealing with our daily life“Not since John Dewey has an American author written about art, education, and the creation of mind with such power and sensitivity.”—Michael Day, International Journal of Arts Education“A primer for the future. . . . This book will serve as an inspiration for those needing the language to convince policy makers and curriculum developers of the value of the arts in education, while also serving as a vehicle for illustrating the educational aspirations the very best education can offer.”—Rita L. Irwin, Journal of Critical Inquiry Into Curriculum and Instruction“[Eisner] has composed a text that is as insightful and inspirational as the educational research he envisions.”—James G. Henderson, International Journal of Education & the Arts

    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.

    He always struggled with his reading and writing skills. Darrell's father, a single parent, couldn't afford private tutors. By the end of middle school, Darrell's grades and his confidence were at an all time low. Then everything changed.When education journalist Kristina Rizga first met Darrell at Mission High School, he was taking AP calculus class, writing a ten-page research paper, and had received several college acceptance letters. And Darrell was not an exception. More than 80 percent of Mission High seniors go to college every year, even though the school teaches large numbers of English learners and students from poor families.So, why has the federal government been threatening to close Mission High—and schools like it across the country?The United States has been on a century long road toward increased standardization in our public schools, which resulted in a system that reduces the quality of education to primarily one metric: standardized test scores. According to this number, Mission High is a “low-performing” school even though its college enrollment, graduation, attendance rates and student surveys are some of the best in the country.The qualities that matter the most in learning—skills like critical thinking, intellectual engagement, resilience, empathy, self-management, and cultural flexibility—can't be measured by multiple-choice questions designed by distant testing companies, Rizga argues, but they can be detected by skilled teachers in effective, personalized and humane classrooms that work for all students, not just the most motivated ones.Based on four years of reporting with unprecedented access, the unforgettable, intimate stories in these pages throw open the doors to America's most talked about—and arguably least understood—public school classrooms where the largely invisible voices of our smart, resilient students and their committed educators can offer a clear and hopeful blueprint for what it takes to help all students succeed.

     -Lucy Calkins, Author of Units of Study for Teaching WritingHidden Gems will transform the way we read student work. -Thomas Newkirk, Author of Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad OnesYou don't get true, fire-in-the-belly energy for writing because you fear getting a bad grade, but because you have something to say and your own way of saying it. -Katherine BomerIf you're like Katherine Bomer, you've grown weary of searching for what's wrong in student writing, and you want better ways to the respond to pieces whose beauty and intelligence doesn't shine on the first read. Now she shares how she learned instead to search-sometimes near the surface, sometimes deep beneath-to find, celebrate, and teach from writers' Hidden Gems.My hope is that as teachers we can respond to all students' writing with astonished, appreciative, awe-struck eyes, writes Katherine. Through protocols, sample assessments, and demonstrations with actual student work, she shows how to bring the brilliant facets of your writers to the surface as you:spot hidden stylistic gems in writing that is unconventional or vernacular uncover content and organizational gems even when you don't find the subject matter engaging or significant respond by naming and celebrating writers' gems instead of hunting for mistakes give lasting compliments using the inspiring language of published writers that motivate students to keep writing, revising, and polishing their gems. Accept Katherine Bomer's invitation to read work by young, unseasoned writers the way we would inquire our way into a poem by Nikki Giovanni, Jimmy Santiago Baca, or Naomi Shihab Nye and to notice the quirky brilliance and humor, the heartbreaking honesty, and surreal beauty in even the slightest bits of writing. You'll soon discover that student writers often perform remarkable feats in the craft of writing, and that you can achieve remarkable results with them when you uncover theirHidden Gems.

    When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, or agents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the methods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose. And yet professors now routinely bring their political views into the classroom and seek to influence the political views of their students. Those who do this will often invoke academic freedom, but Fish argues that academic freedom, correctly understood, is the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to do any job that comes into the professor's mind. He insists that a professor's only obligation is "to present the material in the syllabus and introduce students to state-of-the-art methods of analysis. Not to practice politics, but to study it; not to proselytize for or against religious doctrines, but to describe them; not to affirm or condemn Intelligent Design, but to explain what it is and analyze its appeal."Given that hot-button issues such as Holocaust denial, free speech, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are regularly debated in classrooms across the nation, Save the World On Your Own Time is certain to spark fresh debate—and to incense both liberals and conservatives—about the true purpose of higher education in America.

    He argues that the only feasible explanations of scientific successes are historical explanations, and that anarchism must now replace rationalism in the theory of knowledge.

    Twice exiled, Boal is 'at home' now wherever he finds himself to be. He makes a skeptical, comic, inquisitive and finally optimistic theatre involving spectators and performers in the search for community and integrity. This is a good book to be used even more than to be read." - Richard Schechner"Augusto Boal's achievement is so remarkable, so original and so groundbreaking that I have no hesitation in describing the book as the most important theoretical work in the theatre in modern times - a statement I make with having suffered any memory lapse with respect to Stanislavsky, Artaud or Grotowski." - Goerge E. WellwarthOriginally basing himself at the Arena Stage in Sao Paolo, Brazil, Augusto Boal developed a series of imaginative theatre exercises which promote awareness of one's social situation and its limitations, individual attitudes, and even how our bodies are bound by tradition. Boal is continued his explorations in Paris, where he directed Le CEDITADE (Centre d'Etude et de Diffusion des Techniques Actives d'Expression - Methode Boal), in addition to traveling and lecturing extensively in other countries. On May 2, 2009, Boal died at age 78 in Rio de Janeiro.

    This text involves students in understanding and using the 'tools' of critical social and literary theory from the first day of class. It is an ideal first introduction before students encounter more difficult readings from critical and postmodern perspectives. Nealon and Giroux describe key concepts and illuminate each with an engaging inquiry that asks students to consider deeper and deeper questions. Written in students' own idiom, and drawing its examples from the social world, literature, popular culture, and advertising, The Theory Toolbox offers students the language and opportunity to theorize rather than positioning them to respond to theory as a reified history of various schools of thought. Clear and engaging, it avoids facile description, inviting students to struggle with ideas and the world by virtue of the book's relentless challenge to common assumptions and its appeal to common sense.