Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students


Zaretta Lynn Hammond - 2014
    With the introduction of the rigorous Common Core State Standards, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement and facilitating deeper learningCulturally responsive pedagogy has shown great promise in meeting this need, but many educators still struggle with its implementation. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction.The book includes:*Information on how one’s culture programs the brain to process data and affects learning relationships*Ten “key moves” to build students’ learner operating systems and prepare them to become independent learners*Prompts for action and valuable self-reflectionWith a firm understanding of these techniques and principles, teachers and instructional leaders will confidently reap the benefits of culturally responsive instruction.

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools


Monique W. Morris - 2016
    After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school.Just 16 percent of female students in the USA, Black girls make up more than one-third of all girls with a school-related arrest. The first book to tell these untold stories, Pushout exposes a world of confined potential and supports the growing movement to address the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures.For four years Monique W. Morris, author of Black Stats, chronicled the experiences of black girls across America whose intricate lives are misunderstood, highly judged—by teachers, administrators, and the justice system—and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Morris shows how, despite obstacles, stigmas, stereotypes, and despair, black girls still find ways to breathe remarkable dignity into their lives in classrooms, juvenile facilities, and beyond.

Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty


Jay Gillen - 1900
    Schools filled with black and brown students have become plantations of social control, where the policing of behavior trumps the expanding of minds. Radical teachers and organizers in American public schools must help young people fashion an insurgency. That means, at the very least, seeing each student’s rebellion not as violation, but as communication.Jay Gillen writes with passion and compassion about the daily lives of poor students trapped in institutions that dismiss and degrade them. In the spirit of Paulo Freire, and using the historical models of slave rebellions and Civil Rights struggles as guides, Gillen explains what sort of insurgency is needed and how to create it: the tools and techniques required to build social, intellectual, and political power.This poetic manifesto of revolutionary “educational reform” belongs in the pocket of anyone who currently works in, suffers through, or simply cares about public schooling in this country.Jay Gillen teaches English in a Baltimore public school and has worked with the Baltimore Algebra Project since 1995, building math literacy among youth of color and youth experiencing poverty in US public schools.Bob Moses is an educator and Civil Rights activist. He founded the Algebra Project in 1982.In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.

Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared


Mike Rose - 1989
    Having grown up poor and been labeled this way, nationally acclaimed educator and author Mike Rose takes us into classrooms and communities to reveal what really lies behind the labels and test scores. With rich detail, Rose demonstrates innovative methods to initiate "problem" students into the world of language, literature, and written expression. This book challenges educators, policymakers, and parents to re-examine their assumptions about the capacities of a wide range of students.Already a classic, Lives on the Boundary offers a truly democratic vision, one that should be heeded by anyone concerned with America's future.A mirror to the many lacking perfect grammar and spelling who may see their dreams translated into reality after all. -Los Angeles Times Book Review Vividly written . . . tears apart all of society's prejudices about the academic abilities of the underprivileged. -New York Times

The College Fear Factor: How Students And Professors Misunderstand One Another


Rebecca D. Cox - 2009
    Eye-opening even for experienced faculty and administrators, this book reveals how the traditional college culture can actually pose obstacles to students' success, and suggests strategies for effectively explaining academic expectations.

Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children


Sarah Carr - 2013
    Her family, displaced by Hurricane Katrina, returns home to find a radically altered public education system. Geraldlynn's parents hope their daughter's new school will prepare her for college--but the teenager has ideals and ambitions of her own.Aidan is a fresh-faced Harvard grad drawn to New Orleans by the possibility of bringing change to a flood-ravaged city. He teaches at an ambitious charter school with a group of newcomers determined to show the world they can use science, data, and hard work to build a model school.Mary Laurie is a veteran educator who becomes principal of one of the first public high schools to reopen after Katrina. Laurie and her staff find they must fight each day not only to educate the city's teenagers, but to keep the Walker community safe and whole.In this powerful narrative non-fiction debut, the lives of these three characters provide readers with a vivid and sobering portrait of education in twenty-first-century America. Hope Against Hope works in the same tradition as Random Family and There Are No Children Here to capture the challenges of growing up and learning in a troubled world.

Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom


Daniel T. Willingham - 2009
    Why is it that they can remember the smallest details from their favorite television program, yet miss the most obvious questions on their history test?Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has focused his acclaimed research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning and has a deep understanding of the daily challenges faced by classroom teachers. this book will help teachers improve their practice by explaining how they and their students think and learn—revealing the importance of story, emotion, memory, context, and routine in building knowledge and creating lasting learning experiences.In this breakthrough book, Willingham has distilled his knowledge of cognitive science into a set of nine principles that are easy to understand and have clear applications for the classroom. Some of examples of his surprising findings are:“Learning styles” don't exist The processes by which different children think and learn are more similar than different.Intelligence is malleable Intelligence contributes to school performance and children do differ, but intelligence can be increased through sustained hard work.You cannot develop “thinking skills” in the absence of facts We encourage students to think critically, not just memorize facts. However thinking skills depend on factual knowledge for their operation.Why Don't Students Like School is a basic primer for every teacher who wants to know how their brains and their students’ brains work and how that knowledge can help them hone their teaching skills.

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling


John Taylor Gatto - 1991
    This Special Collector's Edition celebrates 100,000 copies or the book in print, and the book's on-going importance and popularity.

Engaging Learners


Andy Griffith - 2012
    A class can be skilled and motivated to learn without a teacher always having to lead. Engaging learners in this way unpicks intrinsic motivation, the foundation that underpins a productive learning environment and helps to develop independent learning.Based on five years of intensive research through Osiris Education's award-winning Outstanding Teaching Intervention program this book is packed with proven advice and innovative tools that were developed in these successful outstanding lessons. Written in the same humorous, thought-provoking style with which they both teach and train, the authors aim to challenge all who teach, from newly qualified teachers to seasoned professionals, to reflect on their day-to-day practice and set an agenda for sustainable improvement.

College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students


Jeffrey J. Selingo - 2013
    Student-loan debt in the United States crossed the $1 trillion mark in 2011. To say that the cost of a four-year college education is inflated on many campuses would be an understatement—and that education bubble is about to burst. Jeffrey J. Selingo, editor at large for The Chronicle for Higher Education and senior fellow at Education Sector, argues that America’s higher education system is broken and that the great credential race has transformed universities into big business. In the wake of the 2008 recession, colleges can no longer sell a degree at any price as the ticket to success in life. Brand-name universities like Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Stanford will always find students and families willing to pay the sticker price because of their institution’s global prestige, influential alumni networks, and considerable endowments. But the campuses that the vast majority of Americans attend, where some students go into tens of thousands of dollars in debt for degrees with little payoff, will need to adapt fast to the changing job market and new technological breakthroughs. As an industry insider who has covered higher education for more than 15 years, Selingo offers a critical examination of the current state of affairs and the pressing issues faced by students and parents. He also seeks out institutions like Arizona State University and the University of Central Florida that are leading the way into the future. Selingo predicts that the class of 2020 will have a college experience that is radically different from the one their parents had, and the college of the future will be personalized, leaner, and better able to arm students with the hard skills they need to enter the workforce of tomorrow. College (Un)bound will be a great resource for prospective students, but more important, it will change the way you think about higher education.

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror


Judith Lewis Herman - 1992
    In the intervening years, Herman’s volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large. Trauma and Recovery brings a new level of understanding to a set of problems usually considered individually. Herman draws on her own cutting-edge research in domestic violence as well as on the vast literature of combat veterans and victims of political terror, to show the parallels between private terrors such as rape and public traumas such as terrorism. The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context. Meticulously documented and frequently using the victims’ own words as well as those from classic literary works and prison diaries, Trauma and Recovery is a powerful work that will continue to profoundly impact our thinking.

Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States


Joel Spring - 1994
    It focuses on the educational, legal, and social construction of race and racism, and on educational practices related to deculturalization, segregation, and the civil rights movement. Spring emphasizes issues of power and control in schools and shows how the dominant Anglo class has stripped away the culture of minority peoples in the U.S. and replaced it with the dominant culture. In the process, he gives voice to the often-overlooked perspectives of African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, and Native Americans. An understanding of these historical perspectives and how they impact current conditions and policies is critical to teacher's success or failure in today's diverse classrooms.

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America


Ronald Takaki - 1993
    In a lively account filled with the stories and voices of people previously left out of the historical canon, Ronald Takaki offers a fresh perspective - a re-visioning - of our nation's past.

Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches


John W. Creswell - 1997
    Five actual journal articles are reproduced in the appendix as examples of the different research designs.

Holler If You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His Students


Gregory Michie - 1999
    It looks at what it means to be a teacher and a student in urban America, and deals with the critical moral issues teachers must face.