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A blueprint for improving the American public school system cites the inherent flaws of progress-based systems, recommending practices that tap the talents, motivational instincts, and potential of students and teachers.
Make your lessons interesting, interactive, and engaging Successful lessons are explicit, yet also inspire active learning and opportunities to respond. As the one shaping lessons, can you do better? Probably, and you’re not alone. Research shows teachers consistently offer students far fewer than the recommended opportunities to respond, leaving all students—including those with special needs and behavior challenges—less than engaged and falling short of their best chance for success. With this book, you’ll discover 14 strategies you can translate directly to your classroom, complete with descriptions, advantages and disadvantages of each, and how and when best to use them. Divided into three parts, you will be guided through Verbal engagement strategies, such as whip around, choral responding, quick polls, and individual questioning Non-verbal engagement strategies, such as stop and jot, guided notes, response cards, and hand signals Partner and teaming strategies, such as turn & talk, cued retell, four corners, and classroom mingle Dive into these strategies and transform your classroom into a rich and interactive environment—no matter the subject, context, or age of your students.
"Building Trauma-Sensitive Schools is a practical, accessible guide to building learning environments that ensure safety, develop regulation skills, and grow caring relationships for all students, including those who have experienced trauma"--
According to the National School Public Relations Association, it is not the teachers, administration, or local press that are the primary source of information about schools. The most important source of information and "feel" about a school is the support staff - the custodians, bus drivers, nurses, secretaries, and teacher's aides! If you are one of these hidden heroes, this book is for you. Learn how to build upon the universal principles of engagement to become a critical link in your school's success. Discover how to become a frontline ambassador, applying the principles of customer service to deal with families, students, and staff. You will even have your boss eating out of your hand! This book, co-authored by 4Sight Learning's CEO Sam Bartlett and school administrator Vie Herlocker, builds upon the 4Sight's work with schools, implementing research-based family engagement strategies to create measurable increases in student achievement. Chapters include professionalism, goal setting, communicating effectively, being a team player, and dealing constructively with conflict and change. Included are powerful stories of twenty-one Engaged Ambassadors who share how they make a difference in their schools and communities every day.
This work is a report on the positive impact of parental involvement on their child's academics and on the school at large. Building Parent Engagement in Schools is an introduction to educators, particularly in lower-income and urban schools, who want to promote increased parental engagement in both the classroom and at home—an effort required by provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. It is both an authoritative review of research that confirms the positive impact of parental involvement on student achievement and a guide for implementing proven strategies for increasing that involvement. With Building Parent Engagement in Schools, educators can start to develop a hybrid culture between home and school, so that school can serve as a cultural bridge for the students. Filled with the voices of real educators, students, and parents, the book documents a number of parent-involved efforts to improve low-income communities, gain greater resources for schools, and improve academic achievement. Coverage includes details of real initiatives in action, including programs for home visits, innovative uses of technology, joint enterprises like school/community gardens, and community organization efforts.
The focus of this book is to provide teachers with the tools to cultivate engaged learners, which includes developing healthy relationships with their students, based on research suggesting that positive teacher-student relationships improve achievement.
Create a plan to connect with every family! Connecting with parents of various ethnic, socioeconomic, or cultural backgrounds can be challenging for educators. This invaluable book offers strategies that will transform the experience for your students and their families, and lead to sustainable success. Through the author’s perspective as a parent, counselor, and advisor to families at risk, readers will discover A step-by-step approach to family engagement developed for K-12 educators working in high-poverty schools with diverse populations Complete how-to’s for creating and carrying out a family engagement plan Tools including a Parent Meeting Agenda, a Parent Empathy Map, an Educator Needs Assessment, and more
Ninety-five propositions for creating more relevant, more caring schools There is a growing desire to reexamine education and learning. Educators use the phrase "school 2.0" to think about what schools will look like in the future. Moving beyond a basic examination of using technology for classroom instruction, Building School 2.0: How to Create the Schools We Need is a larger discussion of how education, learning, and our physical school spaces can—and should—change because of the changing nature of our lives brought on by these technologies. Well known for their work in creating Science Leadership Academy (SLA), a technology-rich, collaborative, learner-centric school in Philadelphia, founding principal Chris Lehmann and former SLA teacher Zac Chase are uniquely qualified to write about changing how we educate. The best strategies, they contend, enable networked learning that allows research, creativity, communication, and collaboration to help prepare students to be functional citizens within a modern society. Their model includes discussions of the following key concepts: Technology must be ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible Classrooms must be learner-centric and use backwards design principles Good technology can be better than new technology Teachers must serve as mentors and bring real-world experiences to students Each section of Building School 2.0 presents a thesis designed to help educators and administrators to examine specific practices in their schools, and to then take their conclusions from theory to practice. Collectively, the theses represent a new vision of school, built off of the best of what has come before us, but with an eye toward a future we cannot fully imagine.
This book advocates for informed leaders who are aware of the larger historical, political-economic, sociological, and philosophical issues that surround the schools and communities they serve. Extending beyond mainstream conceptions of instructional leadership and broad social justice paradigms, Community Engaged Leadership for Social Justice offers a multidisciplinary framework that helps leaders better serve the needs of their students, teachers, and communities. Exploring issues of urban school reform as it relates to the principal, as well as priorities that are relevant to the process of school improvement and the promotion of social justice, this book provides a critical, equity-oriented set of best practices grounded in research and empirical cases. This is a must-have resource for building consciousness, offering hope, and engaging in dialogical and collaborative leadership practices to radically transform schools and communities.
Student engagement happens as a result of a teacher’s careful planning and execution of specific strategies. This self-study text provides in-depth understanding of how to generate high levels of student attention and engagement. Using the suggestions in this book, every teacher can create a classroom environment where engagement is the norm, not the exception.
