Making Schools Smarter

Making Schools Smarter

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  • Author: Kenneth Leithwood
  • Publisher: Corwin Press
  • ISBN: 9781412917636
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 222

"From strategic planning and accountability to restructuring goals, school leaders face a myriad of organizational tasks, each one vying for immediate action. Where to begin and where best to allocate resources become critical questions as the issue of organization becomes more prevalent. The third edition of a powerful bestseller, Making Schools Smarter provides the refined and updated tools to create a workable model for reshaping today's school districts for positive outcomes. This practical guide addresses and helps resolve significant issues in district and school leadership, including: Determining a comprehensive and real image of future schools and districts as professional learning communities Highlighting critical changes for achieving missions and goals Providing school leaders with much-needed tools to demonstrate and improve accountability With No Child Left Behind and increased accountability as powerful reminders of what's at stake, Making Schools Smarter gets to the heart of the argument that smarter schools mean enhanced learning for all."--Publisher's website.


The Smartest Kids in the World

The Smartest Kids in the World

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  • Author: Amanda Ripley
  • Publisher: Simon and Schuster
  • ISBN: 145165443X
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 320

Following three teenagers who chose to spend one school year living in Finland, South Korea, and Poland, a literary journalist recounts how attitudes, parenting, and rigorous teaching have revolutionized these countries' education results.


Time to Learn

Time to Learn

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  • Author: Christopher Gabrieli
  • Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
  • ISBN: 047025808X
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 306

Across the country, an educational revolution is taking root. Kids are learning more. Teachers are free to teach beyond the test. And parents aren’t worried about what their kids are up to after school. What accounts for this change? The simple answer is, “More time to learn.” The current school day—6 hours and 180 days per year—is obsolete. It fails to provide students with the academic foundations and well-rounded education they need to succeed and thrive in the twenty-first century. The old school day is also out of step with the reality of working families without a stay-at-home parent to manage their children’s after-school time. Using an additional one to two hours, the new school day reworks the schedule so that children can master core academic subjects, receive individualized instruction and tutoring, and be exposed to a broad array of topics such as the arts, music, drama, and sports.


Making ALL Kids Smarter

Making ALL Kids Smarter

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  • Author: John DeLandtsheer
  • Publisher: Corwin Press
  • ISBN: 1412989035
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 153

This book helps teachers plan a challenging program for students, particularly gifted students, within a regular education classroom. It addresses brain-compatible learning, which makes it appropriate for a much wider group of students than just the very brightest. Approaches and strategies are explained in a unique and personal style and include the following: use of inter-disciplinary themes, analytical thinking exercises, teaching moral dilemmas, Socratic questioning techniques, increasing depth and complexity through interactive games, activities to promote creative thinking, using graphic organizers, and teaching research skills and methods. The author demonstrates how all these strategies and approaches work together to help teachers create a more meaningful learning experience for all students. An added benefit of the author's training, as reflected in this book, is to help put the creativity and search for knowledge back into the learning process.


Better Together

Better Together

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  • Author: Tom Vander Ark
  • Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
  • ISBN: 1119439523
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 256

Bring students, teachers, and administrators together to facilitate higher school achievement Better Together presents a tour through one of the modern era’s most important educational innovations, and provides smart strategy for working optimally within the school network sphere. There are more than 50 high-quality scaled charter networks in the U.S.; most share a learning model, professional supports, and—increasingly—platform tools. Although these charter schools get most of the attention, there are over a dozen other networks that connect district schools and provide design principles, curriculum materials, technology tools, and professional learning opportunities to streamline school improvement and help build great new schools from scratch. This book details some of the many success stories, and includes expert analysis of learning models, strategies, and innovations that are making quality scalable and helping schools produce more positive student outcomes. Illustrative examples from the New Tech Network, Summit Public Schools, Big Picture, and other big-name networks provide both guidance and inspiration, while expert discussion clarifies essential details and processes for implementation. Teachers and administrators will find much food for thought both inside and outside of a school network system. Examine proven learning models for scaled school networks Explore the latest innovations for more effective collaborations Read success stories from school networks across the country Learn smart strategies for optimizing the educational network experience Digital platforms have transformed the way we connect with friends, family, colleagues, and businesses. That revolution has finally come to education, opening doors to collaboration, resource expansion, and school success. Better Together explores beyond disruption to show how the U.S. K-12 system is truly evolving.


Making Schools Smarter

Making Schools Smarter

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  • Author: Ken Leithwood
  • Publisher: Corwin
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 224

Leithwood and Aitken have created a handbook for developing a system of collaborative assessment, strategic planning, and accountability in schools and districts. This book supplies not only the instruments to obtain data on how well schools and districts are achieving their purposes but also a means by which to establish achievable standards of expectation. The authors' research included studies of Canadian and American schools and involved the participation of district personnel, teachers, students, parents, and board members. The authors used a real school to help them develop their model of an "ideal school" for the year 2000. Using this experimental model as a basis, they describe specific features to be found in an ideal school and present ways to measure comparable features of existing schools and districts. They provide guidelines for using data generated in these assessments to help move schools toward the ideal. Making Schools Smarter presents a comprehensive process by which a district or a school can learn about its entire operation in order to initiate change based on solid data. Because the authors' ideal school is a "learning organization", movement toward the ideal helps schools "get smarter" and enhance their collective capacities to serve students better. This is an excellent resource for administrators and superintendents, as well as for students and teachers of educational leadership and school restructuring.


The Good School

The Good School

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  • Author: Peg Tyre
  • Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
  • ISBN: 1429996978
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 253

Award-winning education journalist Peg Tyre mines up-to-the-minute research to equip parents with the tools and knowledge necessary to get their children the best education possible We all know that the quality of education served up to our children in U.S. schools ranges from outstanding to shockingly inadequate. How can parents tell the difference? And how do they make sure their kids get what's best? Even the most involved and informed parents can feel overwhelmed and confused when making important decisions about their child's education. And the scary truth is that evaluating a school based on test scores and college admissions data is like selecting a car based on the color of its paint. Synthesizing cutting-edge research and firsthand reporting, Peg Tyre offers parents far smarter and more sophisticated ways to assess a classroom and decide if the school and the teacher have the right stuff. Passionate and persuasive, The Good School empowers parents to make sense of headlines; constructively engage teachers, administrators, and school boards; and figure out the best option for their child—be that a local public school, a magnet program, a charter school, homeschooling, parochial, or private.


Smart Parents

Smart Parents

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  • Author: Bonnie Lathram
  • Publisher: Getting Smart
  • ISBN: 9781632330666
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 310

"By parents, for parents. That is what makes Smart Parents: Parenting for Powerful Learning different from most parenting books. Drawing on personal parenting stories and expert advice from more than 60 contributors, this guide will leave you with ideas you can put into action immediately."--from back cover.


The Cult of Smart

The Cult of Smart

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  • Author: Fredrik deBoer
  • Publisher: All Points Books
  • ISBN: 1250200385
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 272

Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.


Distributed Leadership According to the Evidence

Distributed Leadership According to the Evidence

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  • Author: Kenneth Leithwood
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1135252165
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 307

Although not new, the concept of distributed (shared) leadership has re-emerged in recent years as one highly promising response to the complex challenges currently faced by schools. Responding productively to these challenges far exceeds the capacities of any individual leader. If schools are to flourish in the future, they will need to enlist the collective expertise of many more of their members and stakeholders than they have in the past. The purpose of this volume is to both present and synthesize the best available evidence about the nature, causes, and effects of distributed school leadership. The book also clarifies common misunderstandings about distributed leadership and identifies promising implications for practice and for future research. Key features include... Expertise – Written by the most active and widely respected scholars engaged in research on distributed leadership, the book encompasses the very latest knowledge about the nature, causes and consequences of such leadership in schools. Comparative Models – The book compares various approaches to distributed leadership and examines the conditions under which some approaches may be better than others in improving schools. Evidence-Based – Much of the popularity of distributed leadership is rooted in expectations unsupported by systematic empirical evidence. Virtually all of the available evidence about distributed approach to leadership can be found in this book. This book is appropriate for researchers studying school leadership, instructors and students in graduate-level school leadership courses and practicing administrators at the district and building level.