Meeting Wise


Book Description

This book, by two editors of Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning, attempts to bring about a fundamental shift in how educators think about the meetings we attend. They make the case that these gatherings are potentially the most important venue where adult and organizational learning can take place in schools, and that making more effective use of this time is the key to increasing student achievement. In Meeting Wise, the authors show why meeting planning is a high-leverage strategy for changing how people work together in the service of school improvement. To this end, they have created a meeting-planning “checklist” to develop a common language for discussing and improving the quality of meetings. In addition, they provide guidelines for readers on “wise facilitating” and “wise participating,” and also include “top tips” and common dilemmas. Simple, succinct, and practical, Meeting Wise is designed to be read and applied at every level of the educational enterprise: district leadership meetings with central office staff, charter-school management summits, principals’ meetings with teachers, professional development sessions, teacher-team meetings, and even teachers’ meetings with parents and students.




Data Wise, Revised and Expanded Edition


Book Description

Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning presents a clear and carefully tested blueprint for school leaders. It shows how examining test scores and other classroom data can become a catalyst for important schoolwide conversations that will enhance schools’ abilities to capture teachers’ knowledge, foster collaboration, identify obstacles to change, and enhance school culture and climate. This revised and expanded edition captures the learning that has emerged in integrating the Data Wise process into school practice and brings the book up-to-date with recent developments in education and technology including: The shift to the Common Core State Standards. New material on the “ACE Habits of Mind”: practices that prioritize Action, Collaboration, and Evidence as part of transforming school culture. A new chapter on “How We Improve,” based on experiences implementing Data Wise and to address two common questions: “Where do I start?” and “How long will it take?” Other revisions take into account changes in the roles of school data teams and instructional leadership teams in guiding the inquiry process. The authors have also updated exhibits, examples, and terminology throughout and have added new protocols and resources.




Listen Wise


Book Description

Discover how to engage your students effectively by strengthening their listening skills In Listen Wise: Teach Students to Be Better Listeners, journalist, entrepreneur, and author Monica Brady-Myerov delivers a concise and thoughtful treatment of how to build powerful listening skills in K-12 students. You’ll discover real-world examples and modern, research-based advice about helping young people improve their listening abilities and their overall academic performance. With personal anecdotes from the accomplished author and accessible excerpts from the latest neuroscience of listening and auditory learning, the book is a critical resource that will explain why listening is the missing piece of the literacy puzzle. This important book will show you: Classroom stories and teacher viewpoints that highlight effective strategies to teach critical listening Why building listening skills in students is crucial to improving reading, especially for English learners. Why the Lexile Framework for Listening is contributing to a surging recognition of the importance of listening in the academic curriculum Perfect for K-12 teachers looking for new ways to understand their students and how they learn, Listen Wise will also earn a place in the libraries of college and master’s level students in education.




The Wise Men


Book Description

A captivating blend of personal biography and public drama, The Wise Men introduces the original best and brightest, leaders whose outsized personalities and actions brought order to postwar chaos: Averell Harriman, the freewheeling diplomat and Roosevelt's special envoy to Churchill and Stalin; Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman and for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall; George Kennan, self-cast outsider and intellectual darling of the Washington elite; Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war, undersecretary of state, and secretary of defense throughout the formative years of the Cold War; John McCloy, one of the nation's most influential private citizens; and Charles Bohlen, adroit diplomat and ambassador to the Soviet Union.




Data Wise


Book Description

"Data Wise" is a proven process for collecting and using big data in schools. This book provides a blueprint schools can use to initiate school-wide conversations about these data and make better decisions to enhance school culture and climate.




Three Wise Men


Book Description

From Beau Wise and Tom Sileo comes Three Wise Men, an incredible memoir of family, service and sacrifice by a Marine who lost both his brothers in combat—becoming the only "Sole Survivor" during the war in Afghanistan. Three Wise Men details the fate of three brothers intertwined when they voluntarily enlisted in defending their homeland after the devastating 9/11 attacks. Their extraordinary tale unfurls the severe toll of the Afghan war, particularly on a single family, underscoring the profound significance of the sacrifice and the indomitable resilience of a family's courage. While serving in Afghanistan, US Navy SEAL veteran and CIA contractor Jeremy Wise was killed in an al Qaeda suicide bombing that devastated the US intelligence community. Less than three years later, US Army Green Beret sniper Ben Wise was fatally wounded after volunteering for a dangerous assignment during a firefight with the Taliban. Ben was posthumously awarded the Silver Star, while Jeremy received the Intelligence Star—one of the rarest awards bestowed by the U.S. government—and also a star on the CIA’s Memorial Wall. The legacy of their sacrifice lives on in Beau Wise's account, the only “Sole Survivor” pulled from the battlefield, forging an enduring testament to the value of loyalty, service, and familial bonds.




Freedom Is an Endless Meeting


Book Description

This “excellent study of activist politics in the United States over the past century” challenges the conventional wisdom about participatory democracy (Times Literary Supplement). Freedom Is an Endless Meeting offers vivid portraits of American experiments in participatory democracy throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on meticulous research and more than one hundred interviews with activists, Francesca Polletta upends the notion that participatory democracy is worthy in purpose but unworkable in practice. Instead, she shows that social movements have often used bottom-up decision making as a powerful tool for political change. Polletta traces the history of democracy from early labor struggles and pre-World War II pacifism, through the civil rights, new left, and women’s liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, and into today’s faith-based organizing and anti-corporate globalization campaigns. In the process, she uncovers neglected sources of democratic inspiration—such as Depression-era labor educators and Mississippi voting registration workers—as well as practical strategies of social protest. Polletta also highlights the obstacles that arise when activists model their democracies after nonpolitical relationships such as friendship, tutelage, and religious fellowship. She concludes with a call to forge new kinds of democratic relationships that balance trust with accountability, respect with openness to disagreement, and caring with inclusiveness. For anyone concerned about the prospects for democracy in America, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting will offer abundant historical, theoretical, and practical insights.




How the Wise Decide


Book Description

Discover the formula used by twenty-one of the world’s most extraordinary leaders to make consistent and smart decisions. How do the wise decide and lead businesses and organizations to great success is the question Bryn Zeckhauser and Aaron Sandoski posed to themselves after landing their first jobs as managers. Despite the best training the world could offer—Harvard MBAs and stints at McKinsey & Company, the elite powerhouse consulting firm—they felt unprepared when faced with the pressure to make critical decisions. So they set out on a three-year quest to discover how people with remarkable success and experience in both corporate and public life—“the wise”—went about making crucial, often make-or-break decisions. • How did William George, when CEO of Medtronic, get the real story about why a critical tool used by cardiologists was failing and use that information to fix a systemic problem within the company? • When inventor Dean Kamen has to make a decision about investing in a new technology, why does he find it useful to “fill a room with barbarians” to get the best thinking from his team? • How did Shelly Lazarus assess the risks of making a nontraditional career move, a decision that eventually led her to being appointed CEO? • How did Stephen Schwarzman and Peter Peterson, the founders of The Blackstone Group, turn $400,000 of their own money into one of the world’s preeminent alternative asset managers with $100 billion under management? These and the other accounts of the direct conversations Zeckhauser and Sandoski had with twenty-one major leaders show that between wise decisions and poor ones lie vast fortunes and extraordinary contrasts in success. How the Wise Decide distills their wisdom, and it reveals how you can use this wisdom to be on the winning side of the ledger.




Mindwise


Book Description

Winner of the 2015 Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) Why are we sometimes blind to the minds of others, treating them like objects or animals instead? Why do we talk to our cars, or the stars, as if there is a mind that can hear us? Why do we so routinely believe that others think, feel, and want what we do when, in fact, they do not? And why do we think we understand our spouses, family, and friends so much better than we actually do? In this illuminating book, leading social psychologist Nicholas Epley introduces us to what scientists have learned about our ability to understand the most complicated puzzle on the planet—other people—and the surprising mistakes we so routinely make. Mindwise will not turn others into open books, but it will give you the wisdom to revolutionize how you think about them—and yourself.




Data Wise in Action


Book Description

What does it look like when a school uses data wisely? Data Wise in Action, a new companion and sequel to our bestselling Data Wise, tells the stories of eight very different schools following the Data Wise process of using assessment results to improve teaching and learning. Data Wise in Action highlights the leadership challenges schools face in each phase of the eight-step Data Wise cycle and illustrates how staff members use creativity and collaboration to overcome those challenges. Data Wise in Action builds on the work of leading faculty and graduate students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who joined with exemplary practitioners in 2005 to produce Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning. Since its publication, Data Wise has been read by thousands of school leaders, many of whom have shared the book with colleagues and staff. The success of the original book has generated a new demand among school leaders: to hear real stories from schools that are implementing the Data Wise process. Data Wise in Action answers that need. It offers both inspiration and practical guidance for school leaders.