Community Schools


Book Description

Ferrara and Jacobson go inside community schools across the country to explore the different roles that make this collaborative education reform work. This book provides practitioners, policymakers, family members, youth, and local leaders a greater understanding of the different roles that make up a community school and tools for action. Built on years of practice, research, and continuous improvement, community schools are an innovative, effective, and grassroots strategy for bringing schools and communities together in order to improve outcomes for students, families, and communities. This education reform is growing as school site, local, and state leaders seek collaborative solutions to our schools’ most persistent challenges. The contributors, experts in the field, represent a diverse group of people with longstanding commitments to the community school strategy. From principals to family members, from community partners to teachers, this book illustrates how together, we all have a part to play in the development of successful community schools.




Transforming Teacher Education through Service-Learning


Book Description

Transforming Teacher Education through Service-Learning provides a fresh look at educational reform through the lens of teacher preparation. It poses the question “Why service-learning now?” as it discusses the meaningful ways service-learning pedagogy can transform the approaches used to prepare teachers to educate tomorrow’s children. The pedagogy of service-learning has significant implications for teacher education. Its transformative aspects have far reaching potential to address teacher candidate dispositions and provide deeper understanding of diversity. Knowledge of the pedagogy and how to implement it in candidates’ future classrooms could alter education to a more powerful experience of democracy in action and enhance the civic mission of schools. The current and ongoing research found within this volume is meant to continue support of the notion of educational reform. Because the vision we hold becomes the reality we experience, it is imperative to consider the question—Why service-learning now?—as we adjust teacher preparation programs to promote engaging opportunities for today’s youth.




Teaching to Transform Urban Schools and Communities


Book Description

For preservice candidates and novice teachers facing the challenges of feeling underprepared to teach in urban schools, this book offers a framework for conceptualizing, planning, and engaging in powerful teaching. Veteran teacher educator Etta Ruth Hollins builds on previous work to focus on transformative practices that emphasize the purpose and process of teaching. These practices are designed to improve academic performance, transform the social context in low-performing urban schools, and improve the quality of life in the local community. The learning experiences provided in this book guide readers through a sequence of experiences for learning about the local community that include an examination of history and demographics, community resources, local city and federal governance structures, and collaborating with other professionals. Focus Questions and a dedicated Application to Practice section in each chapter further guide learning and help make real-world connections. Designed to enable readers to bridge the gaps between theory and practice and the actual needs of urban students and their communities, this groundbreaking text helps prepare preservice candidates to make a successful transition and aids novice teachers in developing teaching practices that support academic excellence.




Deeper Learning


Book Description

The acclaimed exploration of how public education can cultivate innovators—with a foreword by Russlynn Ali, a leading advocate for remaking schools Dime-a-dozen ideas for reforming education seem to be everywhere these days but few actually transform the everyday experience of the 50-million-plus students who are regularly subjected to traditional lecturing, note-taking, and rote learning—often with dismal results. Enter Deeper Learning, "a fast read [that] will interest educators who want to produce self-motivated, passionate learners" (Library Journal). Offering "uplifting" (Kirkus Reviews) anecdotes in what Tom Carroll of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future calls a "rare blend of inspiration and practical action," Deeper Learning provides a blueprint for creating flexible environments that put students at the helm of their own collaborative learning experience. This paperback edition includes a new foreword by renowned education advocate Russlynn Ali and will empower and inspire educators everywhere to address the need for schools to be genuinely innovative.




The Power of Simple


Book Description

While the world has propelled itself in the 21st Century with new technology, innovation, and ways of doing things, our schools are having a hard time catching up. Schools still shuffle hundreds of students daily to classrooms with inflexible learning spaces, an outdated curriculum, and work disconnected from the real world. What if as an educator you had the power to change that? What if you could transform student learning and still have time to cover your standards? What if someone who has made radical changes in education provided you with five simple strategies that you could implement in your school tomorrow? The power of SIMPLE The power of SIMPLE will inspire you to make those changes by documenting Kyle Wagner's entire journey in creating Futures Academy- a school that changes the way we educate. It is a school that adapts schedules every week depending on the learning experience; has students presenting regularly to experts in the field; and integrates learning around students exploring their passions and creating work of value in the real world. This book will empower you to create your own vision for school and provide simple and practical strategies to make that vision come to life. You will no longer be paralyzed by fear, but empowered by the fact that you can create real change, and it's not that hard.




Leaders of Their Own Learning


Book Description

From EL Education comes a proven approach to student assessment Leaders of Their Own Learning offers a new way of thinking about assessment based on the celebrated work of EL Education schools across the country. Student-Engaged Assessment is not a single practice but an approach to teaching and learning that equips and compels students to understand goals for their learning and growth, track their progress toward those goals, and take responsibility for reaching them. This requires a set of interrelated strategies and structures and a whole-school culture in which students are given the respect and responsibility to be meaningfully engaged in their own learning. Includes everything teachers and school leaders need to implement a successful Student-Engaged Assessment system in their schools Outlines the practices that will engage students in making academic progress, improve achievement, and involve families and communities in the life of the school Describes each of the book's eight key practices, gives advice on how to begin, and explains what teachers and school leaders need to put into practice in their own classrooms Ron Berger is Chief Program Officer for EL Education and a former public school teacher Leaders of Their Own Learning shows educators how to ignite the capacity of students to take responsibility for their own learning, meet Common Core and state standards, and reach higher levels of achievement. DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of the e-book file, but are available for download after purchase.




Transforming Learning in Schools and Communities


Book Description

Many educators have been looking for a fundamentally different approach to engage young people and encourage progress in learning. Supported by recent public policy developments, a transformation is beginning to take place in the practice of many schools. The focus of learning is shifting away from the child as an individual in a classroom detached from the surrounding neighbourhood to a learning community that embraces carers and families as well as young people and teachers. This monograph analyses the organising principles of this cultural transformation and considers how it will shape learning in schools and communities throughout the world. The book brings together key thinkers from the fields of new learning, new communities of educational practice and new forms of educational governance. Arguing for the necessary interconnectedness of pedagogy, institutions and governance, this ground-breaking book will undoubtedly shape the policy agenda in this area for years to come.




Schools and Communities


Book Description

This book is rooted in the principle that every child and young person has a fundamental entitlement to equal educational opportunities. Human relationships are fundamental to educational and social development and increasing importance is being attached to cooperation and collaboration between schools and the community, and between the agencies that provide services for children and young people.




Learning Transformed


Book Description

Eric Sheninger and Thomas Murray outline eight keys to intentionally design tomorrow's schools so today's learners are prepared for success.




Transforming Schooling for Second Language Learners


Book Description

The purpose of Transforming Schooling for Second Language Learners: Theoretical Insights, Policies, Pedagogies, and Practices is to bring together educational researchers and practitioners who have implemented, documented, or examined policies, pedagogies, and practices in and out of classrooms and in real and virtual contexts that are in some way transforming what we know about the extent to which emergent bilinguals (EBs) learn and achieve in educational settings. In the following chapters, scholars and researchers identify both (1) the current state of schooling for EBs, from their perspective, and (2) the particular ways that policies, pedagogies, and/or practices transform schooling as it currently exists for EBs in discernible ways based on their scholarship and research. Drawing on current and seminal research in fields including second language acquisition, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational linguistics, contributing authors draw on complementary theoretical, methodological, and philosophical frameworks that attend to the social, cultural, political, and ideological dimensions of being and becoming bi/multilingual and bi/multiliterate in schools and in the United States. In sum, we are deeply committed to asserting hope, possibility, and potential to discussions and discourses about bi/multilingual students. We value the urgency around improving the conditions, experiences, and circumstances in which they are learning languages and academic content. Our aim is to highlight perspectives, conceptualizations, orientations, and ideologies that disrupt and contest legacies of deficit thinking, linguistic purism, language standardization, and racism and the racialization of ethnolinguistic minorities.