Student Voice


Book Description

Meaningful school reform starts with your most powerful partner—your students! When you take time to listen, you’ll find that students’ aspirations can drive your school toward exciting new goals—and when students know they’re being heard, they engage meaningfully in their own academic success. Using examples drawn from student surveys, focus groups, observations, and interviews, this groundbreaking book presents a blueprint for a successful partnership between educators and students. You’ll discover how to: Ask the right questions—and understand how to build from the answers Engage students in decision-making and improvement-related processes Implement the Aspirations Framework to guide students toward their full potential




The Power of Voice in Schools


Book Description

For nearly four decades, Russ Quaglia has been laying the groundwork to inform, reform, and transform schools through student voice. That deep commitment is reflected in this inspirational book. Quaglia and his coauthors at the Quaglia Institute for School Voice & Aspirations deftly synthesize the thoughts and feelings of hundreds of thousands of stakeholders and offer a vision for schools where everyone's voice matters. They posit that students, teachers, administrators, and parents must work and learn together in ways that promote deep understanding and creativity. Making this collaborative effort successful, however, requires widespread recognition that all stakeholders have something to teach, and they all have a role to play in moving the entire school forward. We must abandon the "us versus them" fallacy in education; there is only "us." To that end, The Power of Voice in Schools offers a way forward that can be used in any school and * Addresses the importance of everyone's voice in the school community. * Articulates the lessons learned from listening to these voices over the past decade. * Suggests concrete, practical strategies for combined teams of students, teachers, parents, and administrators to make a difference together. This book reflects the dream of a true partnership in listening, learning, and leading together. When the potential of voice is fully realized, schools will look and feel different. Cooperation will replace competition and conflict, collaboration will replace isolation, and confidence will replace insecurity. Most important, the entire school community will work in partnership with one another for the well-being of students and teachers.




EdTech Essentials


Book Description

An accessible, practical guide to incorporating the 10 essential EdTech skills and strategies in every learning setting. In a world awash in technology, what EdTech skills and strategies should educators focus on to ensure they are making the best use of online spaces for classroom learning? How can they navigate through the overwhelming number of options in digital tools and spaces? How can they guide students in learning best practices? EdTech consultant Monica Burns answers these and other questions in this powerful and reader-friendly guide to incorporating EdTech across all grade levels and subject areas, and in both distance-learning and face-to-face environments. Readers will gain practical advice on * Navigating online spaces, * Curating resources, * Introducing opportunities for exploring the world, * Developing collaboration structures, * Providing time and space to create learning products, * Assessing students, * Creating opportunities for sharing, * Connecting student work to relevant audiences, * Developing transferable skills, and * Planning for tech-rich learning experiences. Each chapter explains why the skill or strategy is essential, including supporting research, classroom examples, guiding questions for planning and reflection, and suggested websites and digital tools for classroom use. The book also includes access to downloadable forms to help you set goals, assess your progress, and build your EdTech tool belt. Timely, accessible, and informed by the author's experience and expertise, EdTech Essentials is a must-read for educators who want proven ways to prepare their students to be productive, responsible users of technology both within and outside the classroom.




Teacher Voice


Book Description

Help teachers listen, learn, and lead for powerful school reform! Help teachers find their voice and positively influence meaningful school change with this inspiring guide from student aspirations pioneers Russell Quaglia and Lisa Lande. You’ll discover practical action steps, teacher interviews, in-depth research, and more. Using Quaglia’s three-part School Voice Model, you’ll learn to expertly incorporate teacher voice and inspire teacher to: Effectively express themselves Work collaboratively for school change Increase engagement and define a sense of purpose Amplify their voice via technology Improve retention, innovation, professional development, and student achievement with this breakthrough guide!




How to Create a Culture of Achievement in Your School and Classroom


Book Description

No school improvement effort can be effective without addressing school culture, and in this book you'll learn how to put in place the five pillars essential to building a culture of achievement.




Sketchnotes for Educators


Book Description

Sylvia Duckworth is a Canadian teacher whose sketchnotes have taken social media by storm. Her drawings provide clarity and provoke dialogue on many topics related to education. This book contains 100 of her most popular sketchnotes with links to the original downloads that can be used in class or shared with colleagues. Interspersed throughout the book are Sylvia's reflections on each drawing and what motivated her to create them, in addition to commentary from other educators who inspired the sketchnotes.




Dive Into Inquiry


Book Description

Want to make learning more meaningful in your classroom? Looking to better prepare your students for the world of tomorrow? Keen to help learners create authentic connections to the world around them? Dive into Inquiry beautifully marries the voice and choice of inquiry with the structure and support required to optimise learning for students and get the results educators desire. With Dive into Inquiry you'll gain an understanding of how to best support your learners as they shift from a traditional learning model into the inquiry classroom where student agency is fostered and celebrated each and every day. This book strikes a perfect balance of meaningful pedagogy, touching narrative, helpful processes, original student examples, and rich how-to lesson plans all to get you going on bringing inquiry into your classroom. After reading this book educators will feel equipped to design their own inquiry units in a scaffolded manner that promote a gradual shift of control of learning from the teacher to the learner. Exploring student passions, curiosities, and interests and having these shape essential questions, units of study, and performance tasks are all covered in this powerful book. Learn to keep track of the many inquiry topics in your classroom and have students take ownership over their learning like never before! Trevor MacKenzie provides readers with a strong understanding of the Types of Student Inquiry and proposes a framework that best prepares both educators and learners for sharing the unpacking of curriculum in the classroom as they work together towards co-constructing a strong Free Inquiry unit. Helpful illustrations for in-class use, examples of essential questions from a variety of disciplines, practical goals for making progress in adopting inquiry into your practice, and powerful student learning on display throughout, Dive into Inquiry will energize, inspire, and transform your classroom!




The Pedagogy of Confidence


Book Description

In her new book, prominent professional developer Yvette Jackson focuses on students' strengths, rather than their weaknesses, To reinvigorate educators to inspire learning and high intellectual performance. Through the lens of educational psychology and historical reforms, Jackson responds To The faltering motivation and confidence of educators in terms of its effects on closing the achievement gap. The author seeks to "rekindle the belief in the vast capacity of underachieving urban students," and offers strategies to help educators inspire intellectual performance. Jackson proposes that a paradigm shift towards a focus on strengths will reinvigorate educators' passion for teaching and belief in their ability to raise the intellectual achievement of their students. Jackson addresses how educators can systematically support the development of motivation, reflective and cognitive skills, and high performance when standards and assessments are predisposed to non-conceptual methods. Furthermore, she examines challenges and offers strategies for dealing with cultural disconnects, The influence of new technologies, and language preferences of students.




Developing Assessment-Capable Visible Learners, Grades K-12


Book Description

“When students know how to learn, they are able to become their own teachers.” —Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and John Hattie Imagine students who describe their learning in these terms: “I know where I’m going, I have the tools I need for the journey, and I monitor my own progress.” Now imagine the extraordinary difference this type of ownership makes in their progress over the course of a school year. This illuminating book shows how to make this scenario an everyday reality. With its foundation in principles introduced in the authors’ bestselling Visible Learning for Literacy, this resource delves more deeply into the critical component of self-assessment, revealing the most effective types of assessment and how each can motivate students to higher levels of achievement.




Engaging with Student Voice in Research, Education and Community


Book Description

This work interrupts the current “consulting students” discourse that positions students as service clients and thus renders more problematic the concept of student voice in ways that it might be sustained as a democratic process. It looks at student voice holistically across realms of classroom practices, higher education, practitioner inquiry and policy formulation. The authors render problematic the “empowerment” rhetoric that is the dominant and insufficient narrative justifying consulting children and young people. They explore the many contradictions and ambiguities associating with recruiting and encouraging them to participate and the varying impacts of different circumstances on the ways in which student voice projects are enacted. They perceive that it is possible for student voice projects to be subverted from both above and below as varying stakeholders with varying purposes struggle to manage and control projects. Importantly, the book reports on research that identifies and highlights conditions for initiating and sustaining student voice and include “beyond school” dimensions that consider young people as “audiences” who can inform community facilities, their development and design as well as undergraduate students in universities. These cases are not reported as celebratory, but rather act as narratives that illuminate the many challenges facing those who chose to work with young people in authentic ways. It both advances methodologies for engaging young people as active agents in the design and interpretation of research that concerns them and offers a critique of those methods that see young people as the objects of research, where the data is mined for purposes that do not recognise that students are the consequential stakeholders with respect to decisions made in their interests.​