Curriculum can be defined in a variety of ways. It might be viewed as a body of knowledge, a product, or a process. Curricula can differ as they are conceptualized from various theoretical perspectives to address the needs of teachers, students, and the context of schooling. One reason to study curriculum is "to reveal the expectations, processes and outcomes of students' school learning experiences that are situated in different cultural and system contexts. ... further studies of curriculum practices and changes aremuch needed to help ensure the success of educational reforms in the different cultural and system contexts" (Kulm & Li, 2009, p.709). This volume highlights international perspectives on curriculum and aims to broaden the wider mathematics education community's understandings of mathematics curriculum through viewing a variety of ways that curricula are developed, understood, and implemented in different jurisdictions/countries. Within this volume, we define curriculum broadly as the set of mathematics standards or outcomes, the messages inherent in mathematics curriculum documents and resources, how these standards are understood by a variety of stakeholders, and how they are enacted in classrooms. The focus is on the written, implied, and enacted curriculum in various educational settings throughout the world.

Contents: Emergence of Families, Communities, and Schools in Early Childhood Education: Introduction, Olivia N. Saracho and Bernard Spodek. Challenges and Realities: Family-Community-School Partnership, Olivia N. Saracho and Bernard Spodek. Families and Early Childhood Education Through the Years, Bernard Spodek and Olivia N. Saracho. Young Children Experiencing Divorce and Family Transitions: How Early Childhood Professionals Can Help, Marion F. Ehrenberg, Jacqueline E. Bush, Jennifer D. Pringle, Marei Luedemann, and Jennifer Geisretter. Family context and psychological development in early childhood: Educational implications, Enrique B. Arranz Freijo. Parenting Self-Efficacy and Competence in Relation to Young Children's Social and Academic Outcomes, Priscilla K. Coleman and Katherine H. Karraker. Emotion Regulation: Implications For Children's School Readiness and Achievement, Julia M. Braungart-Rieker and Ashley L. Hill."

This book makes the case for young children as both keenly materially aware of and highly dependent on sets of interrelated material-discursive circumstances. It argues that long-term engagement with children around the topic of meaning-matter relations upends many taken-for-granted notions of consumption, self-regulation, knowledge production, and what constitutes quality of life within a school setting. The book provides complex accounts of agency on multiple scales - the capability of children to shape and share research, the force of objects, stuff, and things to impact the "social" workings of a classroom, and the impact of nonhuman animals on the trajectory of the ways in which children relate to each other. This work makes a significant contribution to both theoretical conceptions and practical enactments of childhoods, productively addressing the many contradictions inherent in a posthuman and participatory approach to researching with young children. It also offers insights into how the everyday materialities of children's classrooms (and their complex representations) are capable of disrupting the common-sense order of things.

This book provides busy educators with insight on genuine processes and decision-making that maximizes student learning and overall academic success. Full of examples, templates, reflective prompts, and suggestions on how to plan for and drive daily practice, Ten Steps for Genuine Leadership in Schools explores the importance of a genuine learning environment, genuine instructional practices, genuine innovative processes, a genuine vision and mission of your school, and genuine relationships between staff, students, parents, and community. Covering specific strategies that can be implemented immediately, this book is a straightforward and honest approach in doing what really matters in the principal's chair to elicit positive student outcomes.

This work looks at managing school system change. It covers such topics as: challenges to leading and managing school and school system change; key roles and competencies for administrators; stakeholder theory analysis; understanding school culture change; and more.

Gail R. Benjamin reaches beyond predictable images of authoritarian Japanese educators and automaton schoolchildren to show the advantages and disadvantages of a system remarkably different from the American one... --"The New York Times Book Review"

Americans regard the Japanese educational system and the lives of Japanese children with a mixture of awe and indignance. We respect a system that produces higher literacy rates and superior math skills, but we reject the excesses of a system that leaves children with little free time and few outlets for creativity and self-expression.

In Japanese Lessons, Gail R. Benjamin recounts her experiences as a American parent with two children in a Japanese elementary school. An anthropologist, Benjamin successfully weds the roles of observer and parent, illuminating the strengths of the Japanese system and suggesting ways in which Americans might learn from it.

With an anthropologist's keen eye, Benjamin takes us through a full year in a Japanese public elementary school, bringing us into the classroom with its comforting structure, lively participation, varied teaching styles, and non-authoritarian teachers. We follow the children on class trips and Sports Days and through the rigors of summer vacation homework. We share the experiences of her young son and daughter as they react to Japanese schools, friends, and teachers. Through Benjamin we learn what it means to be a mother in Japan--how minute details, such as the way mothers prepare lunches for children, reflect cultural understandings of family and education.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Getting Started
2. Why Study Japanese Education?
3. Day-to-Day Routines
4. Together at School, Together in Life
5. A Working Vacation and Special Events
6. The Three R's, Japanese Style
7. The Rest of the Day
8. Nagging, Preaching, and Discussions
9. Enlisting Mothers' Efforts
10. Education in Japanese Society
11. Themes and Suggestions
12. Sayonara
Appendix. Reading and Writing in Japanese
References
Index

This practical, hands-on guide will assist the school library media specialist in planning, funding, implementing, and promoting special events programs in the school. Trotta provides a readable text filled with program ideas, planning documents, and tips for successful programs. She shows how to incorporate special events programs into a yearly curriculum plan, where to locate speakers and performers, how to budget and build support for special programs, and how to develop partnerships with school and community members that will ensure the success of the program. Reproducible forms and guidelines will make it easy for the school library media specialist to plan for and implement special event programming. Trotta systematically takes the library media specialist through the process from the idea stage to the evaluation process. The work features chapters on developing special events programs relevant to the curricula, developing partnerships to support these programs, raising community support and awareness of the media center and its programs, personnel training and strategies, developing promotional materials, keys to making programs successful, and how to do programs on a shoestring. An extensive list of resources for all kinds of programs completes the work.

Teachers from nine countries are profiled, focusing on the practices teachers use, the roles they occupy, and how the conditions of their work affect the quality of their worklife. Similarities and differences between countries regarding teachers' practices, roles and responsibilities, work conditions, job stress and job satisfaction, and centrality of work are explored. This book enables teachers in any country to compare their experiences with those of teachers in several other countries and thereby develop a cross-cultural perspective on their work, as well as to promote a sense of international professional identity.

From the 1950s to the digital age, Americans have pushed their childrento live science-minded lives, cementing scientific discovery and youthfulcuriosity as inseparable ideals. In this multifaceted work, historian RebeccaOnion examines the rise of informal children's science education in thetwentieth century, from the proliferation of home chemistry sets after WorldWar I to the century-long boom in child-centred science museums. Onionlooks at how the United States has increasingly focused its energies over thelast century into producing young scientists outside of the classroom. Sheshows that although Americans profess to believe that success in the sciencesis synonymous with good citizenship, this idea is deeply complicated inan era when scientific data is hotly contested and many Americans have aconflicted view of science itself. These contradictions, Onion explains, can be understood by examiningconnections between the histories of popular science and the developmentof ideas about American childhood. She shows how the idealised concept of"science" has moved through the public consciousness and how the drive tomake child scientists has deeply influenced American culture.

Our image-rich, media-dominated culture prompts critical thinking about how we educate young children. In response, this volume provides a rich and provocative synthesis of theory, research, and practice that pushes beyond monomodal constructs of teaching and learning. It is a book about bringing "sense" to 21st century early childhood education, with "sense" as related to modalities (sight, hearing), and "sense" in terms of making meaning. It reveals how multimodal perspectives emphasize the creative, transformative process of learning by broadening the modes for understanding and by encouraging critical analysis, problem solving, and decision-making. The volume's explicit focus on children's visual texts ("art") facilitates understanding of multimodal approaches to language, literacy, and learning. Authentic examples feature diverse contexts, including classrooms, homes, museums, and intergenerational spaces, and illustrate children's "sense-making" of life experiences such as birth, identity, environmental phenomena, immigration, social justice, and homelessness. This timely book provokes readers to examine understandings of language, literacy, and learning through a multimodal lens; provides a starting point for constructing broader, multimodal views of what it might mean to "make meaning;" and underscores the production and interpretation of visual texts as meaning making processes that are especially critical to early childhood education in the 21st century.

What is it really like to plunge into the world of science learning and teaching? Find out in this unique book. Dive In! grew out of a teacher-scientist project at the University of New Hampshire that promoted active learning and using science practices in the classroom. That experience yielded this book's reason for being: to provide detailed examples of how veteran teachers and their students can make the leap to implementing the recommendations of A Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). These features add to the book's instructional value: Detailed vignettes offer authentic perspectives about conducting student investigations and integrating science practices that support the NGSS. Field-tested learning activities accompany many of the vignettes and illustrate a range of investigations you can adopt or adapt, regardless of your grade level or science content focus. A science practice integration (SPI) toolkit will be useful whether you're already swimming in SPI instruction or just want to dip a toe in. You will learn how to modify existing lesson plans to immerse your students in more science practices. If you need help with SPI's challenges, you can turn to a handy trouble-shooting guide that outlines concerns and offers potential solutions. Written from an authentic teacher perspective, Dive In! presents a realistic picture of the successes and challenges of integrating NGSS science practices into your classroom. This book is the resource you need to help students shift from only knowing about science to actually investigating and making sense of it. Jump in with both feet!

An authoritative reference on one of education's hottest topics, describing how the latest testing and assessment tools can be used to help improve student performance. In this comprehensive review of the wealth of techniques by which students can be assessed, Valerie J. Janesick points out that the politics of schooling often gets in the way of student progress. "High-stakes" standardized testing is frequently based on poorly constructed, unfair tests that encourage "teaching to the test," which actually impedes educational goals. Authentic testing relies more on essays and writing samples, performances, demonstrations, and role-plays. Although it is fairer and provides a measure of student growth and progress, it requires more effort by teachers, who also require extra training. Besides discussing authentic assessment in detail, The Assessment Debate includes a chronology, an annotated directory of organizations supporting performance assessment, a list of state coordinators for testing reform, and state-by-state report cards. A historical chronology from pioneering efforts in the testing movement in the 1880s through the drive toward standardized testing in 2001 A comprehensive annotated bibliography on assessment, including print resources, videotapes, websites, and organizations supporting performance assessment

Telementoring, the practice of online mentoring, is a powerful tool to engage students in meaningful learning. Research has demonstrated the benefits for students and telementors who engage in inquiry and project-based learning with telementoring. Telementoring in the K-12 Classroom: Online Communication Technologies for Learning provides the latest research and the best practices in the field of telementoring. Theoretical and pragmatic viewpoints on telementoring provide guidance to professionals wanting to inform their practice. A solid base of telementoring information and an expansive vision of this practice combine to promote the understanding and successful implementation of telementoring.

This book is based on the power of stories to support children in all areas of their lives. It examines the role narratives can play in encouraging growth in contexts and domains such as personal and family identity, creative movement, memory and self-concept, social relationships, or developing a sense of humor. Each chapter describes innovative and research-based applications of narratives such as movement stories, visual narratives to develop historical thinking, multimodal storytelling, bibliotherapy, mathematics stories, family stories, and social narratives. The chapters elaborate on the strength of narratives in supporting the whole child in diverse contexts from young children on the autism spectrum improving their social skills at school, to four- and five-year-olds developing historical thinking, to children who are refugees or asylum-seekers dealing with uncertainty and loss. Written by accomplished teachers, researchers, specialists, teaching artists and teacher educators from several countries and backgrounds, the book fills a gap in the literature on narratives. "...this work delves into the topic of narratives in young children's lives with a breadth of topics and depth of study not found elsewhere." "Collectively, the insights of the contributors build a convincing case for emphasizing story across the various disciplines and developmental domains of the early childhood years." "The writing style is scholarly, yet accessible. Authors used a wide array of visual material to make their points clearer and show the reader what meaningful uses of story "look like"." Mary Renck Jalongo, Journal and Book Series Editor Springer Indiana, PA, USA

Research has consistently documented the failure of schools to reach students from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. One reason suggested for this failure is teachers' lack of understanding and appreciation for students' home backgrounds, while most teachers are eager to becvome informed and supportive of their diverse students many have lacked the opportunity to develop the knowedge and skills appropriate to working with such students. Ethnic Diversity examines how migration and settlement patterns have varied for these populations throughout U.S. history, documenting what researchers have learned about Latino, Native American, African American, urban Appalachian, and Asian American families, neighborhoods, and communities as these relate to children's learning through case studies (in the form of vignettes) and suggests how schools, communites, and universities can address the needs of culturally diverse students and their families.

This gorgeous collection of animal poems from Roger Stevens, Liz Brownlee and Sue Hardy-Dawson will entrance and delight in equal measure. Featuring a full alphabet of animals, birds, and insects, with the odd extinct or imaginary creature thrown in, these beautiful shape poems are a perfect way to introduce children to poetry. Some funny, some serious, there is something here for everyone. Book band: Dark Blue

New Perspectives on Young Children's Moral Education explores how to approach young children's moral education in a world of uncertainty and change. What is moral education? How do young children learn to act and interact appropriately? How do we enable children to recognise that how they act and interact matters? How can character, virtues and value help young children internalise qualities associated with living 'a good life'? Challenging many current assumptions about ethics and education, Tony Eaude suggests that a moral dimension runs through every aspect of life and that ethics involves learning to act and interact appropriately, based on an 'ethic of care' and enduring qualities and attributes, to equip children to resist strong external pressures. Drawing accessibly on research in neuroscience and psychology, he discusses how young children learn, highlighting the role of emotion, culture, example, habituation and feedback. Small actions can help to develop agency, empathy and thoughtfulness and a sense of moral identity, with an increasing emphasis on self-regulation, a vocabulary of ethics and intrinsic motivation. Eaude explores how character, virtues and values can help young children and adults to recognize and internalize qualities associated with living 'a good life'. He identifies how adults and learning environments can support these processes and shows why an inclusive approach is needed, rather than focusing on these topics only in particular settings, programmes or lessons. Recognising pitfalls and dilemmas, Eaude argues that an approach based on virtue ethics and an apprenticeship model is suitable in school and other settings, both religious and otherwise, internationally.

This isn't your average book about pastoral care - it is a no-nonsense exploration of the knowledge base that excellent pastoral practitioners, be they aspiring, new, or experienced, need to excel in their roles. Written for teaching and non-teaching pastoral leaders alike, this book combines theory, evidence, and research with best practice and on-the-job experience to help you on the way to becoming the very best pastoral leader that you can be. It is written for pastoral leaders by a current pastoral leader, reflecting the reality of our roles - the extraordinary pressures and challenges that we face, sometimes in just getting through the day.