Student Voice: From Invisible to Invaluable is about why and how today's leaders need to connect with students for success. The premise of this book is that student voice is often invisible and that is possibly why schools have changed little since the 19th Century. From digital citizenship to teacher evaluation, we submit that the voice of students can be and needs to be amplified. The authors wrote this book to help elevate the power and influence of student voice in the transformation and leadership of our schools. The authors provide context that helps frame where education has been, where it stands today, and where the authors propose we go in school leadership. To truly transform, schools leaders in the classroom, principal's office, and district office need to elevate the voice of the student. There is no greater way to inspire our children than to let them have a say in their own education. We simply cannot create the leaders of tomorrow when we do not let them lead today. This book will provide examples of excellence, stories of success, and practical tips to help you move student voice from invisible to invaluable.

This book traces back how male students are currently disadvantaged in school by instruction in an overwhelmingly female environment devoid of male role models, who can inspire the love of learning in male students. Further, teachers are unduly influenced by biases related to compliant behaviors which result in conflating assessments of student academic achievement with compliance. Therefore, males' marks prevent to many from qualifying for courses leading to leading as well as achieving sufficiently high marks in those courses.

Educators are facing increasing demands and challenges due to the current emphasis on student growth and teacher accountability. Academic or instructional coaches can work with teachers to help them develop ideas, methods, and strategies for facing and successfully conquering these challenges leading to increased student achievement. Using scenarios and scholarly resources, the book follows one coach's journey from her first day as an instructional or academic coach through her development to an experienced coach who is prepared to help new coaches. The discussion of the theoretical basis for teaching and learning provides the basis for examining various approaches to coaching, methods of data collection and analysis, the components of teacher evaluation systems, and methods for implementing these ideas into the K-12 educational setting. This book is a must read for all coaches and teacher leaders!

Helping Parents Understand the Minds and Hearts of Generation Z takes parents into the daily lives of their 24-7, wired-up children. It allows parents and children to speak for themselves. This highly practical book provides parents insights into how Gen Z thinks, the ways their brains learn, and illustrates why children of this technological generation believe and act the ways they do. There are some red flags in American culture and smart technology and digital devices are right there at the center of them all. Students in Gen Z do not recall a time before the Internet and smart technology. As a result, serious issues are arising in American culture within Gen Z. These considerations have implications for families and interpersonal relationships and will also impact future economics, as more and more student from Gen Z graduate college and enter the workforce. Parents will find this book compelling and will be challenged to consider whether their withdrawn, ear-budded children are addicted to their devices and social media, and to where all of this might lead.

This book provides data and uses stories and personal insights gleaned from nearly 6,000 observations in real classrooms across the nation. The mix of data and descriptions provide a clear picture of the rich interaction of teacher and student behaviors - and how one predicts the other. Graphs and tables provide concrete visual representations of the often surprisingly low rates of effective instructional practices used in the average classroom. In addition to a description of how the large dataset was developed, there are descriptions of what it is like to visit multiple classrooms in different schools, what the data tells us about teaching and learning in our public school system, and what the implications are for pre-service teacher training, school professional development, research, and understanding interaction effects.

Growing a Growth Mindset: Unlocking Character Strengths through Children's Literature provides teachers with an innovative approach to teaching children the positive psychology constructs that underlie self-belief, goal motivation, and happiness. Through selected children's books, the book brings to life the latest research and strategies for developing growth mindset, hope, grit, character strengths, and happiness. Each of these positive psychology constructs is explored through a set of three picture book classics that makes the research understandable to even the youngest learner. The National Council for Social Studies inquiry approach drives each book-driven analysis of the selected stories. This inquiry-based approach is organized around a compelling question and provides a complete outline, including formative and summative questions and assessments, as well as extensions that share this vital learning with parents. Lessons in this book have been created by outstanding teachers and have been field tested in classrooms across the region with extraordinary results.

Inquiry-Based Learning: Designing Instruction to Promote Higher Level Thinking focuses on learning and pedagogy around inquiry using technology as a cognitive tool. Specific inferences and applications of learning through an inquiry approach are explored and illustrations are drawn from educational settings. This third edition text explores realistic approaches and encourages reflective practice through the creation of instruction around a variety of curricular topics, to include digital citizenship, information literacy, social media, telecollaborative activities, problem-based learning, blended learning, and authentic assessments. Emphasis is placed on developing 21st century skills within a thinking curriculum. Readers consider a scenario that continues throughout each chapter in the design and development of inquiry lessons. Chapter reflections and skill building exercises assist readers in developing competencies around the inquiry process as well as the pedagogy required in using this approach with authentic tools.

The Entitled Generation: Helping Teachers Teach and Reach the Minds and Hearts of Generation Z brings teachers into the twenty-first century world of 24-7 technologically-wired up and social media-driven students. This book asks teachers to consider pragmatic and sensible ways to teach Gen Z and to understand the differences between today's students and those of the past. Teachers are offered keen insights by colleagues, in terms of how Gen Z thinks, the various ways that males and females learn, and the distractions and struggles each faces by device addiction affecting today's classrooms. American culture is perpetuating the notion that today's students are entitled to economic and social outcomes on equal bases. Gen Z "feels" everyone should be treated as equals, receiving the same rewards for unequal efforts, thus promoting a feeling of entitlement. Teachers will understand the reality of today's American classrooms. Even with the assumed addiction to smart technology and social media, teachers can use this to their advantage and reach the minds and hearts of Gen Z to prepare them for their futures.

This book's ideas demonstrate how students are not adequately taught the learning skills necessary for superior academic achievement. The major reason schools are failing is that there is less emphasis on teaching students how to learn, the focus is on what to learn instead. This book provides teachers and parents with many concepts and tactics that they can use to teach children how to learn more efficiently and effectively. This book identifies and explains those skills and frames them as interacting in a mutually interacting and reinforcing cycle that I call the Learning Skills Cycle.

Marc Levitt's A Holistic Approach for Cultural Change: Character Education for Ages 13-15 asks educators to consider how our contemporary curriculum and pedagogy supports isolation and competition, rather than our goals for school culture change. Mr. Levitt explores themes such as 'vengeance,' 'prejudice,' 'communications in relationships,' 'trapping oneself in past behaviors,' 'respecting one's heritage,' and 'learning to embrace one's own story' through his original stories. Suggestions for curriculum and pedagogical changes follow, helping educators share the larger personal and social implications of Mr. Levitt's stories, while teaching and demonstrating how we are 'All in it Together'. A Holistic Approach for School-Based Culture Change: Character Education for Ages 13-15 helps educators build a caring and socially intelligent community of students in a way that is neither 'preachy' nor condescending, acknowledging and encouraging our 'mutuality of interests.

Growing a Growth Mindset: Unlocking Character Strengths through Children's Literature provides teachers with an innovative approach to teaching children the positive psychology constructs that underlie self-belief, goal motivation, and happiness. Through selected children's books, the book brings to life the latest research and strategies for developing growth mindset, hope, grit, character strengths, and happiness. Each of these positive psychology constructs is explored through a set of three picture book classics that makes the research understandable to even the youngest learner. The National Council for Social Studies inquiry approach drives each book-driven analysis of the selected stories. This inquiry-based approach is organized around a compelling question and provides a complete outline, including formative and summative questions and assessments, as well as extensions that share this vital learning with parents. Lessons in this book have been created by outstanding teachers and have been field tested in classrooms across the region with extraordinary results.

Choice Knowledge for Students enhances the confidence, maturity, and motivation that drives success. No matter where a student stands with grades or abilities, their future depends on excellent education and not only in academic subjects. Their hearts and souls need tending as much as their minds. This book addresses all three! The first section, "Knowledge for Your Power," nurtures inner strength. Entries like "Rescue Yourself" encourage maturity, ones like "Speak Up" enhance confidence, and those similar to "Keep It Real" nurture honesty and persistence. The second section is "Knowledge for Your Balance." Entries like "Your Best Friend," "Let Go," and "Talk It Out" build a stable foundation for school, work, family, friends, and all the other activities students juggle. The third section, "Knowledge for Your Life," offers inspiring and fun ways to supercharge school and life. Items like "Give Your Best" encourage achievement, ones like "Move Your Body" emphasize physical health, and the future is addressed with topics like "Test the Trend." Choice Knowledge helps students take charge of academic success as well as their lives!

Almost every teacher has experienced at least one of "those kids." The kids who won't sit still, who won't do their work, who don't attend, who won't conform to the classroom expectations, who are straight out defiant and disrespectful. These kids, these so-called "bad kids," and their stories actually have a great deal to teach us. This book centers around these stories and the lessons learned from them. Whether in education or in your everyday relationships with others, the lessons these kids teach will touch your hearts and make a difference in your lives. Picking up before the award-winning documentary The Bad Kids began, Lessons from The Bad Kids will teach us not only to improve our educational system but also how to become better people.

Whether you're an educator, CST member, administrator, or other educational professional, you share one thing in common: dealing with difficult parents and families. Every educator has experienced problematic, unproductive, and/or uncomfortable interactions with parents or families. Whether it be issues of defensiveness, noncompliance, the belief that his or her child "does no wrong," or just plain hostility, it can place an incredible stress on your job duties. Utilize this book to equip yourself with effective, practical tools geared to help productively tailor your interventions around the most common types of challenging parents and families.

Every child should have access to an education that works. The Quest for a Meaningful Special Education follows the educational journeys of nine students with a language-based learning disability (LBLD) who, through a combination of parental advocacy and luck, were removed from a debilitating learning situation and enrolled in a school designed to address their particular learning needs. In the process of following their journeys, the book explores the role of cultures within and outside the school and examines some of the ways that the construction of special education has affected student learning. In the context of the ongoing national conversation about student academic success, high school dropout rates, the disproportionate number of prison inmates with learning disabilities, the costs of educating students, and the controversy over the placement of minorities in special education, The Quest For a Meaningful Special Education is a timely book that will add a new perspective to current debates

This book by practitioners, policy analysts, and young people, for practitioners, policy makers, and researchers, captures up-to-the-moment experience and as yet unresolved issues in a newly emerging field: dropout reengagement. Key elements in this field include reaching out to young people who have left school for a myriad of reasons, and providing individualized supports and services all the way through to successful re-enrollment. The development of coordinated citywide efforts to re-engage out-of-school youth on positive educational pathways - in several dozen cities in recent years - spurred the effort to document practice and policy. Readers will come away with an understanding of results to date, as well as a sense of the variety and continuous improvement and innovation underway. This book describes the impressive early accomplishments of reengagement efforts in several cities, provides practical advice from a variety of perspectives for those seeking to launch or formalize local reengagement programs, and describes how reengagement at scale could help solve the crisis of unfulfilled potential represented in America's millions of young people without high school credentials.

Between 2002 and 2016, the federal government, state governments, and school districts undertook unprecedented measures to improve the lowest-performing schools. This book draws on dozens of actual examples to illustrate the wide range of interventions adopted over this time period. Among the initiatives examined in depth are efforts by states to provide technical assistance to schools and districts, offer students educational choices, engage communities in school improvement, take over low-performing schools and districts, create special state-run school districts, and close failing schools. Also discussed are district-initiated measures, including programs to standardize instruction, innovative approaches to raising student achievement, and restructuring of district operations. The book concludes with an assessment of 15 years of turnaround initiatives and recommendations based on lessons learned over this time period.

Teachers are brain changers. Thus it would seem obvious that an understanding of the brain - the organ of learning - would be critical to a teacher's readiness to work with students. Unfortunately, in traditional public, public-charter, private, parochial, and home schools across the country, most teachers lack an understanding of how the brain receives, filters, consolidates, and applies learning for both the short and long term. Neuroteach was therefore written to help solve the problem teachers and school leaders have in knowing how to bring the growing body of educational neuroscience research into the design of their schools, classrooms, and work with each individual student. It is our hope, that Neuroteach will help ensure that one day, every student -regardless of zip code or school type-will learn and develop with the guidance of a teacher who knows the research behind how his or her brain works and learns.