|
Showing 1 - 8 of
8 matches in All Departments
Winner of the Grawemeyer Award "In their brave search for depth in
American high schools, scholars Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine suffered
many disappointments...Undeterred, they spent 750 hours observing
classes, interviewed more than 300 people, and produced the best
book on high school dynamics I have ever read." -Jay Mathews,
Washington Post "A hopeful, easy-to-read narrative on what the best
teachers do and what deep, engaging learning looks like for
students. Grab this text if you're looking for a celebration of
what's possible in American schools." -Edutopia "This is the first
and only book to depict not just the constraints on good teaching,
but also how good teachers transcend them. A superb book in every
way: timely, lively, and entertaining." -Jonathan Zimmerman,
University of Pennsylvania What would it take to transform our high
schools into places capable of supporting deep learning for
students across a wide range of aptitudes and interests? To find
out, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine spent hundreds of hours observing and
talking to teachers and students in and out of the classroom at
thirty of the country's most innovative schools. To their dismay,
they discovered that deeper learning is more often the exception
than the rule. And yet they found pockets of powerful learning at
almost every school, often in extracurriculars but also in a few
mold-breaking academic courses. So what must schools do to achieve
the integrations that support deep learning: rigor with joy,
precision with play, mastery with identity and creativity? In
Search of Deeper Learning takes a deep dive into the state of our
schools and lays out an inspiring new vision for American
education.
In the last decade, school shootings have decimated communities and
terrified parents, teachers, and children in even the most "family
friendly" American towns and suburbs. These tragedies appear to be
the spontaneous acts of disconnected teens, but this important book
argues that the roots of violence are deeply entwined in the
communities themselves. "Rampage" challenges the "loner theory" of
school violence and shows why so many adults and students miss the
warning signs that could prevent it.
"The best book on high school dynamics I have ever read."-Jay
Mathews, Washington Post An award-winning professor and an
accomplished educator take us beyond the hype of reform and inside
some of America's most innovative classrooms to show what is
working-and what isn't-in our schools. What would it take to
transform industrial-era schools into modern organizations capable
of supporting deep learning for all? Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine's
quest to answer this question took them inside some of America's
most innovative schools and classrooms-places where educators are
rethinking both what and how students should learn. The story they
tell is alternately discouraging and hopeful. Drawing on hundreds
of hours of observations and interviews at thirty different
schools, Mehta and Fine reveal that deeper learning is more often
the exception than the rule. And yet they find pockets of powerful
learning at almost every school, often in electives and
extracurriculars as well as in a few mold-breaking academic
courses. These spaces achieve depth, the authors argue, because
they emphasize purpose and choice, cultivate community, and draw on
powerful traditions of apprenticeship. These outliers suggest that
it is difficult but possible for schools and classrooms to achieve
the integrations that support deep learning: rigor with joy,
precision with play, mastery with identity and creativity. This
boldly humanistic book offers a rich account of what education can
be. The first panoramic study of American public high schools since
the 1980s, In Search of Deeper Learning lays out a new vision for
American education-one that will set the agenda for schools of the
future.
Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush agreed on little, but united behind
the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Passed in late 2001, it was
hailed as a dramatic new departure in school reform. It would make
the states set high standards, measure student progress, and hold
failing schools accountable. A decade later, NCLB has been
repudiated on both sides of the aisle. According to Jal Mehta, we
should have seen it coming. Far from new, it was the same approach
to school reform that Americans have tried before. In The Allure of
Order, Mehta recounts a century of attempts at revitalizing public
education, and puts forward a truly new agenda to reach this
elusive goal. Not once, not twice, but three separate times-in the
Progressive Era, the 1960s and '70s, and NCLB-reformers have hit
upon the same idea for remaking schools. Over and over again,
outsiders have been fascinated by the promise of scientific
management and have attempted to apply principles of rational
administration from above. Each of these movements started with
high hopes and ambitious promises, but each gradually discovered
that schooling is not easy to "order" from afar: policymakers are
too far from schools to know what they need; teachers are resistant
to top-down mandates; and the practice of good teaching is too
complex for simple external standardization. The larger problem,
Mehta argues, is that reformers have it backwards: they are trying
to do on the back-end, through external accountability, what they
should have done on the front-end: build a strong, skilled and
expert profession. Our current pattern is to draw less than our
most talented people into teaching, equip them with little relevant
knowledge, train them minimally, put them in a weak welfare state,
and then hold them accountable when they predictably do not achieve
what we seek. What we want, Mehta argues, is the opposite approach
which characterizes top-performing educational nations: attract
strong candidates into teaching, develop relevant and usable
knowledge, train teachers extensively in that knowledge, and
support these efforts through a strong welfare state. The Allure of
Order boldly challenges conventional wisdom with a sweeping,
empirically rich account of the last century of education reform,
and offers a new path forward for the century to come.
The Futures of School Reform represents the culminating work of a
three-year discussion among national education leaders convened by
the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Based on the recognition
that current education reform efforts have reached their limits,
the volume maps out a variety of bold visions that push the
boundaries of our current thinking. Taken together, these visions
identify the leverage points for generating dramatic change and
highlight critical trade-offs among different courses of action.
The goal of this book is not to present a menu of options. Rather,
it is to surface contrasting assumptions, tensions, constraints,
and opportunities, so that together we can better understand-and
act on-the choices that lie before us.
In recent decades, sociology of education has been dominated by
quantitative analyses of race, class, and gender gaps in
educational achievement. And while there's no question that such
work is important, it leaves a lot of other fruitful areas of
inquiry unstudied. This book takes that problem seriously,
considering the way the field has developed since the 1960s and
arguing powerfully for its renewal. The sociology of education, the
contributors show, largely works with themes, concepts, and
theories that were generated decades ago, even as both the actual
world of education and the discipline of sociology have changed
considerably. The moment has come, they argue, to break free of the
past and begin asking new questions and developing new programs of
empirical study. Both rallying cry and road map, Education in a New
Society will galvanize the field.
In recent decades, sociology of education has been dominated by
quantitative analyses of race, class, and gender gaps in
educational achievement. And while there's no question that such
work is important, it leaves a lot of other fruitful areas of
inquiry unstudied. This book takes that problem seriously,
considering the way the field has developed since the 1960s and
arguing powerfully for its renewal. The sociology of education, the
contributors show, largely works with themes, concepts, and
theories that were generated decades ago, even as both the actual
world of education and the discipline of sociology have changed
considerably. The moment has come, they argue, to break free of the
past and begin asking new questions and developing new programs of
empirical study. Both rallying cry and road map, Education in a New
Society will galvanize the field.
Worries about the quality of public schooling in America are not
new. Present since the mid-nineteenth century, the issue became a
perennial one after 1918, the year in which elementary school
attendance became compulsory in every state. The Allure of Order
traces the cyclical efforts to 'order' American schooling over the
course of the twentieth century, from 1920s reform efforts up
through No Child Left Behind and the current school accountability
movement. The book explores why reformers from both the left and
right have repeatedly placed such high hopes in these reforms and
why teachers and schools have been unable to resist these external
reformers. As he shows, the measurable has repeatedly crowded out
the educationally meaningful, and reforms have never realized the
hopes placed in them. In each reform effort, higher-status
professionals have drawn from policies outside the educational
arena and ridden roughshod over the teaching profession, which has
remained, as he puts it, under-professionalized. Outside reformers
looked to fix schools using Taylorist principles in the 1920s,
Department of Defense metrics in the 1960s, and maxims from
management gurus in our own era. In each case, a largely male
administrative elite dictated to a largely feminized teaching
profession that had little say over policy. In fact, the whole
American educational sector was put together backwards: we draw
less than our most able people to teaching, underprofessionalize
the field, equip teachers with a weak knowledge base, put them in a
highly challenging situation because of a comparatively weak
welfare state, and then, when they don't achieve the results we
seek, impose increasingly stringent regimes of external
accountability. Mehta proposes that we do the reverse: draw more
talented people into teaching, train them well, support their
efforts through a more robust welfare state, and stimulate a cycle
of increased trust and lessening control. This is the strategy of a
number of the countries that outpace the United States on
international assessments, and it is essentially the opposite of
America's preferred strategy. Empirically rich and sweeping in
scope, The Allure of Order will force anyone who cares about
educational policy to re-examine his or her fundamental beliefs
about the problems plaguing our schools.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|