What if you had a collaborative process of looking at student data that could pinpoint student gaps in learning and suggest effective strategies to close those gaps? What if you knew not only what you should start doing to enhance student learning, but also what you should stop doing because it hasn't given you the hoped-for results? Enter Achievement Teams. This is not another program that's here today and gone tomorrow; it's a timeless approach that any school or district can replicate that focuses on the most significant variable in student achievement: teaching. In Achievement Teams, Steve Ventura and Michelle Ventura offer a framework based on John Hattie's Visible Learning research that makes teacher collaboration more efficient, rigorous, satisfying, and effective. Think of it as a systematic treasure hunt for best practices using real data on your students. The authors walk you through the Achievement Teams four-step meeting protocol: In Step 1, teams focus on the evidence from a pre-assessment to provide specific feedback to students and teachers about concepts and skills that students did and did not learn. In Step 2, teams use that evidence to establish SMART goals for both teachers and students. In Step 3, teams summarize the collected data and make inferences around students' mastery levels. In Step 4, teachers select high-impact strategies directly targeted to student needs. A post-assessment reveals what did and didn't work. The authors provide a plethora of resources along the way, including reflection activities to extend your thinking and a variety of helpful downloadable templates designed to facilitate the work. If you're a teacher or leader who is interested in maximizing student achievement, this book is for you.

Michael Ventura, entrepreneur and CEO of award-winning strategy and design practice Sub Rosa, shares how empathy - the ability to see the world through someone else's eyes - could be what your business needs to innovate, connect, and grow. Having built his career working with iconic brands and institutions such as Google and Nike, and also The United Nations and the Obama Administration, Michael Ventura offers entrepreneurs and executives a radical new business book and way forward. Empathy is not about being nice. It's not about pity or sympathy either. It's about understanding - your consumers, your colleagues, and yourself - and it's a direct path to powerful leadership. As such, Applied Empathy presents real strategies on how to make lasting connections and evolve your business internally as well as externally. This ground-breaking guide lays the foundation to establish a diverse, inventive, and driven team that can meet the challenges of today's ever-evolving marketplace. If you want to connect to the people you work with and for, you first have to understand them.

Michael Ventura's owned only one car his entire life: a green '69 Chevy Malibu. Its wheels have crisscrossed the American landscape over more miles than a round trip to the moon. From Times Square to Terlingua, from Maine to Los Angeles, from Austin to Deadwood, Ventura has chronicled the continent in "a kind of switchback journey in image and thought." His essays convey a tactile and intimate relationship with land and people-and of course the car. Ventura's distinctive voice and vision are familiar to readers of the Austin Chronicle (where many of these pieces first appeared), as well the Austin Sun, Psychotherapy Networker, and LA Weekly. In this collection, its title borrowed from a Butch Hancock song, the essays switch lanes with Hancock's evocative black-and-white photographs. Slowing down to take notice of a makeshift shrine in the Texas Panhandle or zipping along the New York Thruway before dawn, Ventura captures the details that make us think profoundly about work, music, poverty, beauty, our home on the planet and in the universe. About volcanoes and the Very Large Array. About friends and companions. About gods and goddesses and God. With Lubbock, Texas, and the Southwest as the book's home base, If I Was a Highway roams widely and freely as Ventura takes readers on an unforgettable journey not only into the country but into the soul.

"Finding one particular thing at one particular time, then letting a world accumulate around it, in rough contingency, nothing quite fitting or not fitting." This is how Dave Hickey describes the work of artist and singer-songwriter Terry Allen, who creates works that proliferate into a constellation of genres as he revisits and revises his original inspirations. A painting may lead to a sculpture, which morphs into a song that takes on many voices and becomes a theatre piece or video installation. Yet, in Allen's endlessly evolving art, "nothing that you might actually see in the world is depicted, nothing is even surreal, because surrealism infers a starting point in reality. The songs are sung by disembodied voices. The stories are told by voices with regional accents. The drawings are drawn because otherwise we could not see what they are about, so they are better read as heraldry, or glyphs, or typologies than anything like pictures."

Terry Allen is the first comprehensive retrospective of this prolific artist's work. It opens with a previously unpublished celebration of Allen by Dave Hickey, then covers his three largest and most important series--JUAREZ, with critical commentary by Dave Hickey; RING, with commentary by Marcia Tucker; and YOUTH IN ASIA, with an interview of Terry Allen and commentary by Dave Hickey. It also explores Allen's other significant visual works--installations, public works and bronzes, and sculpture and works on paper. Highlighting an equally important part of the artist's oeuvre, Michael Ventura provides an insightful discussion of Allen's music. More than two hundred color and black-and-white images flow in and around the texts, providing a sweeping visual gallery of Allen's work in which, as Hickey observes, "not only are there no happy endings. There are no endings."

In 1983 visionary director John Cassavetes asked journalist Michael Ventura to write a unique film study - an on-set diary of the making of his film Love Streams. Cassavetes laid out his expectations. He wanted 'a daring book, a tough book'. In Ventura's words, 'All I had to do for 'daring' and 'tough' was transcribe this man's audacity day by day.' Cassavetes Directs describes the creation of Love Streams shot by shot, crisis by crisis. During production, the director learned that he was seriously ill, that this film might, as it tragically turned out, be his last. Starring alongside actress and wife Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes shot in sequence, reconceiving and revising his film almost nightly, in order that Love Streams could stand as his final statement. Both an intimate portrait of the man and an insight into his unique filmmaking philosophy, Cassavetes Directs documents a heroic moment in the life of a great artist.