Creating Literacy Communities as Pathways to Student Success offers a model for using literacy as a pathway for secondary students to explore fields from which they are often systematically excluded. In particular, this volume demonstrates how access for young Latina students to STEM related fields can be bolstered through engagement with mentors in writing and reading programs. Written for pre- and in-service teachers, as well as scholars across disciplines, this book aims to re-conceptualize the ways in which writing can best serve ethnically and linguistically diverse students, especially girls.

In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.

This unique and visionary text is a compilation of fascinating studies conducted in a variety of cross-cultural settings where children learn language and literacy with siblings, grandparents, peers and community members. Focusing on the knowledge and skills of children often invisible to educators, these illuminating studies highlight how children skilfully draw from their varied cultural and linguistic worlds to make sense of new experiences. The vastly experienced team of contributors provide powerful demonstrations of the generative activity of young children and their mediating partners - family members, peers, and community members - as they syncretise languages, literacies and cultural practices from varied contexts. Through studies grounded in home, school, community school, nursery and church settings, we see how children create for themselves radical forms of teaching and learning in ways that are not typically recognised, understood or valued in schools. This book will be invaluable reading for teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policy-makers who seek to understand the many pathways to literacy and use that knowledge to affect real change in schools.

The themes of attending to individual needs, providing assessment-driven instruction, and creating long-term, focused professional development plans are solid and consistent throughout.

"In Remaking Literacy: Connecting ELA and Hands-On Making, author Jacie Maslyk transforms literacy teaching and learning by integrating maker education into the classroom. Maker education--an approach to instruction that emphasizes hands-on learning experiences--creates innovative opportunities that shape students into creative thinkers. Maslyk shares practical, research-based strategies for incorporating creativity and design thinking into literary instruction. By reading this book, K-5 educators will learn how to reimagine their classrooms so that students' learning will develop in engaging and visible ways"--

In Mobilizing the Community to Help Students Succeed, Hugh B. Price shares the lessons learned while helping to do just that during his tenure as president of the National Urban League. Here, find out how educators can apply some of the same tactics to inspire and award academic achievement in even the most challenged school districts. Using real-life examples and shared wisdom from successful educators and community organizers coast to coast, Price describes ways to * Create initiatives such as community-based honor societies, parades, and rallies to motivate students and reward achievement; * Include parents in motivational efforts to rekindle students' natural curiosity and enthusiasm for learning; * Enlist the support of businesses and other community partners for both financial support and volunteer help; * Maximize use of the media to publicize student accomplishments; and * Set up programs that honor student achievement year-round. According to Price, a highly informed and engaged community is essential to closing the achievement gap. This book underscores that community-based efforts to motivate student success can be effective because they have been effective. The message for educators, parents, business and civic leaders, and members of the general public is that their consistent and creative involvement will result in invigorated youngsters, inspired to achieve in school and in life.

Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at the Reading and Writing Project have helped thousands of educators design their own pathways to the Common Core. Now, with Pathways to the Common Core, they are ready to help you find your way. Designed for teachers, school leaders, and professional learning communities looking to navigate the gap between their current literacy practices and the ideals of the Common Core, Pathways to the Common Core will help you: understand what the standards say, suggest, and what they don't say; recognize the guiding principles that underpin the reading and writing standards; identify how the Common Core's infrastructure supports a spiraling K-12 literacy curriculum; and scrutinize the context in which the CCSS were written and are being unrolled. In addition to offering an analytical study of the standards, this guide will also help you and your colleagues implement the standards in ways that lift the level of teaching and learning throughout your school.--