The Job-Embedded Nature of Coaching: Lessons for School Leaders is a book for sitting principals, aspiring principals, and teacher leaders. This edited volume includes studies that describe and detail findings from dissertation research conducted by scholar-practitioners in preK-12 schools. This book makes unique contributions to the field of practice and understanding of coaching (instructional and peer coaching) as forms of job-embedded learning, most especially for teachers in the beginning years in the profession. Each chapter examines very specific aspects of coaching that school leaders need to have understanding about to be able to create systems that support teachers in the work they do to teach students, interact with colleagues, etc. Conclusions and recommendations are offered for school leaders to support an environment and culture that embraces coaching and job-embedded learning as an integral part of the school’s foundation for building capacity. The messages across the chapters point to the primacy of coaching to promote teacher engagement and its value as job-embedded learning.

An encyclopedia about various methods of qualitative research.

A potent new book examines the overlap between our ecological crisis and video games Video games may be fun and immersive diversions from daily life, but can they go beyond the realm of entertainment to do something serious—like help us save the planet? As one of the signature issues of the twenty-first century, ecological deterioration is seemingly everywhere, but it is rarely considered via the realm of interactive digital play. In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang offers groundbreaking methods for exploring this vital overlap. Arguing that games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing ecological crisis, Playing Nature seeds conversations around key environmental science concepts and terms. Chang suggests several ways to rethink existing game taxonomies and theories of agency while revealing surprising fundamental similarities between game play and scientific work. Gracefully reconciling new media theory with environmental criticism, Playing Nature examines an exciting range of games and related art forms, including historical and contemporary analog and digital games, alternate- and augmented-reality games, museum exhibitions, film, and science fiction. Chang puts her surprising ideas into conversation with leading media studies and environmental humanities scholars like Alexander Galloway, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Heise, ultimately exploring manifold ecological futures—not all of them dystopian.