All children deserve the opportunity to practice freedom of thought, voice, and movement in school. Giving students the opportunity to practice freedom--to teach them how to be autonomous, responsible, cooperative and critically literate--should be done in communities and schools across the country, and this book shows how. The key ability of the human brain that cannot be digitized or mechanized is its ability to interpret—that is, to cope with the intentions of another, to understand what was said and what was meant. Humans have the ability to work together as a team toward a common goal (i.e. cooperate), to be altruistic and make sacrifices to help others, to build trust, and to feel empathy or sympathy—and robots do not. Developing and using these interpretive and cooperative skills is essential to having a nation of thoughtful citizens who are capable of seeing themselves as solutions to the problems and issues we face. Empowered Students: Educating Flexible Minds for a Flexible Future is a theory-to-practice story of how students at a segregated and failing New York City high school were released from years of oppressive schooling practices and learned how to practice freedom, told through the voices and the people who built it: the school leaders, teachers and students.

Empowering Students for the Future: Using the Right Questions to Teach the Value of Passion, Success, and Failure arms educators with the tools to teach what we all wish we had learned in school. You will uncover how to help your students think deeper, redefine failure, and authentically create their definition of success. Author Eric Yuhasz offers a variety of practical ideas throughout, including rapid-fire questions and a bowl meeting structure to help students find their passions; activities to help students address negativity from social media plus negative, self-inflicted mantras they may unconsciously be following; a chart that enables students to see their progress toward achieving their definition of success; tips for discussing value, sacrifice, self-discipline, motivation, and the tyranny of low expectations; plus ideas for helping students embrace failure as a steppingstone toward learning and triumph. With clear strategies in each chapter, this unique book will show you how your learners can truly map out a happier, healthier, more successful future.

The purpose of this book is to articulate an aspirational vision for education, one that deeply engages students in complex and meaningful work and prepares students for the personal, social, and societal problems and opportunities facing them and our society. However, simply adopting an aspirational vision for a high quality learning environment isn’t the real challenge. Most educators, students, and families don’t need a lot of convincing that schools can and should do more. Accordingly, this book does not stop at simply articulating a vision of the possible; the book also helps individuals visualize what it can look like, and supports teachers, families, and other engaged community members as they work toward closing the gap between what is possible and what is currently realized.

In Empower, A.J. Juliani and John Spencer provide teachers, coaches, and administrators with a roadmap that will inspire innovation, authentic learning experiences, and practical ways to empower students to pursue their passions while in school. Empower will provide ways to overcome challenges and turn them into opportunities for our learners.

In school reform, students are rarely consulted. This book presents a step-by-step process for involving students in transforming schools and empowering them to make real decisions that affect their education.

Are you preparing a new generation of innovators? Activate your students’ creativity and problem-solving potential with breakthrough learning projects. Across all grades and content areas, student-driven, collaborative projects will teach students how to generate innovative ideas and then put them into action. You’ll take learning to new heights and help students master core content.

What happens when teachers share power with students? In this profound book, Ira Shor—the inventor of critical pedagogy in the United States—relates the story of an experiment that nearly went out of control. Shor provides the reader with a reenactment of one semester that shows what really can happen when one applies the theory and democratizes the classroom. This is the story of one class in which Shor tried to fully share with his students control of the curriculum and of the classroom. After twenty years of practicing critical teaching, he unexpectedly found himself faced with a student uprising that threatened the very possibility of learning. How Shor resolves these problems, while remaining true to his commitment to power-sharing and radical pedagogy, is the crux of the book. Unconventional in both form and substance, this deeply personal work weaves together student voices and thick descriptions of classroom experience with pedagogical theory to illuminate the power relations that must be negotiated if true learning is to take place.