An analysis of modern curricular policy trends, drawing upon Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence, and featuring inputs from acknowledged experts in the field.

Recent worldwide education policy has reinvented teachers as agents of change and professional developers of the school curriculum. Academic literature has analyzed changes in how teacher professionalism is conceived in policy and in practice but Teacher Agency provides a fresh perspective on this issue, drawing upon an ecological theory of agency. Using this model for understanding agency, Mark Priestley, Gert Biesta and Sarah Robinson explore empirical findings from the 'Teacher Agency and Curriculum Change' project, funded by the UK-based Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Drawing together this research with the authors' international experiences and perspectives, Teacher Agency addresses theoretical and practical issues of international significance. The authors illustrate how teacher agency should be understood not only in terms of individual capacity of teachers, but also in respect of the cultures and structures of schooling.

From David Osborne, the author of Reinventing Government--a biting analysis of the failure of America's public schools and a comprehensive plan for revitalizing American education. In Reinventing America's Schools, David Osborne, one of the world's foremost experts on public sector reform, offers a comprehensive analysis of the charter school movements and presents a theory that will do for American schools what his New York Times bestseller Reinventing Government did for public governance in 1992. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the city got an unexpected opportunity to recreate their school system from scratch. The state's Recovery School District (RSD), created to turn around failing schools, gradually transformed all of its New Orleans schools into charter schools, and the results are shaking the very foundations of American education. Test scores, school performance scores, graduation and dropout rates, ACT scores, college-going rates, and independent studies all tell the same story: the city's RSD schools have tripled their effectiveness in eight years. Now other cities are following suit, with state governments reinventing failing schools in Newark, Camden, Memphis, Denver, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Oakland. In this book, Osborne uses compelling stories from cities like New Orleans and lays out the history and possible future of public education. Ultimately, he uses his extensive research to argue that in today's world, we should treat every public school like a charter school and grant them autonomy, accountability, diversity of school designs, and parental choice.

Many contemporary American middle schools are stuck in a state of "arrested development," failing to implement the original concept of middle schools to a varying, though equally corruptive degrees. The individual chapters of the book outline in detail how to counter this dangerous trend, offering guidance to those who seek immediate, significant, internal reforms before we lose the unique value of middle schools for our nation's adolescents.

Be the leader of a fresh, bold, enduring vision of education for your district or school. The future of learning has arrived, and it requires bold educational leadership and a dramatic redefinition of what it means to be a successful student today. Redefining Student Success invites you to lead this transformation with audacity. It engages leaders with the concepts and actions needed to reimagine schools, address inequities, and help today’s students develop the skills they need for personal, economic, and civic success. This vital guide supports transformative leadership with Concrete guidance on how to create a Portrait of a Graduate and Portrait of an Educator which will help ensure teachers have a unified vision for professional growth and student success. Reflection prompts that help you recognize your strengths, spark discussion among stakeholders, and identify next steps for inspired action. Compelling examples of students already engaged in creative, self-directed problem-solving around issues that matter to them and their communities, together with stories that illustrate how districts and schools have arrived at their own vision of what education must become. Companion guides to 21st century learning for parents and students available online. The time is now to reset educational outcomes, sync schools with the demands of 21st century society, and meet the needs of every learner, in every community.

European legal teaching - historically formalistic, doctrinal, hierarchical, and passive - is coming under increasing pressure to reimagine itself as pragmatic, policy-aware, and action-oriented. Out of this context, a bottom-up movement of university law clinics appears to be emerging in Europe. Although intellectually indebted to the US model, the European variant reflects legal education and practice in Europe, specifically the multi-layered and multi-genetic legal landscape resulting from the Europeanization and internationalization of national legal systems, the globalization of European legal markets, and the growing demand for civic engagement in view of increasingly powerful supra-national institutions. Through the prism of clinical legal education, Reinventing Legal Education is the first attempt to gather scholarly and systematic reflections on the developments taking place in European legal teaching and practice. This groundbreaking book should be read by anyone interested in how clinical legal education is reinventing legal education in Europe.

Since it was first invented, Americans have been trying to re-design the American high school. One of the latest approaches funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is to find inventive high school designs that work well in one location and replicate them in other locations. The authors of this book followed a design team from Big Picture Learning as it worked to do exactly this, recording the challenges it faced, and the strategies it employed. Their accessible and entertaining account of Big Pictures work is laced with stories about scaling up by other school design teams, and in other enterprises beyond high school. Based on careful research, the book is both a practical guide to a new dimension of school reform, and also an interesting read for anyone interested in school change.