In today's school communities, the 'critical friend' - or change facilitator - has an increasingly vital role to play across the spectrum of teaching and learning, health promotion, and continuing professional development. But what is a critical friend and what does it take to be effective in such a role? Drawing on the findings of three intensive, school-based research initiatives, this book clearly defines the role of the critical friend and demonstrates a range of frameworks and applications for practice. Positive change in students' social and emotional wellbeing, and connectedness to school, is promoted through teachers' professional learning and focus on supportive school environments. The critical friend is pivotal in identifying the needs, facilitating the process of change, and ensuring a seamless integration with the core business, values, and objectives of the school. The activities, tips, and tools that are outlined in this groundbreaking book have been developed through years of research at the Center for Adolescent Health, Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. The book offers ready templates for adaptation to specific contexts across diverse demographics. It explains and explores the many dimensions of the critical friend, and it shares strategies that are designed to actively engage school communities in the process of change.

The Critical Friend: Facilitating positive change in school communities

Writing about Learning and Teaching in Higher Education offers detailed guidance to scholars at all stages-experienced and new academics, graduate students, and undergraduates-regarding how to write about learning and teaching in higher education. It evokes established practices, recommends new ones, and challenges readers to expand notions of scholarship by describing reasons for publishing across a range of genres, from the traditional empirical research article to modes such as stories and social media that are newly recognized in scholarly arenas. The book provides practical guidance for scholars in writing each genre-and in getting them published. To illustrate how choices about writing play out in practice, we share throughout the book our own experiences as well as reflections from a range of scholars, including both highly experienced, widely published experts and newcomers to writing about learning and teaching in higher education. The diversity of voices we include is intended to complement the variety of genres we discuss, enacting as well as arguing for an embrace of multiplicity in writing about learning and teaching in higher education.

Self-study is inherently collaborative. Such collaboration provides transparency, validity, rigor and trustworthiness in conducting self-study. However, the ways in which these collaborations are enacted have not been sufficiently addressed in the self-study literature. This book addresses these gaps in the literature by placing critical friendship, collaborative self-study and community of practice at the forefront of the self-study of teaching. It highlights these forms of collaboration, how the collaboration was developed and enacted, the challenges and tensions that existed in the collaboration, and how practice and identity developed through the use of these forms of collaboration. The chapters serve as exemplars of enacting these forms of collaboration and provide researchers with an additional base of literature to draw upon in their scholarly writing, teaching of self-study, and their enactment of collaborative self-study spaces.

There has been an increasing interest in the meaning and importance of friendship in recent years, particularly in the West. However, the history of friendship, and the ways in which it has changed over time, have rarely been examined. Friendship: A History traces the development of friendship in Europe from the Hellenistic period to today. The book brings together a range of essays that examine the language of friendship and its significance in terms of ethics, social institutions, religious organizations and political alliances. The essays study the works of classical and contemporary authors to explore the role of friendship in Western philosophy. Ranging from renaissance friendships to Christian and secular friendships and from women’s writing to the role of class and sex in friendships, Friendship: A History will be invaluable to students and scholars of social history.