Perform to your potential with proven mental training techniques! Achieving Excellence: Mastering the Mindset for Peak Performance in Sport and Life offers a variety of peak performance strategies to help athletes, coaches, and performers of all kinds achieve a winning mindset. The book explores sport psychology concepts and provides practical, proven strategies to incorporate into your daily life and competitive career. Renowned mental skills coach and performance psychology expert Colleen Hacker has helped hundreds of Olympic and professional athletes to achieve their individual and team goals. In Achieving Excellence, she shares her approach for cultivating confidence, focus, and habits of excellence. She will teach you how to create action plans for success and develop performance routines that optimize achievement. Inside, you will discover the strategies and practical tools needed for success in life and sport, such as these: Bulleted checklists that offer step-by-step application tips for mental skills Sidebars that highlight strategies for overcoming common challenges Success stories from top athletes and firsthand accounts of their experiences using different techniques Inspirational quotes throughout the book will motivate you, and implementation worksheets—available both in the book and online through HKPropel—are provided to help you apply mental training strategies in competition or in other achievement domains. With Achieving Excellence, you will develop a winning mindset with evidence-based, step-by-step plans that lead you to peak performance. Note: A code for accessing HKPropel is included with this ebook.

Thomas Jefferson once stated that the foremost goal of American education must be to nurture the "natural aristocracy of talent and virtue." Although in many ways American higher education has fulfilled Jefferson's vision by achieving a widespread level of excellence, it has not achieved the objective of equity implicit in Jefferson's statement. In Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin explore the cause for this divide. Employing historical research, examination of the most recent social science and public policy scholarship, international comparisons, and detailed empirical analysis of rich new data, the authors study the intersection between "excellence" and "equity" objectives. Beginning with a time line tracing efforts to achieve equity and excellence in higher education from the American Revolution to the early Cold War years, this narrative reveals the halting, episodic progress in broadening access across the dividing lines of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The authors argue that despite our rhetoric of inclusiveness, a significant number of youth from poor families do not share equal access to America's elite colleges and universities. While America has achieved the highest level of educational attainment of any country, it runs the risk of losing this position unless it can markedly improve the precollegiate preparation of students from racial minorities and lower-income families. After identifying the "equity" problem at the national level and studying nineteen selective colleges and universities, the authors propose a set of potential actions to be taken at federal, state, local, and institutional levels. With recommendations ranging from reform of the admissions process, to restructuring of federal financial aid and state support of public universities, to addressing the various precollegiate obstacles that disadvantaged students face at home and in school, the authors urge all selective colleges and universities to continue race-sensitive admissions policies, while urging the most selective (and privileged) institutions to enroll more well-qualified students from families with low socioeconomic status.

Although specific definitions may change over time, few goals are considered more important to education than the pursuit of academic excellence. There are many different viewpoints on this issue today among educational psychologists and other social scientists. One particularly glaring fault line in the debate divides those who emphasize developing individual learning and those who focus on promoting cultural and institutional reform. These two perspectives are rarely addressed in a single volume. In this book, well-known theorists and researchers present a range of perspectives on how to promote excellence in education. This allows those who stress transformation of educational practice and those who emphasize individual abilities to speak to each, and invites readers to jointly consider the arguments for both positions, or for some synthesis of the two. The point is to consider how these two divergent viewpoints can be reconciled, or simply coordinated, in an effort to benefit both students and society at large. The main thesis is that excellence can be fostered without sacrificing equity, both of which are fundamental tenets of a democratic education. The issues addressed in this book have implications and relevance for school reform efforts and across the fields of educational psychology, curriculum and instruction, philosophy of education, and educational leadership. The volume provides a unique source for students and teachers in various disciplines who want to gain a broader and more integrated view of the nature and development of excellence through education.

2017 Texas Association for Gifted and Talented Legacy Scholar Book Award 2017 National Association of Gifted Children Scholar Book of the Year Award In Excellence Gaps in Education, Jonathan A. Plucker and Scott J. Peters shine a spotlight on “excellence gaps”—the achievement gaps among subgroups of students performing at the highest levels of achievement. Much of the focus of recent education reform has been on closing gaps in achievement between students from different racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic backgrounds by bringing all students up to minimum levels of proficiency. Yet issues related to excellence gaps have been largely absent from discussions about how to improve our schools and communities. Plucker and Peters argue that these significant gaps reflect the existence of a persistent talent underclass in the United States among African American, Hispanic, Native American, and poor students, resulting in an incalculable loss of potential among our fastest growing populations. Drawing on the latest research and a wide range of national and international data, the authors outline the scope of the problem and make the case that excellence gaps should be targeted for elimination. They identify promising interventions for talent development already underway in schools and provide a detailed review of potential strategies, including universal screening, flexible grouping, targeted programs, and psychosocial interventions. Excellence Gaps in Education has the potential for changing our national conversation about equity and excellence and bringing fresh attention to the needs of high-potential students from underrepresented backgrounds.

The social organization of teaching and learning, particularly in classrooms, has not yet been recognized as a foundational element of education. However, social constructionist views of human development, cognition, and schooling, as well as the increasing challenges of cultural and linguistic diversity, make it a vital concern for teachers, researchers, and policymakers. This book introduces the concept of educational social organization, assembles the pertinent theory and evidence, and suggests future directions for training and policy. }The four goals of school reform--academic excellence, fairness, inclusion and harmony--can be achieved simultaneously, by transforming the final common pathway of all school reform--instructional activity. Teaching Transformed is a new vision for classrooms, based on consensus research findings and unified practice prescriptions, explained and justified by new developments in sociocultural theory, and clarified by an explicit five-phase developmental guide for achieving that transformation. Teaching Transformed is both visionary and practical, both theoretical and data-driven, and determined to create effective education for all students. Professional educators, parents, and any reader concerned with saving our schools will find this book necessary to understand our current plight, and to envision a realistic means of transformation.