Contains cooperative learning activities to help students recognize the elements that combine to make a culture and appreciate the differences among cultures.

Discover why and how schools must become places where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted As educators, parents, and citizens, we must settle for nothing less than environments that bring out the best in people, take learning to the next level, allow for great discoveries, and propel both the individual and the group forward into a lifetime of learning. This is something all teachers want and all students deserve. In Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools, Ron Ritchhart, author of Making Thinking Visible, explains how creating a culture of thinking is more important to learning than any particular curriculum and he outlines how any school or teacher can accomplish this by leveraging 8 cultural forces: expectations, language, time, modeling, opportunities, routines, interactions, and environment. With the techniques and rich classroom vignettes throughout this book, Ritchhart shows that creating a culture of thinking is not about just adhering to a particular set of practices or a general expectation that people should be involved in thinking. A culture of thinking produces the feelings, energy, and even joy that can propel learning forward and motivate us to do what at times can be hard and challenging mental work.

Missiologist and church planter JR Woodward offers a blueprint for the missional church--not small adjustments around the periphery of the infrastructure but a radical revisioning of how a church ought to look that entails changing how we think about leadership and what we expect out of discipleship.

In order to succeed in today’s competitive environment, corporate and nonprofit institutions must create a workplace climate that encourages employees to continue to learn and grow. From the author of the best-selling The Mentor’s Guide comes the next-step mentoring resource to ensure personnel at all levels of an organization will teach and learn from each other. Written for anyone who wants to embed mentoring within their organization, Creating a Mentoring Culture is filled with step-by-step guidance, practical advice, engaging stories, and includes a wealth of reproducible forms and tools.

Creating Campus Cultures is the first book to explicitly focus on how campus cultures shape the experiences of racially diverse student populations.

Collaboration is often viewed as a one-time or project-oriented activity. An increasing challenge is to help organizations incorporate collaborative values and practices in their everyday ways of working. In Creating a Culture of Collaboration, an international group of practitioners and researchers–from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, and the United States–provide proven approaches to creating a culture of collaboration within and among groups, organizations, communities, and societies.

Increasing violence amongst youth in society, burn-out as a widespread disease and scandals in companies are only some of the headlines which appear regularly in the news media. Politics scarcely seems to have any success in fighting violence and injustice in society and in the world. The thesis here suggests that people do not have to wait for a savior such as a politician but that everyone can contribute to a less violent, more peaceful and just world. It will be demonstrated that organizations have an enormous influence on society and this book deals with the possibilities which an organization has to contribute to a less violent culture. By the term “organization” all forms of organized groups of people who come together for a certain purpose are meant, for example schools, clubs, public social aids and others, whilst we mainly concentrate on companies in our research. The intention is to focus particularly on the issues related to the theme of creating a nonviolent culture in the workplace. In the first part on culture, we deal with several questions regarding culture, including such fundamental questions as What is organizational culture?, What are the dimensions of culture? and is it possible to in­ fluence it and if yes, how does it work? In the second part, we take a look at the terms violence and nonviolence and a survey of how these aspects occur in society and organizations is made. The third part is the largest and deals with the qualities of leadership and with the organizational conditions which are necessary to create a nonviolent culture. We hope it will become clearer to the reader that nonviolence is not a strategy or a formula to be used. It can appear very different in different situations. There are component elements which can promote it and there are certain principles that cannot be violated if one wishes to establish true nonviolence. Nevertheless, there is no one patent formula nor one exclusively correct way of creating a nonviolent culture. It requires considerable creativity and endurance to create it and can take a variety of forms.