Research shows school improvement initiatives are most effective when they come from the district level, rather than the state. While there is no one solution to school improvement that holds true in every classroom every time, there are two clearly identified aspects that improve the odds of school success: implementing a curriculum focused on developing knowledge, and supporting a culture where every teacher improves.In Creating the Schools Our Children Need, Dr. Dylan Wiliam outlines a framework for evaluating new district initiatives, and guides school boards, administrators, and district leaders through a breakdown of why what we¿re doing right now isn¿t working, and what we need to be doing instead.

"Unless we believe that those who have more are inherently superior to those who have less, we should be troubled by the fact that patterns of achievement are often fairly predictable, particularly with respect to students' race and class." In Creating the Opportunity to Learn, Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera help navigate the turbid waters of evidence-based methodologies and chart a course toward closing (and eliminating) the academic achievement gap. Turning a critical eye to current and recent research, the authors present a comprehensive view of the achievement gap and advocate for strategies that contribute to the success of all children. Boykin and Noguera maintain that it is possible to close the achievement gap by abandoning failed strategies, learning from successful schools, and simply doing more of what the research shows is most effective. Success is founded on equity, but equity involves more than simply ensuring students have equal access to education; equity also entails a focus on outcomes and results. If we want to bring about significant improvements in those outcomes, we have to do more to address the context in which learning takes place. In short, we must create schools where a child's race or class is no longer a predictor for how well he or she might perform.

Early in the 2000s, a high-school principal in Minnesota, Dr. Bob Perdaems, faced a complex challenge. The demographics of his school were shifting, political tensions in the surrounding communities were rising, and, thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act's new testing and accountability requirements, his school's performance was soon to be scrutinized more intensely and more publicly than ever before. While he had several visions of how his school could continuously improve through these realities, however, he had no additional budget to bring his ideas to life.Undaunted, Dr. Bob set to creating school improvements the best way he knew how--and that, of course, he could afford: he prioritized his school's areas for growth, found teachers who would lend minds and hands, and gathered them to look at the blueprints. What the Academy Taught Us is a book about the collaborative school-improvement culture Dr. Bob created in his Minnesota high school: the principles that initiated it, the collective effort that kept it running, and the lasting effects it had on its teachers and students. The book also brilliantly explores how bottom-up approaches like Dr. Bob's fare in the current era, which seeks to transform schools through more top-down and 'disruptive' means. Ultimately, What the Academy Taught Us offers today's educators a way forward. While largely viewing the difficult work of school improvement through the prism of a single school, it presents abundant recommendations about how schools everywhere can build effective and continuous improvement from the bottom up.

Support the growth of your students with meaningful, effective social-emotional learning (SEL). Full of resources, tools, and planning templates, this comprehensive guide provides everything you need to embed SEL practices within your daily work. You'll engage in deep reflection and discover ways to refine instruction, lesson planning, and assessment; promote whole-child development; and foster a productive learning environment for all. Readers will: Gain a deeper understanding of students' neurological development. Learn the benefits of social-emotional learning. Create a culture of social-emotional learning across entire schools. Plan and teach for social-emotional learning. Assess students on their social-emotional progress in order to encourage continual growth. Contents: Introduction: Why Teach Social-Emotional Learning to All? Chapter 1: What Is Social-Emotional Learning? Chapter 2: Establishing Culture, Climate, and the Learning Environment for SEL in Elementary Schools Chapter 3: Building a Schoolwide Foundation for SEL in Elementary School Chapter 4: Effective SEL Teaching Practices and Strategies in Elementary Schools Chapter 5: Effective SEL Lesson Planning Chapter 6: Monitoring Student Learning of SEL Appendix References and Resources Index

The Teaching Delusion 2: Teaching Strikes Back will give teachers and school leaders the supportive shake-up they need, helping them to abandon practices that aren’t making the difference they should be, and to focus on the things that will really make the biggest difference to students in our schools.|Whisper it quietly: a lot of time is being wasted in a lot of schools. Actually, why are we whispering? What we should really be doing is calling this out – loudly! The job of schools is too important for us to keeping quiet. Schools are in the ‘transforming lives’ business. There is no time to waste! In The Teaching Delusion: Why Teaching In Our Schools Isn’t Good Enough (And How We Can Make It Better), Bruce Robertson explored ‘delusions’ that are holding our schools back. In this sequel, The Teaching Delusion 2: Teaching Strikes Back, he digs deeper into three areas: curriculum, pedagogy and leadership. In doing so, he tackles the issue of time-wasting head-on. By calling out specific delusions in each area, Robertson suggests strategies for dismantling these and offers a clear roadmap forward. Backed by a depth of research and a breadth of experience, The Teaching Delusion 2: Teaching Strikes Back will give teachers and school leaders the supportive shake-up they need, helping them to abandon practices that aren’t making the difference they should be, and to focus on the things that will really make the biggest difference to students in our schools.

'It's time to focus on the needs of our children, not the whims of our politicians, to provide a way forward for a new landscape in education.' Is our education system working? What future are we preparing our children for? What future do we NEED to prepare our children for? Are we at risk of failing a generation? In this updated edition of renowned education speaker Richard Gerver's book we are faced with these worrying questions and many more regarding the schools our children are attending, the curriculum they are following and the testing system used to catagorise them. In this rousing call for educational revolution, Richard argues passionately that we must fight harder for our children's futures and we must do it today! Richard describes the strategies he used when he was brought in as head teacher to turn around Grange Primary school. It was there that he implemented his vision for a school system that caters for every child; a system that helps nurture self-confidence, self-worth, creativity, innovative thinking, team-working and communication skills - all key employability skills that children will need in the fast-moving world of technology and information they are growing up in. Richard is now the second most successful education speaker in the world behind Sir Ken Robinson, who describes Richard as 'one of the clearest and most passionate voices for radical change in education' and wrote the foreword for this book. Richard has updated Creating Tomorrow's Schools Today based on his visits to schools on every continent, his conversations on education with teachers and industry-leading visionaries such as Steve Wozniak, and in the context of an education system that he fears is forgetting the future we need to prepare our children for. Reforms, tweaks and new policies are not enough – a radical transformation is needed. If you read only one Education manifesto in the next year, this is it! Join the conversation: #Edvision

In 'Making Kids Cleverer: A manifesto for closing the advantage gap', David Didau reignites the nature vs. nurture debate around intelligence and offers research-informed guidance on how teachers can help their students acquire a robust store of knowledge and skills that is both powerful and useful. Foreword by Paul A. Kirschner. Given the choice, who wouldn't want to be cleverer? What teacher wouldn't want this for their students, and what parent wouldn't wish it for their children? When David started researching this book, he thought the answers to the above were obvious. But it turns out that the very idea of measuring and increasing children's intelligence makes many people extremely uncomfortable: If some people were more intelligent, where would that leave those of us who weren't? The question of whether or not we can get cleverer is a crucial one. If you believe that intelligence is hereditary and environmental effects are trivial, you may be sceptical. But environment does matter, and it matters most for children from the most socially disadvantaged backgrounds those who not only have the most to gain, but who are also the ones most likely to gain from our efforts to make all kids cleverer. And one thing we can be fairly sure will raise children's intelligence is sending them to school. In this wide-ranging enquiry into psychology, sociology, philosophy and cognitive science, David argues that with greater access to culturally accumulated information taught explicitly within a knowledge-rich curriculum children are more likely to become cleverer, to think more critically and, subsequently, to live happier, healthier and more secure lives.;Furthermore, by sharing valuable insights into what children truly need to learn during their formative school years, he sets out the numerous practical ways in which policy makers and school leaders can make better choices about organising schools, and how teachers can communicate the knowledge that will make the most difference to young people as effectively and efficiently as possible. David underpins his discussion with an exploration of the evolutionary basis for learning and also untangles the forms of practice teachers should be engaging their students in to ensure that they are acquiring expertise, not just consolidating mistakes and misconceptions.There are so many competing suggestions as to how we should improve education that knowing how to act can seem an impossible challenge. Once you have absorbed the arguments in this book, however, David hopes you will find the simple question that he asks himself whenever he encounters new ideas and initiatives Will this make children cleverer? as useful as he does.;Suitable for teachers, school leaders, policy makers and anyone involved in educations