This book explores the contributions, actual and potential, of complexity thinking to educational research and practice. While its focus is on the theoretical premises and the methodology, not specific applications, the aim is pragmatic--to present complexity thinking as an important and appropriate attitude for educators and educational researchers. Part I is concerned with global issues around complexity thinking, as read through an educational lens. Part II cites a diversity of practices and studies that are either explicitly informed by or that might be aligned with complexity research, and offers focused and practiced advice for structuring projects in ways that are consistent with complexity thinking. Complexity thinking offers a powerful alternative to the linear, reductionist approaches to inquiry that have dominated the sciences for hundreds of years and educational research for more than a century. It has captured the attention of many researchers whose studies reach across traditional disciplinary boundaries to investigate phenomena such as: How does the brain work? What is consciousness? What is intelligence? What is the role of emergent technologies in shaping personalities and possibilities? How do social collectives work? What is knowledge? Complexity research posits that a deep similarity among these phenomena is that each points toward some sort of system that learns. The authors’ intent is not to offer a complete account of the relevance of complexity thinking to education, not to prescribe and delimit, but to challenge readers to examine their own assumptions and theoretical commitments--whether anchored by commonsense, classical thought or any of the posts (such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postpositivism, postformalism, postepistemology) that mark the edges of current discursive possibility. Complexity and Education is THE introduction to the emerging field of complexity thinking for the education community. It is specifically relevant for educational researchers, graduate students, and inquiry-oriented teacher practitioners.

There is a big difference between assigning complex texts and teaching complex texts No matter what discipline you teach, learn how to use complexity as a dynamic, powerful tool for sliding the right text in front of your students’ at just the right time. Updates to this new edition include How-to’s for measuring countable features of any written work A rubric for analyzing the complexity of both literary and informational texts Classroom scenarios that show the difference between a healthy struggle and frustration The authors’ latest thinking on teacher modeling, close reading, scaffolded small group reading, and independent reading

Teaching as Principled Practice: Managing Complexity for Social Justice presents a practical vision for effective teacher development emphasizing social justice. This vision is encompassed in a set of six principles that underlie the authors' work with pre-service teachers, and is intended to guide one's practice in the classroom. The text's primary focus is on children and youth who have been traditionally underserved by educational institutions in the United States. It speaks directly to both pre-service and experienced teachers in a way that addresses the challenges of urban education for teachers and children.

Teacher professionalism in changing times -- Professional identities : teaching as emotional work -- Commitment as a key to quality : variations in teachers' work and lives -- A capacity for resilience -- Teachers' professional learning and development : combining the functional and attitudinal -- Learning as a school-led social endeavour -- The importance of high quality leadership -- Understanding complexity, building quality

Looking for a way to increase engagement, differentiate instruction, and incorporate more informational text and student writing into your curriculum? Teaching with Text Sets is your answer! This must-have resource walks you through the steps to create and use multi-genre, multimodal text sets for content-area and language arts study. It provides detailed information to support you as you choose topics, locate and evaluate texts, organize texts for instruction, and assess student learning. The guide is an excellent resource to help you meet the Common Core and other State Standards.

This edited volume brings together both established and emerging researcher voices from around the world to illustrate how complexity perspectives might contribute to new ways of researching and understanding the psychology of language learners and teachers in situated educational contexts. Chapter authors discuss their own perspectives on researching within a complexity paradigm, exemplified by concrete and original examples from their research histories. Moreover, chapters explore research approaches to a variety of learner and teacher psychological foci of interest in SLA. Examples include: anxiety, classroom group dynamics and group-level motivation, cognition and metacognition, emotions and emotion regulation strategies, learner reticence and silence, motivation, self-concept and willingness to communicate.

Understanding how task complexity affects second language learning, interaction and spoken and written performance is essential to informed decisions about task design and sequencing in TBLT programs. The chapters in this volume all examine evidence for claims of the Cognition Hypothesis that complex tasks should promote greater accuracy and complexity of speech and writing, as well as more interaction, and learning of information provided in the input to task performance, than simpler tasks. Implications are drawn concerning the basic pedagogic claim of the Cognition Hypothesis, that tasks should be sequenced for learners from simple to complex during syllabus design. Containing theoretical discussion of the Cognition Hypothesis, and cutting-edge empirical studies of the effects of task complexity on second language learning and performance, this book will be important reading for language teachers, graduate students and researchers in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and cognitive and educational psychology.