The Soul of the Schoolhouse: Cultivating Student Engagement’s primary focus is to help readers understand the many, diverse factors that make up engaged learning and students’ motivation to learn. The authors acknowledge the importance of cognitive aspects of education and the techniques that skilled educators use to enhance the learning process; such information is contained in chapters on motivation and models of thinking about how to engage those in our schools. This tome also reflects the essential and interrelated nature of emotional, social, spiritual, and relational elements of engagement in the learning process. As such, chapters of this book cover such topics as educational leadership for engaged learning, school-community connections, co-curricular activities, models of curriculum design, and school law and policies that bolster student learning, as well.

Imagine Walden recast as a love story. This intimate memoir opens with its Brooklyn-born narrator standing on his head outside an old one-room schoolhouse amid 500 acres of remote woodlands in Iowa¿on the lam from a love affair gone sour and a myopic past. Structured like a schoolbook, each chapter is named after a school subject (i.e. Geography, Civics, Anatomy, What I Did On My Summer Vacation), which collectively forms an overall lesson plan for the author¿s personal reeducation. Turns out the Midwestern Heartland won¿t allow him to hide out forever. SCHOOLHOUSE is a modern day search for where identity, place, and heart all intersect. A Waldenesque study in both nature and human nature.

Anne Dyson confronts race and racism head-on with this ethnographic study of a child’s efforts to belong—to be a child among children. Follow the journey of a small Black child, Ta’Von, as he moves from a culturally inclusive preschool through the early grades in a school located in a majority white neighborhood. Readers will see Ta’Von encountering obstacles but finding agency and joy through writing and music-making, especially his love of the blues. Most attempts at desegregating schools are studied by reducing individual children to demographic statistics and test scores. This book, instead, provides a child’s perspective on challenges to classroom inclusion. Ta’Von’s journey demonstrates that it is within children’s peer worlds—formed in response to institutional policies and practices like desegregation initiatives, standardized testing, and a curricular focus on so-called “basic literacy skills”—that inequity becomes part of the experience of childhood. This book examines policies about literacy testing and teaching, including the potential power of the written word and of the arts. “Few researchers have had a career so embedded inside the lives of children in a classroom context as Anne Haas Dyson. This book should be on every literacy researcher’s shelf. It is a culmination of years of Dyson’s relentless fight against deficit framings of children and the deep inequalities that continue to persist in the world.” —Jennifer Rowsell, professor of literacies and social innovation, University of Bristol

A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere: this is the goal of the Khan Academy, a passion project that grew from an ex-engineer and hedge funder's online tutoring sessions with his niece, who was struggling with algebra, into a worldwide phenomenon. Today millions of students, parents, and teachers use the Khan Academy's free videos and software, which have expanded to encompass nearly every conceivable subject; and Academy techniques are being employed with exciting results in a growing number of classrooms around the globe. Like many innovators, Khan rethinks existing assumptions and imagines what education could be if freed from them. And his core idea-liberating teachers from lecturing and state-mandated calendars and opening up class time for truly human interaction-has become his life's passion. Schools seek his advice about connecting to students in a digital age, and people of all ages and backgrounds flock to the site to utilize this fresh approach to learning. In The One World Schoolhouse, Khan presents his radical vision for the future of education, as well as his own remarkable story, for the first time. In these pages, you will discover, among other things: How both students and teachers are being bound by a broken top-down model invented in Prussia two centuries ago Why technology will make classrooms more human and teachers more important How and why we can afford to pay educators the same as other professionals/DIV How we can bring creativity and true human interactivity back to learning/DIV Why we should be very optimistic about the future of learning. Parents and politicians routinely bemoan the state of our education system. Statistics suggest we've fallen behind the rest of the world in literacy, math, and sciences. With a shrewd reading of history, Khan explains how this crisis presented itself, and why a return to "mastery learning," abandoned in the twentieth century and ingeniously revived by tools like the Khan Academy, could offer the best opportunity to level the playing field, and to give all of our children a world-class education now. More than just a solution, The One World Schoolhouse serves as a call for free, universal, global education, and an explanation of how Khan's simple yet revolutionary thinking can help achieve this inspiring goal.