Needs Assessment

Needs Assessment
Author: James W. Altschuld
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2010
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1412975573

This volume four of The Needs Assessment Kit provides a good overview of how to: analyze two distinct types of data; pull them together in a meaningful way; and to derive priorities from the collation of the information that has been generated by the needs assessment. What should result is a stronger foundation for needs-related decisions and one that will stand the scrutiny of involved and questioning audiences. áThis text offers guidance not absolute solutions to help needs assessment committees (NACs) and their facilitators work through the complexities of analysis and subsequent prioritization.

Needs Assessment

Needs Assessment
Author: James W. Altschuld
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2010
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1412975840

In 1995, Witkin and Altschuld proposed a three phase process model of needs assessment: - Preassessment (learning as much as possible from existing, inexpensive sources) - Assessment (collecting new information about the needs in consideration) - Postassessment (prioritizing needs, understanding their causes, and translating priorities into action plans for organizations). The model has been extensively re-conceptualized and forms the basis for this book. The content includes a user-oriented approach to a comprehensive overview of the three phases and the 14 key steps necessary to implement them. Numerous examples and practical illustrations are given throughout the text as guidance for needs assessors and those who do research on the topic. An extensive glossary of needs-related terms and an outline of a final report are also provided. The book is the first one in the Needs Assessment KIT with connections to the other four.

The Agile College

The Agile College
Author: Nathan D. Grawe
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421440245

Following Grawe's seminal first book, this volume answers the question: How can a college or university prepare for forecasted demographic disruptions? Demographic changes promise to reshape the market for higher education in the next 15 years. Colleges are already grappling with the consequences of declining family size due to low birth rates brought on by the Great Recession, as well as the continuing shift toward minority student populations. Each institution faces a distinct market context with unique organizational strengths; no one-size-fits-all answer could suffice. In this essential follow-up to Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, Nathan D. Grawe explores how proactive institutions are preparing for the resulting challenges that lie ahead. While it isn't possible to reverse the demographic tide, most institutions, he argues persuasively, can mitigate the effects. Drawing on interviews with higher education leaders, Grawe explores successful avenues of response, including • recruitment initiatives • retention programs • revisions to the academic and cocurricular program • institutional growth plans • retrenchment efforts • collaborative action Throughout, Grawe presents readers with examples taken from a range of institutions—small and large, public and private, two-year and four-year, selective and open-access. While an effective response to demographic change must reflect the individual campus context, the cases Grawe analyzes will prompt conversations about the best paths forward. The Agile College also extends projections for higher education demand. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study, the book updates prior work by incorporating new information on college-going after the Great Recession and pushes forecasts into the mid-2030s. What's more, the analysis expands to examine additional aspects of the higher education market, such as dual enrollment, transfer students, and the role of immigration in college demand.

Prioritizing the Common Core

Prioritizing the Common Core
Author: Larry Ainsworth
Publisher: Lead + Learn Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2013
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1935588419

The consensus among educators nationwide is that in-depth instruction paired with focused assessment of essential concepts and skills are far more effective than superficially covering every concept and skill in the standards. Educators are faced with the task of teaching all standards while meeting the extraordinary range of student learning needs. Prioritizing the Common Core offers common sense solutions to the dilemmas teachers face today in implementing the new, more rigorous national standards. Chapters present a rationale for prioritizing the Common Core, a step-by-step process for prioritizing standards in language arts and mathematics, strategies for soliciting feedback and input from everyone in the district or school prior to the final determination of the Priority Standards, and detailed summaries of the process schools in six different districts used to identify their Priority Standards, with accompanying commentary by those who directed the work.

Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement

Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement
Author: Randy Stoecker
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2016-05-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1439913528

"[This book] questions the prioritization and theoretical/philosophical underpinnings of the core concepts of service learning: 1. learning, 2. service, 3. community, and 4. change. By 'liberating' service learning, [the author] suggests reversing the prioritization of the concepts, starting with change, then community, then service, and then learning. In doing so, [the author] clarifies the benefits and purpose of this work, arguing that it will create greater pedagogical and community impact. [This book] challenges--and hopefully will change--our thinking about higher education community engagement."--

PRIMED for Character Education

PRIMED for Character Education
Author: Marvin W Berkowitz
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2021-04-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1351030248

Winner of the 2023 Outstanding Book Award from AERA's Moral Development and Education SIG! In PRIMED for Character Education, renowned character educator Marvin W Berkowitz boils down decades of research on evidence-based practices and thought-provoking field experience into a clear set of principles that leaders, administrators, and teacher-leaders can implement to help students thrive. The author’s original six-component framework offers a comprehensive guide to shaping purposeful learning environments, healthy relationships, core values and virtues, role models, empowerment, and long-term development in any PreK-12 school or district. This engaging and heartfelt book features tips for practice, anecdotes from award-winning schools, and straightforward tenets from moral education, social-emotional learning, and positive psychology.

The Executive Function Guidebook

The Executive Function Guidebook
Author: Roberta Strosnider
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-03-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1544338856

Teach some of the most important skills your students will ever need! Executive function skills—including self-regulation, focus, planning, and time-management—are essential to student success, but they must be taught and practiced. This unique guidebook provides a flexible seven-step model, incorporating UDL principles and the use of metacognition, for making executive-function training part of your classroom routine at any grade level. Features include: Descriptions of each skill and its impact on learning Examples of instructional steps to assist students as they set goals and work to achieve success. Strategies coded by competency and age/grade level Authentic snapshots and “think about” sections Templates for personalized goal-setting, data collection, and success plans Accompanying strategy cards

Scaling Software Agility

Scaling Software Agility
Author: Dean Leffingwell
Publisher: Pearson Education
Total Pages: 635
Release: 2007-02-26
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0321630068

“Companies have been implementing large agile projects for a number of years, but the ‘stigma’ of ‘agile only works for small projects’ continues to be a frequent barrier for newcomers and a rallying cry for agile critics. What has been missing from the agile literature is a solid, practical book on the specifics of developing large projects in an agile way. Dean Leffingwell’s book Scaling Software Agility fills this gap admirably. It offers a practical guide to large project issues such as architecture, requirements development, multi-level release planning, and team organization. Leffingwell’s book is a necessary guide for large projects and large organizations making the transition to agile development.” —Jim Highsmith, director, Agile Practice, Cutter Consortium, author of Agile Project Management “There’s tension between building software fast and delivering software that lasts, between being ultra-responsive to changes in the market and maintaining a degree of stability. In his latest work, Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell shows how to achieve a pragmatic balance among these forces. Leffingwell’s observations of the problem, his advice on the solution, and his description of the resulting best practices come from experience: he’s been there, done that, and has seen what’s worked.” —Grady Booch, IBM Fellow Agile development practices, while still controversial in some circles, offer undeniable benefits: faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements, and higher quality. However, agile practices have been defined and recommended primarily to small teams. In Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell describes how agile methods can be applied to enterprise-class development. Part I provides an overview of the most common and effective agile methods. Part II describes seven best practices of agility that natively scale to the enterprise level. Part III describes an additional set of seven organizational capabilities that companies can master to achieve the full benefits of software agility on an enterprise scale. This book is invaluable to software developers, testers and QA personnel, managers and team leads, as well as to executives of software organizations whose objective is to increase the quality and productivity of the software development process but who are faced with all the challenges of developing software on an enterprise scale.