Creating Literacy Communities as Pathways to Student Success

Creating Literacy Communities as Pathways to Student Success
Author: Jessica Singer Early
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2018-10-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0429815158

Creating Literacy Communities as Pathways to Student Success offers a model for using literacy as a pathway for secondary students to explore fields from which they are often systematically excluded. In particular, this volume demonstrates how access for young Latina students to STEM related fields can be bolstered through engagement with mentors in writing and reading programs. Written for pre- and in-service teachers, as well as scholars across disciplines, this book aims to re-conceptualize the ways in which writing can best serve ethnically and linguistically diverse students, especially girls.

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges
Author: Thomas R. Bailey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2015-04-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674368282

In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.

Many Pathways to Literacy

Many Pathways to Literacy
Author: Eve Gregory
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2004-02-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1134402392

This unique and visionary text is a compilation of fascinating studies conducted in a variety of cross-cultural settings where children learn language and literacy with siblings, grandparents, peers and community members. Focusing on the knowledge and skills of children often invisible to educators, these illuminating studies highlight how children skilfully draw from their varied cultural and linguistic worlds to make sense of new experiences. The vastly experienced team of contributors provide powerful demonstrations of the generative activity of young children and their mediating partners - family members, peers, and community members - as they syncretise languages, literacies and cultural practices from varied contexts. Through studies grounded in home, school, community school, nursery and church settings, we see how children create for themselves radical forms of teaching and learning in ways that are not typically recognised, understood or valued in schools. This book will be invaluable reading for teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policy-makers who seek to understand the many pathways to literacy and use that knowledge to affect real change in schools.

The Learning Communities Guide to Improving Reading Instruction

The Learning Communities Guide to Improving Reading Instruction
Author: Valerie Hastings Gregory
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2017-02-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1634507924

The themes of attending to individual needs, providing assessment-driven instruction, and creating long-term, focused professional development plans are solid and consistent throughout.

Mobilizing the Community to Help Students Succeed

Mobilizing the Community to Help Students Succeed
Author: Hugh B. Price
Publisher: ASCD
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2010-06-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1416612122

In Mobilizing the Community to Help Students Succeed, Hugh B. Price shares the lessons learned while helping to do just that during his tenure as president of the National Urban League. Here, find out how educators can apply some of the same tactics to inspire and award academic achievement in even the most challenged school districts. Using real-life examples and shared wisdom from successful educators and community organizers coast to coast, Price describes ways to * Create initiatives such as community-based honor societies, parades, and rallies to motivate students and reward achievement; * Include parents in motivational efforts to rekindle students' natural curiosity and enthusiasm for learning; * Enlist the support of businesses and other community partners for both financial support and volunteer help; * Maximize use of the media to publicize student accomplishments; and * Set up programs that honor student achievement year-round. According to Price, a highly informed and engaged community is essential to closing the achievement gap. This book underscores that community-based efforts to motivate student success can be effective because they have been effective. The message for educators, parents, business and civic leaders, and members of the general public is that their consistent and creative involvement will result in invigorated youngsters, inspired to achieve in school and in life.

Overcoming Educational Racism in the Community College

Overcoming Educational Racism in the Community College
Author: Angela C. Long
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: EDUCATION
ISBN: 9781003446248

Overall, nearly half of all incoming community college students "drop-out" within twelve months of enrolling, with students of color and the economically disadvantaged faring far worse. Given the high proportion of underserved students these colleges enroll, the detrimental impact on their communities, and for the national economy as a whole at a time of diversifying demographics, is enormous. This book addresses this urgent issue by bringing together nationally recognized researchers whose work throws light on the structural and systemic causes of student attrition, as well as college presidents and leaders who have successfully implemented strategies to improve student outcomes. The book is divided into five sections, each devoted to a demographic group: African Americans, Native Americans/American Indians, Latino Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and Caucasian students in poverty. Each section in turn comprises three chapters, the first providing an up-to-date summary of research findings about barriers and attainments pertaining to the corresponding population, the second the views of a community college president, and the final chapter offering a range of models and best practices for achieving student success. The analyses--descriptions of cutting edge programs--and recommendations for action will commend this volume to everyone concerned about equity and completion rates in the community college sector, from presidents and senior administrators through faculty and student affairs leaders. For educational researchers, it fills blanks on data about attrition and persistence patterns of minority students attending community colleges.

Redefining Student Success

Redefining Student Success
Author: Ken Kay
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2021-07-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1071831313

Be the leader of a fresh, bold, enduring vision of education for your district or school. The future of learning has arrived, and it requires bold educational leadership and a dramatic redefinition of what it means to be a successful student today. Redefining Student Success invites you to lead this transformation with audacity. It engages leaders with the concepts and actions needed to reimagine schools, address inequities, and help today’s students develop the skills they need for personal, economic, and civic success. This vital guide supports transformative leadership with Concrete guidance on how to create a Portrait of a Graduate and Portrait of an Educator which will help ensure teachers have a unified vision for professional growth and student success. Reflection prompts that help you recognize your strengths, spark discussion among stakeholders, and identify next steps for inspired action. Compelling examples of students already engaged in creative, self-directed problem-solving around issues that matter to them and their communities, together with stories that illustrate how districts and schools have arrived at their own vision of what education must become. Companion guides to 21st century learning for parents and students available online. The time is now to reset educational outcomes, sync schools with the demands of 21st century society, and meet the needs of every learner, in every community.

The Costs of Completion

The Costs of Completion
Author: Robin G. Isserles
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421442086

To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree—or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success. The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisis—academic momentum—suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated, thereby increasing their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. A host of what Isserles terms "innovative disruptions" have been implemented as a way to improve on community college completion, but because disruptions are primarily driven by degree attainment, Isserles argues that they place learning and developing as afterthoughts while ignoring the complex lives that define so many community college students. Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching largely first-generation community college students as well as an analysis of five years of student enrollment patterns, college experiences, and life narratives, Isserles takes pains to center students and their experiences. She proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strive to not only get students through college—quantifying credit accumulation and the like—but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. Ultimately, The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them.

Remaking Literacy

Remaking Literacy
Author: Jacie Maslyk
Publisher: Solution Tree
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781947604698

"In Remaking Literacy: Connecting ELA and Hands-On Making, author Jacie Maslyk transforms literacy teaching and learning by integrating maker education into the classroom. Maker education--an approach to instruction that emphasizes hands-on learning experiences--creates innovative opportunities that shape students into creative thinkers. Maslyk shares practical, research-based strategies for incorporating creativity and design thinking into literary instruction. By reading this book, K-5 educators will learn how to reimagine their classrooms so that students' learning will develop in engaging and visible ways"--

Pathways to the Common Core

Pathways to the Common Core
Author: Lucy Calkins
Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780325043555

Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at the Reading and Writing Project have helped thousands of educators design their own pathways to the Common Core. Now, with Pathways to the Common Core, they are ready to help you find your way. Designed for teachers, school leaders, and professional learning communities looking to navigate the gap between their current literacy practices and the ideals of the Common Core, Pathways to the Common Core will help you: understand what the standards say, suggest, and what they don't say; recognize the guiding principles that underpin the reading and writing standards; identify how the Common Core's infrastructure supports a spiraling K-12 literacy curriculum; and scrutinize the context in which the CCSS were written and are being unrolled. In addition to offering an analytical study of the standards, this guide will also help you and your colleagues implement the standards in ways that lift the level of teaching and learning throughout your school.--