Guiding School Improvement with Action Research

Guiding School Improvement with Action Research
Author: Richard Sagor
Publisher: ASCD
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2000-05-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1416615903

Action research, explored in this book, is a seven-step process for improving teaching and learning in classrooms at all levels. Through practical examples, research tools, and easy-to-follow "implementation strategies," Richard Sagor guides readers through the process from start to finish. Learn how to uncover and use the data that already exist in your classrooms and schools to answer significant questions about your individual or collective concerns and interests. Sagor covers each step in the action research process in detail: selecting a focus, clarifying theories, identifying research questions, collecting data, analyzing data, reporting results, and taking informed action. Drawing from the experience of individual teachers, faculties, and school districts, Sagor describes how action research can enhance teachers' professional standing and efficacy while helping them succeed in settings characterized by increasingly diverse student populations and an emphasis on standards-based reform. The book also demonstrates how administrators and policymakers can use action research to bolster efforts related to accreditation, teacher supervision, and job-embedded staff development. Part how-to guide, part inspirational treatise, Guiding School Improvement with Action Research provides advice, information, and encouragement to anyone interested in reinventing schools as learning communities and restructuring teaching as the true profession it was meant to be.

Learning to Improve

Learning to Improve
Author: Anthony S. Bryk
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2015-03-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 161250793X

As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.” Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rates of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies for improving feedback to novice teachers. Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation’s schools and colleges.

Reconceptualizing Curriculum Development

Reconceptualizing Curriculum Development
Author: James Henderson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2014-12-05
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317648765

Reconceptualizing Curriculum Development provides accessible, clear guidance on curriculum problem solving and educational leadership through the practice of a synoptic curriculum study. This practice integrates three influential interpretations of curriculum—curriculum as deliberative artistry, curriculum as complicated conversation, and curriculum as currere—with John Dewey’s lifetime work on reflective inquiry. At its heart, the book advances a way of studying as a way of living with reference to the question: How might I live as a democratic educator? The study guidance is organized as an open-ended scaffolding of three embedded reflective inquiries informed by four deliberative conversations. Study recommendations are provided by a carefully selected team. The field-tested study-based approach is illustrated through a multi-layered, multi-voiced narrative collage of four experienced teachers’ personal journeys of understanding in a collegial study context. Applying William Pinar’s argument that a "conceptual montage" enabling teachers to lead complicated conversations should be the focus for curriculum development in the field’s current ‘post-reconceptualist’ moment, the book moves forward the educational aim of facilitating a holistic subject/self/social understanding through the practice of a balanced hermeneutics of suspicion and trust. It closes with a discussion of cross-cultural collaboration and advocacy, reflecting the interest of curriculum scholars in a wide range of countries in this study-based, lead-learning approach to curriculum development.

Succeeding with Standards

Succeeding with Standards
Author: Judy F. Carr
Publisher: ASCD
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2001
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0871205092

How to link all aspects of local curriculum to state and national standards. Explore the 11 components involved, and know the key issues to address.

Curriculum in Action

Curriculum in Action
Author: Annie Petersen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2020-01-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9781516598823

Curriculum in Action: Multiculturalism and the Human-Animal Connection introduces future and current K-12 educators to engaging animal themes and fosters the consideration and development of animal-focused lessons. The text illuminates the multifaceted roles animals have played in society, their cultural influences within diverse communities, and how teachers can introduce animal themes in the classroom in an empathetic, ethical, and considerate way. Each chap

Curriculum and Imagination

Curriculum and Imagination
Author: James McKernan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2007-08-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1134124708

Curriculum and Imagination describes an alternative ‘process’ model for designing developing, implementing and evaluating curriculum, suggesting that curriculum may be designed by specifying an educational process which contains key principles of procedure. This comprehensive and authoritative book: offers a practical and theoretical plan for curriculum-making without objectives shows that a curriculum can be best planned and developed at school level by teachers adopting an action research role complements the spirit and reality of much of the teaching profession today, embracing the fact that there is a degree of intuition and critical judgement in the work of educators presents empirical evidence on teachers’ human values. Curriculum and Imagination provides a rational and logical alternative for all educators who plan curriculum but do not wish to be held captive by a mechanistic ‘ends-means’ notion of educational planning. Anyone studying or teaching curriculum studies, or involved in education or educational planning, will find this important new book fascinating reading.

Vygotsky in Action in the Early Years

Vygotsky in Action in the Early Years
Author: Galina Dolya
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2009-09-10
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1135223467

Key to Learning is a unique programme of cognitive development activities for the Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 based on the concepts of Lev Vygotsky, one of the 20th century’s most influential theorists in the field of early years education.

Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action

Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action
Author: Radhika Iyengar
Publisher: Ibe on Curriculum, Learning, a
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9789004471801

Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action offers researchers, practitioners, donors, and decisionmakers insights into entry points for education systems change needed to reorient human society's relationship with our planetary systems.

Effective Universal Instruction

Effective Universal Instruction
Author: Kimberly Gibbons
Publisher: Guilford Publications
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2018-12-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1462536832

This accessible volume helps school leadership teams accomplish the crucial yet often overlooked task of improving universal instruction--Tier 1 within a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS). Strong universal instruction reduces the numbers of PreK–12 students who may need additional services and supports. Providing clear action steps and encouraging guidance, the expert authors present a roadmap for evaluating the effectiveness of Tier 1, identifying barriers to successful implementation, and making and sustaining instructional improvements. In a large-size format for easy photocopying, the book includes 27 reproducible checklists, worksheets, and forms. Purchasers get access to a Web page where they can download and print the reproducible materials. This book is in The Guilford Practical Intervention in the Schools Series, edited by Sandra M. Chafouleas.