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.

Mindstorms

Mindstorms
Author: Seymour A Papert
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 154167510X

In this revolutionary book, a renowned computer scientist explains the importance of teaching children the basics of computing and how it can prepare them to succeed in the ever-evolving tech world. Computers have completely changed the way we teach children. We have Mindstorms to thank for that. In this book, pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert uses the invention of LOGO, the first child-friendly programming language, to make the case for the value of teaching children with computers. Papert argues that children are more than capable of mastering computers, and that teaching computational processes like de-bugging in the classroom can change the way we learn everything else. He also shows that schools saturated with technology can actually improve socialization and interaction among students and between students and teachers. Technology changes every day, but the basic ways that computers can help us learn remain. For thousands of teachers and parents who have sought creative ways to help children learn with computers, Mindstorms is their bible.

Learners Without Borders

Learners Without Borders
Author: Yong Zhao
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2021-06-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1506377386

The future of education centers empowered students in a global learning ecosystem. Despite decades of reform, the traditional borders of education—graduation, curriculum, classrooms, schools—have failed to deliver on the goals of excellence and equity. Despite massive societal changes, education remains controlled by an old mindset. It is time to change that limiting mindset and, more importantly, the ineffective practices in education. To truly serve all learners, future classrooms must remove the boundaries of learning and become student-centered, culturally responsive, and personalized—supportive and equitable environments where each student can direct their own learning and seek multiple pathways to skills and knowledge in a global learning ecosystem. This compelling call for transformative change offers all involved in education Evidence-based arguments that reveal the need to break the traditional borders that limit learning Strategies to personalize learning and remove the confinement of traditional pathways Examples from around the world to create equitable and student-centric learning environments Resources for creating a school learning environment that expands opportunities for personalized learning into the global learning ecosystem It is time to now imagine a different kind of learning, without borders, and to begin the shifts in practice that will result in personalized learning for all students.

Class Warfare

Class Warfare
Author: Steven Brill
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2012-08-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 145161201X

This work looks at why many of America's schools are failing and relates how parents, activists, and education reformers are joining together to fix a system that works for adults but consistently fails the children it is meant to educate. In it the author takes a look at the adults who are fighting over America's failure to educate its children, and points the way to reversing that failure.

Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education

Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education
Author: Susan Wise Bauer
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0393285979

“If you read only one book on educating children, this should be the book.… With a warm, informative voice, Bauer gives you the knowledge that will help you flex the educational model to meet the needs of your child.” —San Francisco Book Review Our K–12 school system isn’t a good fit for all—or even most—students. It prioritizes a single way of understanding the world over all others, pushes children into a rigid set of grades with little regard for individual maturity, and slaps “disability” labels on differences in learning style. Caught in this system, far too many young learners end up discouraged. This informed, compassionate, and practical guidebook will show you how to take control of your child’s K–12 experience and negotiate the school system in a way that nurtures your child’s mind, emotions, and spirit. Understand why we have twelve grades, and why we match them to ages. Evaluate your child’s maturity, and determine how to use that knowledge to your advantage. Find out what subject areas we study in school, why they exist—and how to tinker with them. Discover what learning disabilities and intellectual giftedness are, how they can overlap, how to recognize them, and how those labels can help (or hinder) you. Work effectively with your child’s teachers, tutors, and coaches. Learn to teach important subjects yourself. Challenge accepted ideas about homework and standardized testing. Help your child develop a vision for the future. Reclaim your families’ priorities (including time for eating together, playing, imagining, traveling, and, yes, sleeping!). Plan for college—or apprenticeships. Consider out-of-the-box alternatives.

Evolving Education

Evolving Education
Author: Katie Martin
Publisher: Impress, LP
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2021-07-26
Genre:
ISBN: 9781948334341

It's time to create a new normal. It's time to leave behind practices that don't best serve all learners and educators, and to prioritize what matters most: relationships, connection, purpose, flexibility, agency, and authentic learning. Education must evolve. Looking to learners will help us see what's working, what's challenging, and, ultimately, what's possible. To ensure that all of those learners thrive, we'll need to use insight from our own experiences, research from the field, and new tools and approaches to adapt our practices. In Evolving Education, Dr. Katie Martin advocates for a much-needed shift to a learner-centered teaching model. Learner-centered education creates purposeful, personalized, authentic, and competency-based experiences that help students develop skills that empower them to learn, grow, and solve problems that matter to them and others. Following on Martin's previous book, Learner-Centered Innovation, Evolving Education offers a deeper dive into how educators can harness new technologies, learning sciences, and pedagogy that center learners and learning. After all, Martin argues, if we truly want to develop knowledge, habits, and skills in students, we have to know them, love them, and help them see the full beauty of who they are and what they can become. Endorsements "Evolving Education clearly articulates how to redefine success, create powerful learning experiences, and support them with enabling conditions. This would make a great book study for any school faculty or community group." -Tom Vander Ark, CEO of Getting Smart "Katie Martin absolutely nailed it in Evolving Education. A learner-centered paradigm requires that we examine beliefs and biases and disrupt systems that do not serve each and every learner. This work requires innovation, creativity, flexibility, and heart. This book is the perfect mix of incredible storytelling, inspiration, and concrete strategy." -Katie Novak, EdD, author of UDL and Blended Learning

Changing Our Minds

Changing Our Minds
Author: Dr. Naomi Fisher
Publisher: Robinson
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 147214550X

Children are born full of curiosity, eager to participate in the world. They learn as they live, with enthusiasm and joy. Then we send them to school. We stop them from playing and actively exploring their interests, telling them it's more important to sit still and listen. The result is that for many children, their motivation to learn drops dramatically. The joy of the early years is replaced with apathy and anxiety. This is not inevitable. We are socialised to believe that schooling is synonymous with education, but it's only one approach. Self-directed education puts the child back in control of their learning. This enables children, including those diagnosed with special educational needs, to flourish in their own time and on their own terms. It enables us to put wellbeing at the centre of education. Changing Our Minds brings together research, theory and practice on learning. It includes interviews with influential thinkers in the field of self-directed education and examples from families alongside practical advice. This essential guide will give you an understanding of why self-directed education makes sense, how it works, and what to do to put it into action yourself.

Education to Better Their World

Education to Better Their World
Author: Marc Prensky
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2016
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0807774944

In his most visionary book, internationally renowned educator Marc Prensky presents a compelling alternative to how and what we teach our children. Drawing on emerging world trends, he elaborates a comprehensive vision for K–12 education that includes new goals, new means, a new curriculum, a new kind of teaching, and a new use of technology. “Marc Prensky—one of the smartest people working in educational reform today—offers us a lucid, inspiring, optimistic, doable, and crucial blueprint for how we can build a future with the schools children desperately need in our modern, high-risk, highly complex, fast-changing, and imperiled world.” —James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Regents’ Professor, Arizona State University “Marc Prensky was always ahead of his time. Education to better their world continues this trend in spades. This book is a goldmine and a powerful wakeup call that the future is already here—in pockets right now but a harbinger of what is rapidly emerging. Read the book and make yourself part of the future today. As we are finding in our own work, students are agents of change—in pedagogy, in learning environments, and of society itself. Exciting possibilities await!” —Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus, OISE/University of Toronto “Marc Prensky’s answer to the question ‘What is the purpose of education?’—that education should now empower youth to improve their communities and the world—would unleash the energy, creativity, and compassion of students and teachers in ways we have never imagined. We need the better world Prensky envisions and we need it now.” —Milton Chen, The George Lucas Educational Foundation “Prensky offers perhaps the most compelling case and model yet articulated by anyone for today’s globally-empowered children. A must-read book for all educators and anyone who cares about education.” —James Tracey, Head of School, Rocky Hill School, RI “Wow. As a takeaway it is good—very good.” —John Seeley Brown “A great book. Filled with ‘food for thought’, common sense, provocative ideas and fun to read.” —Nieves Segovia, Presidenta, Institucion Educativa SEK (SEK International Schools)

Beautiful Risk of Education

Beautiful Risk of Education
Author: Gert J. J. Biesta
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317263308

This is a book about what many teachers know but are increasingly being prevented from talking about: that real education always involves a risk. The risk is there because, as W. B. Yeats has put it, education is not about filling a bucket but about lighting a fire. It is there because students are not to be seen as objects to be moulded and disciplined, but as subjects of action and responsibility. The Beautiful Risk of Education is organised around a critical discussion of seven key educational concepts: creativity, communication, teaching, learning, emancipation, democracy, and virtuosity. By opposing the risk aversion that characterises many contemporary educational policies and practices, Gert J.J. Biesta makes a strong argument for giving risk a central place in our educational endeavours and brings risk taking to the forefront of a critical pedagogical practice.

A Good Education

A Good Education
Author: Margaret White
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2018-01-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1351270117

This book provides an answer to one of the key questions of our time: namely, what constitutes a good education. Presenting a ‘four-dimensional’ model, it directly considers the essential elements a good education should include. Through forging this framework and outlaying its origins, implications and practice, the book explains how a good contemporary education can be defined and implemented. From the premise that such educational essentials are neither the preserve of the elite nor a minimum standard, White's exploration keeps the child at the heart of the discussion, focusing on every pupil's worth, identity, interactions and development. The author offers a detailed and rigorous perspective reflecting on extensive professional experience, starting with a consideration of the current educational climate and progressing through the book's three parts: looking for a good education creating a model of good education applications, implications and implementation of the model. A Good Education recognises the transformative power of education and reflects on the importance of human factors: teachers' provision for their pupils and students' ability to flourish. This book is addressed to those actively engaged in or concerned about educational provision: graduates entering teaching, school leaders, policy-makers and parents. It also speaks more broadly to all those who know that a good education really matters.