August 2016 Bookshelf
Books 25 August 2016
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Margaret Wheatley
Setting out on a path less traveled can be a frightening experience—particularly when a century-old system is trying to hold you back. Find the encouragement to press on through Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science. Explore how the natural phenomena of biology, quantum physics, and chaos theory can be applied to the leadership strategies you invoke in your unique learning environment. Discover the advantages of embracing the chaos of new systems creation and how, within the chaos, order will be found.
Scientific Teaching
Jo Handelsman, Sarah Miller, and Christine Pfund
From the outside, science can look like a step-by-step problem solving process with minimal improvisation. It seems quite different from the ever-changing field of education, which demands flexibility and creativity from all its participants. So, when authors Jo Handelsman, Sarah Miller, and Christine Pfund wanted to combine their love for science and apply it as a viable pedagogical approach, Scientific Teaching looked like a frivolous pursuit. However, their exploration of active learning, assessment, and diversity will take you on a worthwhile adventure in education design, which might just spark ideas for your learning environment.
Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom
Gary Stager and Sylvia Libow Martinez
Once an idea that seemed so farfetched you almost had to speak about it in low whispers, “learning by doing” is now looking to take the microphone away from old-school lectures. There are so many tools available today for educators to apply this methodology in their learning environment that it can become dizzying. So, Gary Stager and Sylvia Libow Martinez wrote Invent to Learn to cut through the noise and lay out clear, diverse strategies to fit your learners’ needs. With today’s technology, children are able to bring their imaginations to life, and—regardless of budgetary constraints—there’s a way for you to take advantage of the resources.
Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood
A.S. Neill, Edited by Albert Lamb
A.S. Neill was a man ahead of his time. Back in the early 20th-century, he had already grown frustrated by England’s grammar school system. So, he built what might be the first example of a truly learner-centered environment—one governed for and by learners. To share the insights, learnings, and mistakes he’d accumulated over his 50 years of experience, Neill authored Summerhill. Now a classic, this revised edition includes previously unseen excerpts and reflections from one of Summerhill’s learners.
UnCommon Learning: Creating Schools That Work for Kids
Eric Sheninger
What some consider an encore to his previous work, Digital Leadership, Eric Sheninger’s UnCommon Learning combines his professional experience as a high-school principal with his travels as an international consultant helping educators find the signal (transformation) in the noise (reformation). Sheninger painlessly carves his way through the thick walls of school-centered culture and brings light to the applicable strategies for redesigning the learning environment you work in.
How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
Paul Tough
Having just welcomed his first child into the world, Paul Tough began his reporting for How Children Succeed. Through his research, he discovered all he wanted was for his son “to be able to deal with failure.” Ignoring the false notion that “the faster a child develops skills, the better he does on tests, the better he’ll do in life,” Tough focused on a seemingly unreported reality that tied dispositions, rather than knowledge and skills, to success.
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