June 2016 Bookshelf
Books 18 June 2016
Creating Academic Momentum
Mike Raible
How do successful innovators take their big ideas and turn them into real, transformational actions? Few have spent more time studying why and how competency-based models flourish than Creating Academic Momentum author Mike Raible, who also penned Every Child, Every Day (a profile of Taylor County School District). Throughout Creating Academic Momentum, Raible delivers observations, ideas, and advice (but never instructions) on how to overcome institutional inertia and create environments where competency-based education can take root.
The Rise
Sarah Lewis
To the outside world, success often comes suddenly, as if shot out of a cannon. However, the most successful, original people know that their greatest achievements were more iteration than inspiration—built from countless, uncelebrated failures. Sarah Lewis’ The Rise is a study of people—like Frederick Douglass and J.K. Rowling—whose failures played a crucial role in developing the ideas and inventions that shape our world today. And, from celebrating the power of creative play to recognizing failure as essential, The Rise contains important and timely lessons for learners and educators today.
Leaving to Learn: How Out-of-School Learning Increases Student Engagement and Reduces Dropout Rates
Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski
In Leaving to Learn, Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski identify widespread disengagement as the prime driver of the dropout crisis that claims 1 learner every 12 seconds. Their solution? Open up the walls of school and connect learning in authentic ways to the outside world of life and work. The book is as much practical as intellectual. Big Picture Learning, co-founded by Washor, has spent 20 years bringing Leaving to Learn’s model to life through out-of-school internships, apprenticeships, and deeply personalized projects. Most of all, the book shows how recognition of relevant open-walled learning experiences engage and leverage the natural curiosity of all learners.
Re-Awakening the Learner: Creating Learner- Centric, Standards-Driven Schools
Copper Stoll and Gene Giddings
The premise behind Copper Stoll and Gene Giddings’ book: Re-awakening the sleeping giant in education. And, who else could that be but the learner? Bringing their combined experience, research, and vision to bear, Stoll and Giddings’ Re-Awakening the Learner shines a light on the systemic shift required to create a space and opportunity for learners to be involved in every step of their own education.
Making the Important Measurable, Not the Measurable Important
Dr. E. Jane Davidson and Joanne McEachen
Making the Important Measurable, Not the Measurable Important delves into the land of “what-ifs?” With one big “what-if” at the center of it all: What if we truly put learners first? In this mini-book, Dr. E. Jane Davidson and Joanne McEachen share their Learners FirstTM approach to education—where what really matters to and for learners is at the heart of everything. From new assessment measures to new tracking systems, their call is for a systems-wide transformation.
Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why
Paul Tough
Following his acclaimed How Children Succeed, Paul Tough offers Helping Children Succeed, which sets out to address the questions that made the latter so intriguing. Taking another look at the impact of poverty on children’s mental health and physical development, he shifts his focus to how we can help children develop the skills and ways of being—grit, curiosity, conscientiousness, self-control, and optimism—that empower them to forge their own paths and co-create their own learning.
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