Administration Books - Page 6

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

James Paul Gee

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Subjects -> Entertainment -> Puzzles & Games -> Video & Electronic Games

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Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A controversial look at the positive things that can be learned from video games by a well known professor of education.James Paul Gee begins his new book with "I want to talk about vide games--yes, even violent video games--and say some positive things about them." With this simple but explosive beginning, one of America's most well-respected professors of education looks seriously at the good that can come from playing video games. Gee is interested in the cognitive development that can occur when someone is trying to escape a maze, find a hidden treasure and, even, blasting away an enemy with a high-powered rifle. Talking about his own video-gaming experience learning and using games as diverse as Lara Croft and Arcanum, Gee looks at major specific cognitive activities:* How individuals develop a sense of identity* How one grasps meaning* How one evaluates and follow a command* How one picks a role model* How one perceives the worldThis is a ground-breaking book that takes up a new electronic method of education and shows the positive upside it has for learning.

Interviewing As Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education And the Social Sciences

Irving Seidman

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The third edition of this bestselling resource provides clear, step-by-step guidance for new and experienced interviewers to help them develop, shape, and reflect on interviewing as a qualitative research process. While proposing a phenomenological approach to in-depth interviewing, the author also includes principles and methods that can be adapted to a range of interviewing approaches. Using concrete examples of interviewing techniques to illustrate the issues under discussion, this classic text helps readers to understand the complexities of interviewing and its connections to broader issues of qualitative research. Equally popular for individual and classroom use, the new Third Edition of "Interviewing as Qualitative Research" features: an introduction to the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process in its historical context, including an expanded discussion of informed consent and its complexities; special attention to the rights of participants in interview research as those rights interact with ethical issues; and, updated references and suggestions for additional reading for a deeper consideration of methodological, ethical, and philosophical issues, including relevant Internet resources.

We Can't Teach What We Don't Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools (Multicultural Education (Paper))

Gary R. Howard

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Good ramp up, but... 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Three stars just for the "crazy uncle in the attic" metaphor. I intend to borrow that one someday- it captures what I've been trying for years to articulate.

The first two thirds of the book were interesting, though nothing you haven't heard elsewhere. Well, maybe not everyone was blessed with parents as enlightened as mine. That's the only explanation I can come up with.

The last third of the book, which SHOULD have been practical How-Tos instead turned into diffuseness and academic word play. It was very disappointing after how direct the first part was.

All authors claiming to teach me how to do something should first write a draft that lays out their proposals in point form. If you can't put it in point form, it's too academic. I want things I can take to a classroom.

Editorial Review:

Once again, in this expanded Second Edition, Gary Howard outlines what good teachers know, what they do, and how they embrace culturally responsive teaching. Howard brings his bestselling book completely up to date with today's school reform efforts and includes a new introduction and a new chapter that speak directly to current issues such as closing the achievement gap, and to recent legislation such as No Child Left Behind. With our nation's student population becoming ever more diverse, and teachers remaining largely White, this book is now more important than ever. It is a must-read in universities and school systems throughout the country.

Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education Series)

L. Dee Fink

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Dee Fink poses a fundamental question for all teachers: "How can I create courses that will provide significant learning experiences for my students?" In the process of addressing this question, he urges teachers to shift from a content-centered approach to a learning-centered approach that asks "What kinds of learning will be significant for students, and how can I create a course that will result in that kind of learning?"

Fink provides several conceptual and procedural tools that will be invaluable for all teachers when designing instruction. He takes important existing ideas in the literature on college teaching (active learning, educative assessment), adds some new ideas (a taxonomy of significant learning, the concept of a teaching strategy), and shows how to systematically combine these in a way that results in powerful learning experiences for students. Acquiring a deeper understanding of the design process will empower teachers to creatively design courses for significant learning in a variety of situations.

The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education

Grace Llewellyn

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Total reviews: 85 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Must Read 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This is the only review I have ever written so take note.
This book changed my life.I went through school being vaugly aware of the opression I was suffering but I figured,as most teens would,that it was unavoidable. Keep in mind I was no deliquent. I made highest honors every term and was in AP classes. Despite that, I knew there was more to life than my grades. This book was easy for me to relate to and easy to understand.It listed the logical steps to leaving school plus dealing with legal ramifications and other things like that.I first read this book 4 months ago and I am now a 16 year old attending college.It can be done!Must read for everyone.

Editorial Review:

An estimated 700,000 American children are now taught at home. This book tells teens how to take control of their lives and get a "real life." Young people can reclaim their natural ability to teach themselves and design a personalized education program. Grace Llewellyn explains the entire process, from making the decision to quit school, to discovering the learning opportunities available.

The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom

James W. Stigler, James Hiebert

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Comparing math teaching practices in Japan and Germany with those in the United States, two leading researchers offer a surprising new view of teaching and a bold action plan for improving education inside the American classroom.

For years our schools and children have lagged behind international standards in reading, arithmetic, and most other areas of academic achievement. It is no secret that American schools are in dire need of improvement, and that education has become our nation's number-one priority. But even though almost every state in the country is working to develop higher standards for what students should be learning, along with the means for assessing their progress, the quick-fix solutions implemented so far haven't had a noticeable impact.

The problem, as James Stigler and James Hiebert explain, is that most efforts to improve education fail because they simply don't have any impact on the quality of teaching inside classrooms. Teaching, they argue, is cultural. American teachers aren't incompetent, but the methods they use are severely limited, and American teaching has no system in place for getting better. It is teaching, not teachers, that must be changed.

In The Teaching Gap, the authors draw on the conclusions of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) -- an innovative new study of teaching in several cultures -- to refocus educational reform efforts. Using videotaped lessons from dozens of randomly selected eighth-grade classrooms in the United States, Japan, and Germany, the authors reveal the rich, yet unfulfilled promise of American teaching and document exactly how other countries have consistently stayed ahead of us in the rate their children learn. Our schools can be restructured as places where teachers can engage in career-long learning and classrooms can become laboratories for developing new, teaching-centered ideas. If provided the time they need during the school day for collaborative lesson study and plan building, teachers will change the way our students learn.

James Stigler and James Hiebert have given us nothing less than a "best practices" for teachers -- one that offers proof that how teachers teach is far more important than increased spending, state-of-the-art facilities, mandatory homework, or special education -- and a plan for change that educators, teachers, and parents can implement together.

The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing

Alfie Kohn

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Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The homework myth disspelled or how we're teaching children not to love learning examined in exceptional book 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

We live in an achievement driven culture that is so obsessed with success we often don't question the value of those things we do to reach them. Alife Kohn's book The Homework Myth takes us down the rabbit hole showing us the flawed assumptions and conlcusions of numberous studies and how they shape school policy teaaching children not to love learning but to hate it. We categorize, grade and put our children into slots using homework, "standardized testing" and other devices that often are meaningless measures of true intelligence or success. As Kohn quotes one writer, grades are "an inadquate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined mastery of anunknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material". Got that? In other words, grades are as subjective and uninformative as can be. The same can be said for homework and how it adds to our children's understanding of the material. Kohn takes apart multiple studies that have been done to support the concept of homework and discovers that these flawed studies were designed to prove their point rather than find out the true meaning and understanding of homework in our children's ability to learn.

Kohn suggests that a placebo like effect is seen in studies designed to evaluate the effectiveness of homework and he has a valid point. He points out the flawed thinking of teachers and school districts believing that homework correlates to academic benefit. There's no clear cut evidence of this. He also looks at the detrimental effect that homework has on family life, social interaction and questions the nonacademic benefits of the homework "system". He shows why homework persists based on miconceptions about how people learn, competitiveness and an essential distrust of children and how they spent their time (something you'll also find in the business world which is why "busy work" is assgined as well despite the fact that it burns out employees and makes them not enjoy the work they do. In a sense, I suppose you could argue that homework prepares children for the pointlessness of the work world--i.e., "better get used to it" as Kohn refers to the pointless tasks we'll be asked to do later in life).

Kohn also takes on the myths of testing (since homework often is preparation for testing particularly to make sure that children do well on standardized testing).

We find out nothing about whether a child's learning has improved or deepened but instead how well a child can memorize by rote. Every hour spent making sure that children do well on standardized testing is time taken away from true learning (you're teaching them to take the test well not to develop critical thinking skills).

For example, he looks at standarized testing and discovers that
1) Timed tests put a premuium not on thoughtfulness but on speed.
2) Tests that focus on "basic skills" are geared towards cramming facts that are useless without the connection to comprehension and ideas.
3) Most children under the ages of eight or nine are tripped up by the format because they don't understand its purpose and, as a result, don't do well.
4) "norm-referenced" studies are designed not to measure knowledge but, instead, to artifically rank students focusing on the competition not on comprehension. In other words, some children are better at taking these tests than others but it doesn't give us a sense of their depth or understanding of the materials and is useless.

This book should be required reading for school administrators, teachers and**yes**parents. It's a thoughtful look at how we are destroying the desire to learn with often untested or assumptions that we make about human behavior. I highly recommend this book for any school age parent simply because it will help you understand the system and its flaws.

Editorial Review:

So why do we continue to administer this modern cod liver oil-or even demand a larger dose? Kohn’s incisive analysis reveals how a set of misconceptions about learning and a misguided focus on competitiveness has left our kids with less free time, and our families with more conflict. Pointing to stories of parents who have fought back-and schools that have proved educational excellence is possible without homework-Kohn demonstrates how we can rethink what happens during and after school in order to rescue our families and our children’s love of learning.

Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America

Donna Foote

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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A revealing look inside a national phenomenon, Teach For America, which, since its founding in 1990, has pursued one of the most daring—and controversial—strategies for closing the educational achievement gap between the richest and poorest students in the country.

The story is set in South Los Angeles at Locke High School, an institution founded in 1967 in the spirit of renewal that followed the devastating Watts riots but that, four decades on, has made frustratingly little progress in lifting the fortunes of the area’s mostly black and Latino children. Into this place, which resembles a prison as much as a school, are dropped a group of “recruits” from Teach For America, the fast-growing organization devoted to undoing generations of disadvantage through a fiercely regimented selection and deployment of America’s best and brightest. Nearly twenty thousand top college graduates apply for two thousand slots. Then, with only a summer of training, the lucky ones are sent to face the most desperate of classroom environments.

Giving us a year in the life of Locke through the absorbing experiences of four TFA corps members—Rachelle, Phillip, Hrag, and Taylor—Donna Foote recounts the progress of their idealistic but unorthodox mission and shares its results, by turns exhausting, exhilarating, maddening, and unforgettable. As the four struggle to negotiate the expectations of their Locke colleagues (most conventionally trained, many skeptical) and the relentlessly exacting demands of the overseers at TFA headquarters (to say nothing of the typical stresses of youth), we see these young people assume a level of responsibility that might crush a seasoned educator. Limited training must often be supplemented with improvisation in a school where Rachelle’s special ed biology students prove to need remedial reading more urgently than lab work, while Taylor’s ninth-grade English classes show themselves equal to discussing Shakespeare. Through it all, these teachers are sustained not only by the missionary fervor of their cause but also by the intermittent evidence that they can make a tangible difference.

Without romanticizing the successes or minimizing the failures, Relentless Pursuit relates, through the experiences of these four new teachers, the strengths, the foibles, and the peculiarities of an operation to accomplish what no government program has yet managed — to overcome one of the most basic and vexing of social inequities, a problem we can no longer afford to ignore.

There Are No Shortcuts: How an inner-city teacher--winner of the American Teacher Award--inspires his students and challenges us to rethink the way we educate our children

Rafe Esquith

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Total reviews: 80 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The banner in Rafe Esquith’s classroom at Hobart Elementary School reads: “There are no shortcuts.” And his students are a testament to the power of that philosophy. These are kids who speak English as a second language, fourth--and fifth--graders who go to school in a part of Los Angeles where violence and despair are the norms of the neighborhood.

But the statistics are not what you’d expect: Esquith’s students score in the country’s top 10 percent on standardized tests and go on to colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, University of Chicago, Swarthmore, Stanford, and UCLA. How do they do it?

Esquith’s view—that learning isn’t easy and that it shouldn’t be—is an increasingly unusual take among educators. Success, he believes, comes from a strong work ethic and from dedication and perseverance on the part of children, teachers, and parents alike. But such ideas prove to be a hard sell to those who believe that hard work and fun must be mutually exclusive. On the other hand, visitors from all over the world have made a pilgrimage to this astonishing classroom.

Esquith’s students work hard. They are in the classroom at 6:30 a.m. and stay until 5:00 p.m. They come to school during their vacations. Each year the Hobart Shakespeareans, as Esquith’s students are known, perform one of the Bard’s plays—Sir Ian McKellen and Hal Holbrook are passionate patrons. These Renaissance children are outstanding mathematicians and scientists; they read Steinbeck and Malcolm X; they are artists; they play classical music and blistering rock 'n' roll. Above all, they are recognized for their impeccable manners, which serve them well as Esquith accompanies them all over the United States. They are, as many observers have commented, the gold standard in American education.

His former students in middle and high school return on Saturdays, where they read Ibsen, Chekhov, and eight Shakespeare plays a year. In their “Wake Up with Will” program, these eager youngsters travel the world with Esquith and his wife, from London to Paris to colleges all over the country. It’s a classroom where the American Dream really does come true.

There have been no shortcuts for Rafe Esquith, either. He had to learn the hard way: dealing with bureaucratic administrators, antagonistic colleagues, and his own impetuous and occasionally tactless, even confrontational, nature. But his history, peppered with funny and painful incidents, and a gallery of incisive portraits--Miss Mothball, Miss Busy-As-a-Bee, Mr. Incompetent--explains his extraordinary success as a teacher.

His scathing yet loving view from the front lines is the most trenchant look at American education to appear
in many years. It’s a full-alert warning signal, an inspiration, and a guide for teachers, parents, and all the rest of us who care about our country’s children.

Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education

Peter M. Senge, Nelda H. Cambron McCabe, Timothy Lucas, Art Kleiner, Janis Dutton, Bryan Smith

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Created by bestselling author and MIT senior lecturer Peter Senge and a team of educators and organizational change leaders, this new addition to the Fifth Discipline Resource Book series offers practical advice for educators, administrators, and parents on how to strengthen and rebuild our schools.

Few would argue that schools today are in trouble. The problems are sparking a national debate as educators, school boards, administrators, and parents search for ways to strengthen our school system at all levels, more effectively respond to the rapidly changing world around us, and better educate our children.

Bestselling author Peter Senge and his Fifth Discipline team have written Schools That Learn because educators—who have made up a sizable percentage of the audience for the popular Fifth Discipline books—have asked for a book that focuses specifically on schools and education, to help reclaim schools even in economically depressed or turbulent districts. One of the great strengths of Schools That Learn is its description of practices that are meeting success across the country and around the world, as schools attempt to learn, grow, and reinvent themselves using the principles of organizational learning. Featuring articles, case studies, and anecdotes from prominent educators such as Howard Gardner, Jay Forrester, and 1999 U.S. Superintendent of the Year Gerry House, as well as from impassioned teachers, administrators, parents, and students, the book offers a wealth of practical tools, anecdotes, and advice that people can use to help schools (and the classrooms in them and communities around them) learn to learn.

You'll read about schools, for instance, where principals introduce themselves to parents new to the school as "entering a nine-year conversation" about their children's education; where teachers use computer modeling to galvanize student insight into everything from Romeo and Juliet to the extinction of the mammoths; and where teachers' training is not just bureaucratic ritual but an opportunity to recharge and rethink the classroom.

In a fast-changing world where school violence is a growing concern, where standardized tests are applied as simplistic "quick fixes," where rapid advances in science and technology threaten to outpace schools' effectiveness, where the average tenure of a school district superintendent is less than three years, and where students, parents, and teachers feel weighed down by increasing pressures, Schools That Learn offers much-needed material for the dialogue about the educating of children in the twenty-first century.