Eye On Education
Awakening brilliance in the writer's workshop; using notebooks, mentor texts, and the writing process.
Drawing on her teaching experiences, Morris, an elementary language arts teacher who conducts writing workshops for teachers, provides ideas for creating writing workshops for students in elementary grades that use writer's notebooks, mentor texts, and the 6 traits. She goes over the fundamentals of these workshops, including materials and schedules, then explains how to use mentor texts to create curriculum, the purpose of the writer's notebook, collecting and selecting ideas in it, teaching students reflection and planning, drafting and sharing drafts, revision, polishing, publishing, portfolios, and conferencing, with lessons and student samples. No index is provided. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Dropout prevention fieldbook; best practices from the field.
Schargel, a former teacher, counselor, and administrator who runs a training firm that presents education workshops, outlines field-tested and research-based techniques and exercises that apply the 15 strategies from Strategies to Help Solve Our School Dropout Problem and Helping Students Graduate: A Strategic Approach to Dropout Prevention (co-authored by Schargel and the director of the National Dropout Center at Clemson U.). Those volumes explain what to do, while this volume shows how to predict and prevent student dropouts, for teachers, administrators, counselors, and special educators. Techniques have been drawn from schools, districts, programs, the US Department of Education, and state Departments of Education and list type of strategy, grade level, and specific users. Separate indexes by strategy and grade level, and those for administrators, counselors, and special educators, are provided. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The principal as student advocate; a guide for doing what's best for all students.
Norton (educational administration and policy studies, Arizona State U.), Larry K. Kelly, and Anna Battle aid school principals in assessing their traits and behaviors in relation to student advocacy. They define student advocacy as the behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs possessed by administrators who are advocates, and offer self-assessments and best practices for academic programs and other activities that foster the interests of all students. They discuss the importance of the inclusive school, student services and the principal's role, maintaining an orderly environment for teaching and learning and its relationship to student advocacy, and advocacy in relation to a school's special education program. No index is provided. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Professional development; what works, 2d ed.
Zepeda (lifelong education, administration, and policy, and educational administration and policy, U. of Georgia) supplies principals, professional development directors, teachers, and other leaders with a guide that shows how to plan and implement programs to promote teacher growth. She describes how to find time and plan professional development, how to support teachers, and how to evaluate and assess efforts. She then outlines specific forms that are collaborative and job-embedded: coaching, teacher and whole-faculty study groups, book studies, critical friends groups, lesson study, learning circles, action research, and portfolios. This edition expands coverage of job-embedded learning, has more on the theoretical grounding of professional development, updates references and figures, includes downloadable tools, and incorporates Learning Forward's revised Standards for Professional Learning. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
