This little book is a do-it-yourself speaking coach, mentor, and image consultant rolled into one! Confident and effective communication is a skill every public speaker craves and every exceptional speaker continually hones. Effective presentations require preparation, savvy performance, and sound communication to win audience approval and "buy-in." Inside Backstage Pass for Presenters, Trainers, and Public Speakers you will find strategies to help you do just that, including: Designing audience handouts and seating the audience Maintaining group energy and timing group work Working with angry and challenging audiences Structuring breaks for more active audience participation Quality closers that highlight session gains Self-evaluation assessments that include feedback from colleagues Lists of Q&A's and Do's and Don'ts This practical yet humorous handbook demonstrates how to get your point across and win your audience-by zeroing in on the keys to successful communication, whether your goal is to bring a change in ideas, attitude, or performance from your audience.
Graduation for All is a very practitioner-friendly guide for administrators interested in decreasing dropout rates. The book helps teachers develop comprehensive and effective models of dropout prevention and intervention for students most at risk of dropping out of school. It offers tools, guidelines, and information to use in the design, modification, or selection of evidence-based intervention models and strategies, rather than simply a list of strategies or a collection of programmes. In addition, tools and techniques for implementing prevention strategies into the larger school system are included. The book includes both a research base and real world examples used to emphasize critical points. User-friendly pedagogy includes icon signposts indicating Myth or Truth sections, Quick Check points, Research and Statistics boxes, Potential Trouble Spot areas, Data Collection Point tools, and Food for Thought reflections, as well as reproducible forms throughout.
Unlock the wonder in each of your students through inquiry-based science! Are you both fascinated and baffled by inquiry-based science? Do you want to tap the strength of inquiry-based science to help your students build deeper understandings? Do you want to use inquiry-based science to foster high-quality instruction across the educational board? This guide provides clear and simple explanations for engaging students in meaningful and hands-on, minds-on ways of understanding science. Eight Essentials of Inquiry-Based Science, K-8 breaks each essential into sample lessons that include sample data, discussion questions, and tools such as graphic organizers and analogies. Hammerman draws on more than 20 years experience in the fields of science instruction and professional development to address basic and complex principles related to inquiry, including: How to discuss data, information, models, graphics, and experiences How to interact with one another to strengthen knowledge and skills How to extend learning through guided or open-inquiry investigations and research How to apply new learning and the best research-based practices for improving student achievement When you harness the immense power of inquiry-based learning, you can fully discover the inquisitive nature of each of your students!
How to Be a More Effective Leader in Today's Schools
Now you can do more than just deal with the "crisis-du-jour". Leadership is learnable, and this comprehensive guide will show you how to be proactive, prevent crises, create dreams, push the envelope, and focus on the future instead of just reacting to crises, spending all your time putting out fires, or coping with the current system-whether it works or not. In this updated second edition, best-selling author Robert D. Ramsey gives you just what you need to avoid "simply managing" and to become a true leader instead! Unlike other manuals that give you bits and pieces on how to develop a particular curriculum or handle specific day-to-day discipline problems, this unique handbook offers administrators practical, time-proven lessons on how to think, act, plan, set priorities, manage time, and make decisions-skills that will help you navigate through the unique challenges of leading in a school environment. Included are guidelines on: Getting the most out of people Bringing about change Handling politics Dealing with setbacks Thinking, looking, and acting like an effective school leader Communicating effectively Practicing ethical leadership Being a school leader can actually be exciting, rewarding, and fun again, once you're equipped to tackle today's challenges!
Strategies for Leadership, Learning, & Collaboration
This book enables prospective and practising school and district leaders, teacher leaders, and other educational leaders to learn the skills needed to create collaborative learning communities in which high academic standards are achieved for all. Sullivan and Glanz put forth a framework centered on reflective practice that will help schools to ......
"A school's MicroSociety program is not a gimmick, as Professor Cherniss carefully describes and discusses. It is a process that gives students responsibilities and obligations. They experience the benefits of collaboration and the problems of group cohesion, and they learn how and why the bottom line of their economic enterprise requires foresight, decision-making, flexibility, creativity, and more. Are there problems in creating and maintaining such an enterprise? Yes, but Professor Cherniss candidly, critically, sympathetically, and constructively explains why readers will have no doubt that the MicroSociety's educational potential is indeed great. It is the opposite of a transient fad, of which there has been a surfeit." -Seymour B. Sarason, Professor Emeritus Psychology & Education, Yale University See meaningful whole-school reform strategies through the lenses of the MicroSociety (R) program! The steady stream of quick-fix educational reforms du jour has drowned out the optimism and drive of many school leaders. To buoy the hopes and success of change agents, this guide offers a real look into school reform, with its trials and triumphs, and pinpoints specific strategies for overcoming the former and achieving the latter. Looking closely at the MicroSociety (R) whole-school reform model, the text empowers leaders with a systemic approach to implementation and sustainability of meaningful change. Along with the history and basics of MicroSociety (R), it highlights research-based tactics, enabling administrators, teachers, parents, and students to fully invest in and affect positive, enduring reform. The book features: Actual challenges and proven solutions for everything from dealing with "problem" students and time constraints, to attaining genuine teacher buy-in and seamless curriculum 16 straightforward guidelines for before, during, and after implementation In-depth case studies illustrating the gamut of outcomes, from failure to success, and why they resulted Insights on how "emotional intelligence" influences the change process Implications for educational policy
Transform teacher-parent relationships into a strategy for children's success! While most parents strive to support their children with the best parenting practices, both teachers and parents often find themselves struggling to reconcile conflicts that can result in hostility, defensiveness, and communication breakdowns. In addition, negative public constructions of parents perpetuate this dilemma, particularly for those parents who are already marginalized through poverty or language barriers. Working from research in three key areas-parent development and skills, social and historical family influences, and parent-school relationships-educator (and parent) Gwen L. Rudney offers teachers: Useful interpretations of parent beliefs and actions Compelling insight into what parents expect from teachers Key ideas that characterize the struggles that parents face while raising children Practical strategies designed to lead to community, trust-building, collaboration, gratitude, and friendship with parents Straightforward chapters offer teachers everything from theory to commonsense strategies for working with parents to improve life and learning for all children.
"Dr. Villani's comprehensive new book gives our profession-especially ose who are new to it-a terrific boost. With clarity and great care, Villani outlines the critical need for mentoring and induction programs for new school leaders. Using excellent examples, she shows us the extremely difficult and varied situations principals face daily. Then ......
"This fascinating, well-researched book makes a wonderful contribution to the field. It provides helpful information on what test anxiety is and what we can do about it. This topic is as important today than ever due to education reform initiatives across the country." -James Kelleher, Assistant Superintendent Scituate Public Schools, MA "The book offers answers to the most important question of all: If test anxiety can hinder our ability to make accurate inferences and good decisions for kids, what can we do to ease students' fears? As it turns out, researchers have answers, and the authors present helpful ideas for all of us-parents, educators, and students themselves." -Linda Wacyk, Trustee Grand Ledge Board of Education, MT What can we do about test anxiety that will help our students? Testing is expanding at every level of education and into every corner of social and vocational enterprise, and test anxiety can have devastating effects on students' test scores, confidence, and motivation to learn. Testing has become more extensive and more consequential at every level. The higher the stakes on tests, the greater the concern about the presence and effects of test anxiety. Addressing Test Anxiety in a High-Stakes Environment provides straightforward explanations, practical suggestions, and reasonable recommendations for addressing test anxiety. This practical resource offers: An overview of the concept of test anxiety A glossary of assessment and measurement terms Current research findings on test anxiety and which students it is most likely to affect Information on the prevalence, correlations, and effects of test anxiety Situations in which test anxiety can be helpful Suggestions for preventing and reducing the effects of test anxiety
