Leading for Instructional Improvement

Educational experts agree that quality teaching is the single most important factor in improving educational outcomes for all students. Teaching is a highly sophisticated and complex endeavor requiring deep expertise on the part of teachers and school leaders. This book shows how teacher, school, and district leaders can cultivate the expertise of teachers to deliver high quality instruction for all students. Leading for Instructional Improvement captures the nationally acclaimed work conducted by the Center for Educational Leadership at the University of Washington in its effort to improve the quality of teaching and leadership in schools across the country. The book provides extensive practical guidance grounded in theory and research, along with powerful stories and examples from classrooms, schools, and districts. Many of the tools, protocols, and frameworks contained in this book can be accessed electronically by visiting the Center for Educational Leadership website at www.k-12leadership.org.

Praise for Leading for Instructional Improvement

"This book offers insights that are invaluable to educators who seek to enhance teacher effectiveness now. The ideas presented are practical and applicable to schools in a variety of settings."
--PEDRO A. NOGUERA, Ph.D., Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Development and executive director, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education

"A deep and thoughtful look at how the issue of expertise is cultivated. Seizing upon their Center's research-based instructional framework, the authors provide important insights and tools."
--DR. BEVERLY HALL, superintendent, Atlanta Public Schools

"In this age of intense focus on how we evaluate teachers, we have to remember that any evaluation is only as good as the evaluator. This extremely useful book provides an excellent roadmap for how principals can become more effective in the most important aspect of their work, instructional leadership."
--JERRY D. WEAST, Ed.D., superintendent of schools, Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland

"Fink and Markholt offer practitioners a guide to effective teaching. Leading for Instructional Improvement asks us to heed the lessons within and support the kind of teacher education that will improve student achievement for today's schools and those of tomorrow."
--BARNETT BERRY, president, Center for Teaching Quality

A practical, holistic approach to integrating social studies with language arts and other content areas

This comprehensive, reader-friendly text demonstrates how personal connections can be incorporated into social studies education while meeting standards of the National Council for the Social Studies. Praised for its wealth of strategies that go beyond social studies content teaching--including classroom strategies, pedagogical techniques, activities, and lesson plan ideas--this book presents a variety of methods for new and experienced teachers.

Key Features

New to This Edition
The Second Edition has been significantly refined to incorporate new topic coverage and strategies needed by elementary and middle school social studies teachers

A passionate defense of the humanities from one of today's foremost public intellectuals

In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education.

Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have rightly been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry both in the United States and abroad. Anxiously focused on national economic growth, we increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world.

In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world.

Drawing on the stories of troubling--and hopeful--educational developments from around the world, Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.

In this seminal book on the construction of case studies in the field of language and literacy, the authors consider in detail what it means to be "on the case." They evaluate the basic assumptions that ground a qualitative approach to case study methodology, the decisions entailed in designing a case study, and the possibilities and challenges of data collection and analysis. For the novice researcher, this book is an essential manual on how to design and carry out a case study. For the experienced researcher, this book offers fresh insights into the theoretical issues that underpin qualitative case study research.

Features:

"My students walk out the school door into a social emergency, " Linda Christensen writes. "They are in the center of it. I believe that writing is a basic skill that will help them both understand that emergency and work to change it." This practical, inspirational book offers essays, lesson plans, and a remarkable collection of student writing, all rooted in an unwavering focus on language arts teaching for justice.

Despite having a workforce consisting of highly qualified staff, some universities do not have high levels of research productivity and lack a research culture. The possible reasons for research-inactive staff may be due to a lack of mentoring for "new" members of staff in terms of research proposal preparations, viable research strategies, ongoing research supervision as well as finding and targeting funding agencies. This book has been divided into three sections: the first defines and characterizes research, with chapters identifying strategies for research and pinpointing ethical issues; the second section discusses in detail developing the research proposal, formulating the research problem, using statistics effectively and evaluating the successful research project; and the final section addresses ways to write the research results in such a way as to secure funding and publish in peer-reviewed journals. It contains useful checklists, activities and practical suggestions to facilitate research productivity and output. The work is of interest to graduate students, junior-level faculty, and university administrators committed to increasing research productivity and global research funding and rankings.

Rhetoric in Popular Culture, Third Edition provides students with a solid background in the central issues in interpreting pop culture. Author Barry Brummett helps readers use techniques of rhetorical criticism to analyze texts from popular culture including print ads, music videos, TV advertisements, Internet user groups, movies, and television shows. Part I covers rhetoric as a concept, the history of rhetoric, and a method for doing rhetorical criticism. Part II includes critical essays and case studies that show students how the critical methods discussed in Part I can be used to study the rhetoric of extended texts.

This text helps prospective and experienced principals, administrators, and supervisors increase their knowledge and skills through concepts, case-studies, and simulations. Part I presents important theoretical concepts and research findings that can improve educators' problem-solving and leadership effectiveness. Part II consists of over 65 reality-based case studies, "In-Basket Exercises," simulations, and role-plays to illustrate problems and issues. The case studies, simulations, and exercises stimulate class discussion and reflection on key issues facing today's school administrator and offer guidelines for thoughtful problem-solving and resolution. The new edition has been updated to include the most current research on areas such as leadership, as well as refocused chapters to more accurately address real life school situations.

Building on the success of previous editions, Social Studies for the Elementary and Middle Grades discusses flexible strategies for teaching today's diverse learner, the structure of the knowledge to be learned, how to help students reconstruct present ideas, and how to translate theory and recent research into lesson plans and units.

Packed with activities, up-to-date technology, teaching strategies, and a constructivist approach, this text demonstrates how to use developmentally appropriate strategies to help students construct important social studies ideas and skills.