According to author Mike Schmoker, there is a yawning gap between the most well-known essential practices and the reality of most classrooms. This gap persists despite the hard, often heroic work done by many teachers and administrators. Schmoker believes that teachers and administrators may know what the best practices are, but they aren’t using them or reinforcing them consistently. He asserts that our schools are protected by a buffer—a protective barrier that prevents scrutiny of instruction by outsiders. The buffer exists within the school as well. Teachers often know only what is going on in their classrooms—and they may be completely in the dark about what other teachers in the school are doing. Even principals, says Schmoker, don’t have a clear view of the daily practices of teaching and learning in their schools.
Schmoker suggests that we need to get beyond this buffer to confront the truth about what is happening in classrooms, and to allow teachers to learn from each other and to be supervised properly. He outlines a plan that focuses on the importance of consistent curriculum, authentic literacy education, and professional learning communities for teachers.
What will students get out of this new approach? Learning for life. Schmoker argues passionately that students become learners for life when they have more opportunities to engage in strategic reading, writing with explicit guidance, and argument and discussion.
Through strong teamwork, true leadership, and authentic learning, schools and their students can reach new heights. Results Now is a rally cry for educators to focus on what counts. If they do, Schmoker promises, the entire school community can count on unprecedented achievements.
About this product: This best-selling text will show you the basic concepts and techniques you need to successfully communicate in today's business world, regardless of your current level of business experience. Covering every aspect of the communication process, COMMUNICATING FOR RESULTS will give you a competitive edge in any business situation-from the initial interview to making skilled presentations (complete with professional visual aids) to assuming a leadership role. In addition, you'll find online video clips of common professional scenarios paired with the text's concepts, giving you a realistic glimpse into the business world and an opportunity to see how theory translates into practical action that will help you improve your chance of career success!
About this product: How to build a corporate culture that continuously gets results Quint Studer has built a thriving career on helping healthcare companies achieve maximum effectiveness and consistent bottom-line results. Now, in Results That Last, he brings his ideas to the rest of the business world. Studer teaches leaders in every industry how to apply his tactics and strategies to their own organizations to build a corporate culture that consistently reaches and exceeds its goals. He has a gift for helping struggling companies implement and hardwire brilliantly simple fixes that solve larger problems in a self-perpetuating, almost organic way. Written in a conversational, easy-to-read format, each chapter includes compelling real-world stories that bring Studer's prescriptions to vibrant life. Results That Last offers sound, proven tactics for turning troubled businesses into consistent moneymakers.
Quint Studer (Gulf Breeze, FL) is an acclaimed leadership and healthcare consultant and the founder of the Studer Group, an outcome firm that coaches some 300 hospitals and health systems on achieving operational excellence. He is also the author of the self-published hit Hardwiring Excellence, a book that has more than 200,000 copies currently in circulation.
About this product: How to take control of teams and projects even when you're not the boss.... Project leaders these days supervise few if any of the people that they rely upon for project success. Getting projects off to a good start and then maintaining control of them is an enormous challenge for a project leader who has little or no formal authority.
But there are many proven, powerful techniques a strong project leader can employ to keep projects and teams on track. Results Without Authority explores a wide range of effective methods and tools for leading a diverse team, and includes clear, insightful examples that demonstrate how they work in a variety of situations.
Packed with invaluable guidance for controlling projects of all scopes and in any field, Results Without Authority will help novice and experienced project leaders get the best from their project teams.
About this product: What is the single, most important event of the school year that affects school improvement? How do you measure school improvement? How can simple tools--already at your fingertips--work more effectively to improve student achievement in reading, math, and more?
The Results Fieldbook answers these questions and describes in abundant, practical detail how five school systems overcame obstacles and achieved exceptional results for all their students. These schools focused on the proven core concepts that Mike Schmoker described in both editions of his first ASCD book, Results: The Key to Continuous School Improvement. Supplementing the five case studies, brief vignettes written by practitioners show how core practices--teamwork, the use of achievement data, and planning for measurable goals--made an immediate and profound difference in student learning at their respective schools.
A close look at these school systems reveals the simplicity of school improvement efforts built around the still-overlooked and most potent force in improvement--collective, organized teacher intelligence. This book contains easily adapted processes and refinements that result from such teacher collaboration and all but guarantee measurable improvement. Tables, figures, and appendixes illustrate effective data-collection processes; and at the conclusion, a three-part synthesis of the best of these systems provides practical steps toward implementing this radically more effective approach to school improvement, starting with preservice education.
About this product: An easy-to-start, simple-to-maintain, scientifically sound, and eminently usable twelve-week program of small steps on the road to better health
Small Changes, Big Results is not about cutting all the carbohydrates out of your diet. Or replacing every single gram of sugar with omega-3 fatty acids. It’s not about doing one hundred sit-ups a day, or getting on the treadmill whenever you have a free second. In fact, it’s not about any of the total lifestyle-replacement gimmicks—whether diet, exercise, or pop psychology—that have swept our culture in recent years, putting untold millions of Americans on the risky roller coaster of success and failure that defines fad diets and programs.
Not here.
Small Changes, Big Results is about reality—the reality of what you can do, the reality of what you want to do, and the reality of what works. It’s about introducing a series of small changes each week for three months in the three core areas of diet and nutrition; exercise and fitness; and emotional wellness. For each of the twelve weeks, nutritionist Ellie Krieger introduces a very finite, completely practical action plan for the week—and not only are these tasks incredibly doable, they’re in fact so accessible that it’s tough not to be inspired.
For example, in Week 1 the nutrition task is merely to go shopping, buy some healthful pantry items, and start keeping track of what you eat; the exercise consists of taking three twenty-minute walks; and the wellness aspect is to do a five-minute breathing exercise. That’s it. And it doesn’t really get any harder.
But these small changes do in fact lead to big results. At the end of twelve weeks, a totally unhealthy diet has been overhauled: armed with easy, delicious recipes and tips, you’ve removed unhelpful munchies and replaced them with healthful snacking, you’ve cut down on lethal trans fats while adding beneficial fat choices, you’ve replaced refined grains with whole grains, you’re eating more fish and less red meat, and so forth. Yet you’ve never been forbidden to eat a single thing: instead of prohibiting entire food groups, Ellie categorizes foods as Usually, Sometimes, and Rarely—and now you should be eating more from the Usually choices, less from the Rarely category. Furthermore, you’ve integrated physical activity into your life, and you’ve developed a set of tools to help you deal with stress—you’re not only eating better, but you’re also exercising better and feeling better.
The beauty of this program is that none of these action steps is remotely intimidating, because they’re not a full immersion into a totally new lifestyle. Instead, it’s a series of incremental changes—removing bad habits one by one, while at the same time adding good ones. There’s nothing to scare you off—on the contrary, here’s a whole book full of small changes that produce big results.
About this product: This text offers a comprehensive presentation of the vital aspects of supervision with a focus on practical advice about how to handle real-life, on-the-job situations. In this revision, the author has recognized the ever-changing social and work environment and has updated the text with current trends and situations and the latest professional concepts of supervisory practice. The text is arranged with an emphasis on inquiry learning, which presents the key concepts in a clear and concise manner. A wide variety of exercises, applications, and margin notes help to further the learning process.
About this product: It's possible to look like a leader, say all the right things to shareholders, make employees feel good about themselves, and still not produce the sorts of results everyone expects and wants from your company. A previous generation might have called this winning the battle but losing the war.
Directing employees is harder than it looks, since past performance isn't really an indication of how a leader will do in the future. As the authors say, "The half-life of knowledge grows ever shorter in most professions, requiring even high performers to unlearn what they know and do."
The authors--a university professor and two heads of consulting firms--divide leadership priorities into four areas: employees, organization, customers, and investors. A company head generally has to focus on one responsibility over the other three, but can't get away with ignoring any of them for very long. They explain each of these four priorities in depth--noting, for example, that keeping employees committed and productive means "mass customizing" the workplace to fit individual employees' needs while keeping everyone working toward the same goal. That customization may require adjustments unheard-of a few years ago--allowing an employee to work from home in a different city, for example--but pays off in the retention of valuable human assets that would otherwise take their training, experience, energy, and creativity to other companies, possibly competitors.
People who already have leadership positions in their companies can certainly find a lot of important information, but the book may be even more valuable to those who want to move into management roles. It certainly shows what challenges to expect. --Lou Schuler
About this product: How to Measure Training Results presents practical tools for collecting and measuring six types of data critical to an overall evaluatin of training. This timely resource:
Includes dozens of reproducible tools and processes for training evaluation
Shows how to measure both financial and intangible/non-financial results
About this product: Curriculum maps are among the simplest yet most effective tools for improving teaching and learning. Because they require people to draw explicit connections between content, skills, and assessment measures, these maps help ensure that all aspects of a lesson are aligned not only with each other, but also with mandated standards and tests.
In Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping, Heidi Hayes Jacobs and her coauthors offer a wide range of perspectives on how to get the most out of the curriculum mapping process in districts and schools. In addition to detailed examples of maps from schools across the United States, the authors offer concrete advice on such critical issues as
* Preparing educators to implement mapping procedures, * Using software to create unique mapping databases, * Integrating decision-making structures and staff development initiatives through mapping, * Helping school communities adjust to new curriculum review processes, and * Making mapping an integral part of literacy training.
Teachers, administrators, staff developers, and policymakers alike will find this book an essential guide to curriculum mapping and a vital resource for spearheading school improvement efforts.
Heidi Hayes Jacobs is the author of Mapping the Big Picture: Integrating Curriculum and Assessment, K-12 and Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Design and Implementation. She is based in Rye, New York.