Books

Each year, Robyn R Jackson helps thousands of administrators stop wasting time and energy on flawed leadership approaches that succeed only with the right staff, students, parents, budget and boss. As they have discovered, it’s possible to transform your school with the people and resources you already have. The secret? Stop leading and start building! In this book, you’ll learn to use Jackson’s breakthrough Buildership Model™ to escape the ‘school improvement hamster wheel’ and finally create the school your students and teachers deserve.

Students impacted by trauma face behavioural and mental health challenges, which, if not addressed, can have long-lasting effects. In Trauma-sensitive leadership: Creating a safe and predictable school environment, authors John F Eller and Tom Hierck emphasise leaders’ unique role in working with teachers, staff, families and the community to create schools where students build resilience to cope with traumatic experiences.

Designed specifically for leaders, the Leading PLCs at Work® districtwide plan book offers tools and best practices for effective planning in a professional learning community (PLC), guiding leaders in identifying major tasks and completion dates to reach goals and optimise time and productivity.

In How to look at student work to uncover student thinking, assessment expert Susan M Brookhart and instructional coach Alice Oakley walk teachers through a better and more illuminating way to approach student work across grade levels and content areas. You’ll learn to view students’ assignments not as a verdict on right or wrong but as a window into what student ‘got’ and how they are thinking about it. The insight you’ll gain will help you:

• infer what students are thinking
• provide effective feedback
• decide on next instructional moves
• grow as an individual.

In this book, Lauren Porosoff explains how PD curators: structure teachers’ schedules to make time for in-house professional learning; select content and create a process for how people interact with it; fit the often disparate pieces together into a meaningful whole; and discover whether the event has been successful. The practical tools and protocols in each chapter will help you plan professional learning that taps into the expertise and interests of a diverse staff. Canned sessions that don’t connect with teachers’ actual needs will be a thing of the past. Instead, you’ll discover ways to support teachers in sharing ideas and trying out new practices that advance student learning. In doing so, you’ll empower teachers and students alike.

Whether a student’s post-secondary plan is further education or direct workforce placement, all secondary learners must develop specific competencies to succeed in the global workplace. In Ready for the workforce, Christi McBride and Brenda Duncan-Davis provide educators with empowering cooperative activities they can embed in their established curriculum to help nurture essential skills for career preparedness.

This powerful resource helps teachers infuse language learning into every subject area with research-based instructional strategies. It is packed with easy-to-use activities that immerse students in content while promoting oral and written language development.

Meet the needs of all students with this classroom-tested instructional framework for Years F–12. Guided math provides an innovative approach to mathematics instruction that fosters mathematical thinking and conceptual understanding.

Many educators recognise that social and emotional learning (SEL) is essential to ensuring student success. What educators now grapple with is understanding exactly what SEL is, how it should be taught and how to actively create those spaces that foster SEL. This essential resource develops students’ social and emotional wellbeing – whether in the classroom, on the schoolyard, or in after-school programs – to help create both successful students and well-rounded citizens.

In this timely resource, students learn to prove their conclusions by reading critically and closely and by effectively annotating literary and informational texts. Students will look for central ideas to comprehend texts and use credible evidence to make informed decisions. Lessons focus on finding, using and citing reliable sources and text evidence. 

Environmental science education is essential to preparing today’s students for the future. We must create opportunities for hands-on investigations that explore complex environmental problems in order to find solutions and meet the challenges of our changing world.

Clothesline math: The master number sense maker provides teachers with the tools they need to facilitate classroom discourse and intentionally teach number sense at all grade levels.