Books

Educational leadership is never conflict-free. And poorly managed conflict – whether it involves staff, students, parents or other stakeholders – can consume a great deal of educational leaders’ time and energy. In Responding to resistance: Thirty strategies to manage conflict in your school, author William A Sommers acknowledges this reality and presents a wide-ranging set of efficient response strategies. He equips F–12 school and district leaders with a repertoire of skills for reacting professionally and effectively. Using this resource’s common sense tools, leaders will be able to spend more time on improving learning in their schools.

Teacher development and evaluation systems have a long history in education, but the history of their shortcomings is just as long. This book introduces transformative, research-based processes for supporting teacher growth and reliably evaluating performance.

When even the smallest mistake can negatively affect students and staff, strong decision-making skills are crucial. By focusing on key questions, however, school leaders can find a path through the complex decisions they encounter every day. What if I’m wrong? And other key questions for decisive school leadership guides you past the pitfalls of split-second instinct, groupthink, prejudice and the rush to judgement. Leadership coach and former principal Simon Rodberg pulls together true stories from his own experience, examples of a range of school issues and the latest research in cognitive science into a five-question framework for school leaders to ask themselves when facing a decision.

Stephanie Filio’s Responding to student trauma: A toolkit for schools in times of crisis is the book every counsellor and educator needs right now. Whether you and your students are facing community or individual trauma, or both at once, this quick reference guide gives you strategies to address it.

Mathematical imagining describes an original routine that gives students space and time to imagine a mathematical situation and then revise, discuss and act upon the mental images they create. You can use this creative routine in your secondary classroom to glimpse your students’ thinking and discover teaching opportunities, while empowering them to create their own mathematics.

Today’s teachers face a daunting challenge: how to ensure a positive school experience for their students, many of whom carry the burden of adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse, poverty, divorce, abandonment and numerous other serious social issues. Spurred by her personal experience and extensive exploration of brain-based learning, author Marilee Sprenger explains how brain science – what we know about how the brain works – can be applied to social-emotional learning.

As schools are filled with increasingly diverse student populations with diverse learning needs, inclusive education becomes more important by the day. In Inclusion strategies and interventions, second edition, author Toby J Karten aims to help educators provide consistent and strong learning pathways and create classrooms conducive to learning for both general education learners and learners with special needs.

The student-centered classroom: Transforming your teaching and grading practices lays out six practices that will help F–12 teachers create an effective and immensely satisfying student-centred environment in any classroom, no matter the grade level or content area.

The literacy workshop is a first-of-its-kind resource that offers a practical process for creating an integrated literacy workshop using demonstration lessons that align with current curriculum standards. By weaving together the common threads of literacy learning, you can increase the time your students spend engaged in authentic reading and writing.

What role do student behaviours and emotional states play in school? What supports do students need in order to learn and pursue positive behaviours? Behavior solutions: Teaching academic and social skills through RTI at Work™ answers these questions and more to help F–12 teachers and administrators bridge the systemic behaviour gap.

A generalist is curious, open-minded, sceptical and persistent in their quest for information. Thinking like a generalist demonstrates what it means to take a generalist stance in instruction and provides a set of teaching tools to be able to pass those skills to students – skills that will transfer beyond the walls of the classroom.

Math coach Kassia Omohundro Wedekind and literacy coach Christy Hermann Thompson have spent years comparing notes on how to build effective classroom communities across the content areas. How, they wondered, can we lay the groundwork for classroom conversations that are less teacher-directed and more conducive to student-to-student dialogue? Their answers start with Hands-Down Conversations, an innovative discourse structure in which students’ ideas and voices take the lead while teachers focus on listening and facilitating.