Charts recent and current developments in the practical business of changing classroom practice to make schools more effective. It is devoted to detecting the effects on classroom practice of the efforts made to improve schools, and to understanding how classroom practice changes.

Over the last ten years deliberate and determined efforts have been made to improve schooling. This book charts recent and current developments in the practical business of changing classroom practice to make schools more effective. It is devoted to detecting the effects on classroom practice of the efforts made to improve schools and classrooms, and to understanding how classroom practice changes. Contributors include advisory teachers, Higher Education HE tutors and researchers, and work described ranges from early years' classrooms to post-experience course outcomes and the tracking of Inservice education and training INSET effectiveness.

Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice takes as its starting point a strikingly blunt question: "With so many major structural changes in U.S. public schools over the past century, why have classroom practices been largely stable, with a modest blending of new and old teaching practices, leaving contemporary classroom lessons familiar to earlier generations of school-goers?" It is a question that ought to be of paramount interest to all who are interested in school reform in the United States. It is also a question that comes naturally to Larry Cuban, whose much-admired books have focused on various aspects of school reform--their promises, wrong turns, partial successes, and troubling failures. In this book, he returns to this territory, but trains his focus on the still baffling fact that policy reforms--no matter how ambitious or determined--have generally had little effect on classroom conduct and practice. "For forty years, Larry Cuban has been a voice of thoughtful analysis amid the overwrought rhetoric of American education reform. His distinctive contribution--updated, deepened, and extended in this book--has been to focus our attention on the persistent gap between the misconceptions of policy elites and the realities of daily practice in the classroom. One hopes that the next generation of American educators will learn the essential lessons of Cuban's analysis more deeply than the current generation. Young people considering a career in education should hold the lessons of this book close to their hearts." -- Richard F. Elmore, Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership, Harvard Graduate School of Education "Larry Cuban's well-written book convincingly demonstrates why current education reforms don't work, can't work, and won't work." -- Diane Ravitch, research professor of education, New York University "Anyone with a deep interest in public schools should read Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice. Cuban takes the reader through the history of earnest efforts to improve our schools--through technology, structural reforms, and accountability systems--and shows why they have met with mixed and often disappointing results. His recommendations for us are both cautionary and hopeful, and always respectful of the dilemmas that teachers face each day they walk through the classroom door." -- Gary Yee, board director, District Four, Oakland Unified School District, and retired vice chancellor, Educational Services, Peralta Community College District Larry Cuban is professor emeritus of education at Stanford University.

This book aims to help teachers and those who support them to re-imagine the work of teaching, learning and leading. In particular, it shows how transformations of educational practice depend on complementary transformations in classroom-school- and system-level organisational cultures, resourcing and politics. It argues that transforming education requires more than professional development to transform teachers; it also calls for fundamental changes in learning and leading practices, which in turn means reshaping organisations that support teachers and teaching – organisational cultures, the resources organisations provide and distribute, and the relationships that connect people with one another in organisations. The book is based on findings from new research being conducted by the authors – the research team for the (2010-2012) Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project Leading and Learning: Developing Ecologies of Educational Practice.

Charts recent and current developments in the practical business of changing classroom practice to make schools more effective. It is devoted to detecting the effects on classroom practice of the efforts made to improve schools, and to understanding how c.

The three concepts central to this volume—practice, learning and change—have received very different treatments in the educational literature, an oversight directly confronted here. While learning and change have been extensively theorised, their various contexts articulated and analysed, practice is notably underrepresented. Where much of the literature on learning and change takes the notion of ‘practice’ as an unexamined given, its co-location as a term with various classifiers, as in ‘legal practice’ and ‘teaching practice’, render it curiously devoid of semantic force. In this book, ‘practice’ is the super-ordinate organising idea. Drawing on what has been termed the ‘practice turn in contemporary theory’, the work develops a conceptual framework for researching learning in, and on, practice. It challenges received notions of practice, questioning the assumptions, elisions, conflations and silences on the subject. In so doing, it offers fresh insights into learning and change, and how they relate to practice. In tandem with this conceptual work, the book details site-ontological studies of practice and learning in diverse professional and workplace contexts, examining the work of occupations as various as doctors, chefs and orchestral musicians. It demonstrates the value of theorising practice, learning and change, as well as exploring the connections between them amid our evolving social and institutional structures.

2018 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Ambitious Science Teaching outlines a powerful framework for science teaching to ensure that instruction is rigorous and equitable for students from all backgrounds. The practices presented in the book are being used in schools and districts that seek to improve science teaching at scale, and a wide range of science subjects and grade levels are represented. The book is organized around four sets of core teaching practices: planning for engagement with big ideas; eliciting student thinking; supporting changes in students’ thinking; and drawing together evidence-based explanations. Discussion of each practice includes tools and routines that teachers can use to support students’ participation, transcripts of actual student-teacher dialogue and descriptions of teachers’ thinking as it unfolds, and examples of student work. The book also provides explicit guidance for “opportunity to learn” strategies that can help scaffold the participation of diverse students. Since the success of these practices depends so heavily on discourse among students, Ambitious Science Teaching includes chapters on productive classroom talk. Science-specific skills such as modeling and scientific argument are also covered. Drawing on the emerging research on core teaching practices and their extensive work with preservice and in-service teachers, Ambitious Science Teaching presents a coherent and aligned set of resources for educators striving to meet the considerable challenges that have been set for them.

Biology is where many of science's most exciting and relevant advances are taking place. Yet, many students leave school without having learned basic biology principles, and few are excited enough to continue in the sciences. Why is biology education failing? How can reform be accomplished? This book presents information and expert views from curriculum developers, teachers, and others, offering suggestions about major issues in biology education: what should we teach in biology and how should it be taught? How can we measure results? How should teachers be educated and certified? What obstacles are blocking reform?

What does it mean to teach for human dignity? How does one do so? This practical book shows how the leaders at four urban public schools used a process called Descriptive Inquiry to create democratic schools that promote and protect human dignity. The authors argue that teachers must attend to who a child is and find a way to create classrooms that allow everyone to feel safe and express ideas. Responding to the perennial question of how to cultivate teachers, they offer an approach that attends to both ethical development and instructional methods. They also provide a way forward for school leaders seeking to listen to, and provide guidance for, their staff. At its core, Descriptive Inquiry in Teacher Practice champions a commitment to schools as places in which children, teachers, and leaders can learn how to live and work well together. Book Features: Illustrates how to take an inquiry stance toward the difficult issues that educators face every day.Examines how themes regularly addressed in foundations can be used to improve schools.Includes engaging portraits of progressive urban schools that showcase the qualities of the leaders that guide them.Demonstrates the power of a progressive and humanistic education for children of color and for those from lower-income backgrounds.

This book is concerned with action research as a form of teacher professional development. In it, John Elliot traces the historical emergence and current significance of action research in schools. He examines action research as a "cultural innovation" with transformative possibilities for both the professional culture of teachers and teacher educators in academia and explores how action research can be a form of creative resistance to the technical rationality underpinning government policy. He explains the role of action research in the specific contexts of the national curriculum, teacher appraisal and competence-based teacher training.