If you want to boost your library's relevancy and support youth learning, consider incorporating connected learning at your library. This book helps you to realize the potential of this exciting and dynamic trend. Learning doesn't just happen in the classroom: it happens everywhere. The connected learning model supports this principle, asserting that young people learn best when their experiences are interest-driven, peer-supported, and rooted in solid academics. Libraries are the perfect environment for this type of learning, providing a place where teens can connect with each other and with adult mentors to engage with learning material and thrive. This book shows you how to cultivate connected learning in your library. You'll discover what the approach involves, its benefits, and what it can look like in various library settings. You'll also learn how to generate support for connecting learning within your library; reimagine your spaces and programs to better support connected learning; integrate technology into programs and services to make it accessible to youth; build partnerships with other libraries as well as other organizations; recruit volunteers; and raise community awareness to increase involvement.

A Powerful Approach to Bringing God's Grace to Kids Did you know that the way we deal (or don't deal) with our kids' misbehavior shapes their beliefs about themselves, the world, and God? Therefore it's vital to connect with their hearts--not just their minds--amid the daily behavior battles. With warmth and grace, Jim and Lynne Jackson, founders of Connected Families, offer four tried-and-true keys to handling any behavioral issues with love, truth, and authority. You will learn practical ways to communicate messages of grace and truth, how to discipline in a way that motivates your child, and how to keep your relationship strong, not antagonistic. Discipline is more than just a short-term attempt to modify your child's actions--it's a long-term investment to help them build faith, wisdom, and character for life. When you discover a better path to discipline, you'll find a more well-behaved--and well-believed--kid.

“When students know how to learn, they are able to become their own teachers.” —Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and John Hattie Imagine students who describe their learning in these terms: “I know where I’m going, I have the tools I need for the journey, and I monitor my own progress.” Now imagine the extraordinary difference this type of ownership makes in their progress over the course of a school year. This illuminating book shows how to make this scenario an everyday reality. With its foundation in principles introduced in the authors’ bestselling Visible Learning for Literacy, this resource delves more deeply into the critical component of self-assessment, revealing the most effective types of assessment and how each can motivate students to higher levels of achievement.

In Cultivating Genius, Dr. Gholdy E. Muhammad presents a four-layered equity framework--one that is grounded in history and restores excellence in literacy education. This framework, which she names, Historically Responsive Literacy, was derived from the study of literacy development within 19th-century Black literacy societies. The framework is essential and universal for all students, especially youth of color, who traditionally have been marginalized in learning standards, school policies, and classroom practices. The equity framework will help educators teach and lead toward the following learning goals or pursuits: Identity Development--Helping youth to make sense of themselves and others Skill Development-- Developing proficiencies across the academic disciplines Intellectual Development--Gaining knowledge and becoming smarter Criticality--Learning and developing the ability to read texts (including print and social contexts) to understand power, equity, and anti-oppression When these four learning pursuits are taught together--through the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework, all students receive profound opportunities for personal, intellectual, and academic success. Muhammad provides probing, self-reflective questions for teachers, leaders, and teacher educators as well as sample culturally and historically responsive sample plans and text sets across grades and content areas. In this book, Muhammad presents practical approaches to cultivate the genius in students and within teachers.

How does the world’s oral majority—adults with limited formal education (ALFE)—really prefer to learn? Few pause long enough to ask those who eschew print. The result of scholarly research and prolonged immersion in the Cambodian culture, Connected Learning exposes the truth about orality—the shame associated with limited formal education; the unfortunate misnomer that is orality; the place of spirituality, grace, and hope; and the obvious but overlooked learning preferences. ALFE have different ways of learning and knowing, a different epistemology and culture from print learners, even though we all begin alike. The choice is not between Ong’s orality or literacy, but between learning from people or from print. Dr. Thigpen, a veteran cross-cultural worker, shares remedies for the hegemony and inequities unwittingly fostered by the literate minority. In a dominant culture where learning from people is prime, how can educators with a preference for print adapt? Providing an important tool in the Learning Quadrants diagram, Connected Learning advises teaching to the quadrant and calls for seven necessary shifts in teaching. Anyone versed in orality will admit these findings have “global implications and applications” (Steffen). The reader who heeds will positively impact a huge portion of humanity.

This book critically analyses the current education political strategy of cultivating excellence in education. It shows how the new policy for selecting talented students in Denmark deconstructs the compromise from which the comprehensive school was built and reduces equal opportunities. It discusses how the current practice of measurement, selection and guidance of talented students brings about significant changes in education policies, in pedagogic practices, a restructuring of school organisations, and changed requirements of teachers. It explains how the internal differentiation of education systems based on self-selection and free choice, but also on new assessment techniques, tends to widen the inequality gap between students. The analysis clearly shows the relationship between the circulation of new ideas and normative frameworks at international level, and their transfer into national policies, while situating these developments in a socio-historical perspective. The book illustrates by means of a concrete case study with important empirical data that demonstrate the reality and influence of this new policy on the day-to-day work of teachers.

Help close the STEM gap through theory and practical tools Containing all of the practical tools needed to put theory into practice, STEM for All by Leena Bakshi McLean provides a roadmap for teachers, instructional coaches, and leaders to better understand the challenges that create low engagement and scores in STEM subjects and implement exciting and culturally relevant teaching plans. This book covers a wealth of key topics surrounding the subject, including classroom culture, discourse, identity, and belonging, family and community participation, and justice-centered core learning. This book uses the Connect, Create, and Cultivate framework from STEM4Real, an organization that provides socially just and culturally relevant STEM teaching and standards-based learning strategies, combined with stories and case studies of real students throughout to provide context for key concepts. In this book, readers will learn about: Six pillars that can throw off the foundation of a classroom, including non-inclusive curriculum and lack of equal access Moments of triumph and resilience that can be used to navigate rocky and recalcitrant relationships Implicit and unconscious biases that can unravel our impact despite our best intentions STEM for All earns a well-deserved spot on the bookshelves of all educators motivated to close the STEM gap and better prepare their students for future college and career opportunities in math and science fields.

A new educational paradigm for youth mindfulness. “If you are a teacher, or an educator, or involved in school administration and curriculum development, the book you hold in your hands has the potential to transform your life, the lives of your students, and the life of the school itself, as well as education in America.”—Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, from the Foreword With attention spans waning and stress on the rise, many teachers are looking for new ways to help students concentrate, learn, and thrive. The Way of Mindful Education is a practical guide for cultivating attention, compassion, and well-being not only in these students, but also in teachers themselves. Packed with lesson plans, exercises, and considerations for specific age groups and students with special needs, this working manual demonstrates the real world application of mindfulness practices in K-12 classrooms. Part I, Why Mindful Education Matters, explains what mindfulness is, the science behind its benefits for students and educators, and the inspiring work that is already underway in the Mindful Education movement. In Part II, Begin with Yourself, we are reminded that in order to teach mindfully, we need to be mindful. Here teachers will learn the when, where, and how of mindfulness so they can effectively embody its practices with their students. Mindfulness practices offer teachers self-care and attention skills that prepare them to teach with greater energy and mastery. Discover how simple exercises can help manage stress, focus attention, develop compassion, and savor positive experiences in everyday life. Part III, Cultivating a Mindful Classroom, explores the qualities of a mindful teacher, the ingredients of a mindful learning environment, and helpful skills for appropriate, supportive work with cultural diversity, student stress and trauma, and varying age groups and developmental stages. Finally, in Part IV, Mindful Education Curriculum, we learn eighteen ready-to-use mindfulness lessons for use in schools. These practical exercises, designed to foster skills like embodiment, attention, heartfulness, and interconnectedness, can be readily adapted for any age group and population, and the author draws from his extensive personal experience to offer a wealth of tips for introducing them to students in real-time. Decades of research indicate the impressive benefits of mindfulness in social, emotional, and cognitive development, and as an antidote to emotional dysregulation, attention deficits, and social difficulties. This book invites teachers, administrators, and anyone else involved in education to take advantage of this vital tool and become purveyors of a mindful, compassionate, ethical, and effective way of teaching.

The overwhelming majority of tea practitioners in contemporary Japan are women, but there has been little discussion on their historical role in tea culture (chanoyu). In Cultivating Femininity, Rebecca Corbett writes women back into this history and shows how tea practice for women was understood, articulated, and promoted in the Edo (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. Viewing chanoyu from the lens of feminist and gender theory, she sheds new light on tea’s undeniable influence on the formation of modern understandings of femininity in Japan. Corbett overturns the iemoto tea school’s carefully constructed orthodox narrative by employing underused primary sources and closely examining existing tea histories. She incorporates Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of social and cultural capital and Norbert Elias’s “civilizing process” to explore the economic and social incentives for women taking part in chanoyu. Although the iemoto system sought to increase its control over every aspect of tea, including book production, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular texts aimed specifically at women evidence the spread of tea culture beyond parameters set by the schools. The expansion of chanoyu to new social groups cascaded from commoner men to elite then commoner women. Shifting the focus away from male tea masters complicates the history of tea in Japan and shows how women of different social backgrounds worked within and without traditionally accepted paradigms of tea practice. The direct socioeconomic impact of the spread of tea is ultimately revealed in subsequent advances in women’s labor opportunities and an increase in female social mobility. Through their participation in chanoyu, commoner women were able to blur and lessen the status gap between themselves and women of aristocratic and samurai status. Cultivating Femininity offers a new perspective on the prevalence of tea practice among women in modern Japan. It presents a fresh, much-needed approach, one that will be appreciated by students and scholars of Japanese history, gender, and culture, as well as by tea practitioners.

Cultivating the Spirit THIS GROUNDBREAKING WORK IS BASED on a five-year study of how students change during the college years and the role college plays in facilitating the development of their spiritual qualities. Students, the authors argue, grapple with the big questions in life: Who am I? What are my values? Do I have a mission in life? Why am I in college? What kind of person do I want to be? What sort of world do I want to help to create? Their answers to these questions help determine their academic and career choices and are tied to the development of personal qualities such as empathy, caring, and social responsibility. The study finds that, while students' religious engagement declines during college, at the same time they become substantially more caring, tolerant, connected with others, and actively egaged in a spiritual quest. Spiritual growth also enhances academic performance, leadership development, and satisfaction with college. The study provides strong evidence pointing to specific experiences during college that can contribute to students' spiritual growth. The need for spiritual development in college is apparent. Two-thirds of the students in the study express a strong interest in spiritual matters, well over half report that their professors never encourage discussions of religious or spiritual matters, and about the same proportion report that professors never provide opportunities to discuss the purpose and meaning of life. Cultivating the Spirit aims to raise the awareness of academic administrators, faculty, and the public at large to the vital role that spirituality plays in student learning and development. Throughout the book, the authors identify strategies for enhancing students' development and encourage the academy to give greater priority to the spiritual aspects of students' educational and personal development.