"For educators and school leaders who long for a positive school culture, the numerous, time-saving, cost-effective methods of identifying and celebrating student success are found in this book." - Trevor Greene, 2013 MetLife/NASSP National High School Principal of the Year WHAT IF YOU AND YOUR SCHOOL COULD BECOME YOUR WORLD'S GREATEST IN ONE YEAR OR LESS? Building the World's Greatest High School isn't about a new program for your school. It's about a way of being that will unalterably change lives and impact futures of you, your students, your colleagues, and your community. Building the World's Greatest High School will show you: - Five shifts to enhance the potentials of all students and staff. - Six World's Greatest Values that will forever change your school. - Seven building blocks for improving student and staff success. - How to start your journey to become your World's Greatest Me. "I have had the privilege of knowing Richard Parkhouse for over 25 years. His passion for creating positive school cultures is second to none. When he's on your campus, lives change, students and staff understand the vision while school pride can be seen and felt. His heart and passion are infectious." - Janet Roberts, CADA President, California Associate of Directors of Activities (2013), Activities Director - Chino Hills High School

Get ready to be a renegade with this how-to leadership guide. We’re all looking for the next best tech tool, but why don’t we have the same progressive appetite for pedagogy that we have for technology? Renegade leadership may be the answer we need. Merging best practice with innovation, renegade leadership is student-centered, intertwining equity, culture, and technology. Using research, vignettes, and renegade profiles, this book challenges you to lead in the digital age by: Applying transformational tenets of connected pedagogy Increasing your leadership in curriculum, cultural proficiency, and school improvement Leading staff meetings, planning professional development, and improving student learning Don’t miss the free podcasts, flipped book study, and more on the Renegade Leadership website.

Turn ideas into goals—and goals into impact The road to school improvement and student achievement is paved with good intentions—so why does the destination seem so far away? If you’re like most educators, the answer is a pothole known as the implementation gap. This book provides a road map to bypassing that gap in your school or district, offering a carefully researched, field-tested methodology that takes leadership teams, professional learning communities, and educators all the way from good ideas to systematic impact. Following the five Ds, you’ll: Discover goals worth pursuing and problems worth addressing Design instruments and actions that generate deep impact Deliver interventions and collect data Double-back to monitor your progress and evaluate the impact Double-up to enhance, sustain, and scale your success You became an educator to make a difference in students’ lives. With this playbook, you’ll transform research and ideas into achievable actions—and make maximum impact.

Virtual Worlds and E-Commerce: Technologies and Applications for Building Customer Relationships presents various opinions, judgments, and ideas on how the use of digitally created worlds is changing the face of e-commerce and extending the use of internet technologies to create a more immersive experience for customers. Containing current research on various aspects of the use of virtual worlds, this book includes a discussion of the elements of virtual worlds; the evolution of e-commerce to virtual commerce (v-commerce); the convergence of online games and virtual worlds; current examples of virtual worlds in use by various businesses, the military, and educational institutions; the economics of virtual worlds: discussions on legal, security and technological issues facing virtual worlds; a review of some human factor issues in virtual worlds; and the future of virtual worlds and e-commerce.

Common Worlds: Paths Toward Sustainable Urbanism explores expert and lay approaches to sustainable urbanism, focusing on the politics and civic aesthetics of space and place; project-based learning and it consequences for the life chances of youth; and the prospect of intergenerational civic engagement. Extended case studies of sustainable urbanism describe areas undergoing demographic and socioeconomic change over the two decades since the end of the Cold War. The case studies, based upon participatory action research, are framed through the lens of transformational anthropology, which focuses on the structural factors and power relationships that contribute to social and economic disparities within a population. This approach is based upon principles of personal and group transformation, and it holds researchers responsible for collaborating with communities and groups in co-constructing research, thereby enhancing the constituents’ ability to carry out subsequent transformational change studies rooted in and shaped by the local community. Each case also focuses on a movement in support of aesthetic improvement, including preservation, conservation, and restoration efforts on behalf of parkland, open space, agricultural land, and marine wetlands in the face of external threats to their sustainability.

Latina/o/x places exist as both tangible physical phenomena and gatherings created and maintained by creative cultural practices. In this collection, an interdisciplinary group of contributors critically examines the many ways that varied Latina/o/x communities cohere through cultural expression. Authors consider how our embodied experiences of place, together with our histories and knowledge, inform our imagination and reimagination of our surroundings in acts of placemaking. This placemaking often considers environmental sustainability as it helps to sustain communities in the face of xenophobia and racism through cultural expression ranging from festivals to zines to sanctuary movements. It emerges not only in specific locations but as movement within and between sites; not only as part of a built environment, but also as an aesthetic practice; and not only because of efforts by cultural, political, and institutional leaders, but through mass media and countless human interactions. A rare and crucial perspective on Latina/o/x people in the Midwest, Building Sustainable Worlds reveals how expressive culture contributes to, and sustains, a sense of place in an uncertain era.