Many argue that the conventional high school transcript has become irrelevant to today’s best practices in teaching, learning, and assessment. With more and more school leaders turning to alternate, competency-based approaches for learning, crediting and transcripts can follow suit by drawing on badging, micro-crediting, digital portfolios of student work, and other emerging tools. Reinventing Crediting for Competency-Based Education explores the need for this transformation while detailing the implementation of promising models, particularly the Mastery Transcript Consortium. Written by an experienced consultant and former school leader, this book will assist school and district administrators in making a forward-thinking crediting and transcript system work for their students’ futures.

A tremendous amount of money is being steered toward personalized learning (PL) initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels, and it is important to understand the return on the investment in students’ futures. It is only through rigorous discussions that educators and policymakers will be able to determine if PL is a passing fad or if it possesses the staying power necessary to show a positive impact on student achievement. Evaluation of Principles and Best Practices in Personalized Learning is a critical scholarly publication that explores the modern push for schools to implement PL environments and the continuing research to understand the best strategies and implementation methods for personalizing education. It seeks to begin creating a standardized language and standardized approach to the PL initiative and to investigate the implications it has on the educational system. Additionally, this book adds to the professional discussion of PL by looking at both the advantages and disadvantages of PL, the teacher’s role in PL, creating a PL program to scale, the role of technology and PL, the special education population and PL, emerging research on PL, and case studies involving PL. Featuring research on a wide range of topics such as blended learning, preservice teachers, and special education, this book is ideal for teachers, administrators, academicians, policymakers, researchers, and students.

Making Technology Work in Schools is an easy-to-use guide for transforming your school into a learner-centered, tech-rich environment. School systems are increasingly adopting ambitious new educational technologies, but how do you make sure they are yielding effective teaching and learning experiences? The authors’ proven, intuitive practices speak directly to academic coaches, school technology leads, district technology directors, and teachers on special assignment who are responsible for introducing new tools and programs. After reading this book, you will be able to better prepare the educators you serve to empower their learners, whether digitally savvy or not, to be engaged, collaborative, and better prepared for college and careers.

Integrating Computer Science Across the Core is a guide to systematizing computer science and computational thinking practices in your school. While most books explain how to teach computer science as a stand-alone discipline, this innovative approach will help you leverage your existing curriculum to deepen and expand students’ learning experiences in all content areas. Effective, equitable, and sustainable, this blueprint provides principals, curriculum directors, directors of technology, and other members of your school or district leadership team with suggested organizational structures, tips for professional learning, and key resources like planning instruments.

Radical Principals is a guidebook for K-12 leaders looking for creative ways, beyond the status quo, to support and nurture school communities in the wake of unprecedented obstacles. In-service principals understandably rely on existing protocols and district policies to solve day-to-day problems, but do you ever wonder whether these quick fixes are preventing you from making a more lasting, transformative change? Radical Principals are those school leaders who recognize that every child, especially disadvantaged ones living through inequities, need adults lighting their path with inventive and evidence-based opportunities for success. This inspirational yet pragmatic book provides novel strategies and solutions for balancing common concerns—curriculum, school safety, high-stakes testing, parental concerns, among others—while advancing your long-term vision for your school. These audacious, yet controlled approaches will help you maneuver around both the stubborn obstacles facing children in the greatest need of supports and your own blind spots and unintended biases. Spanning bureaucratic roadblocks, systemic injustice, communication breakdowns, and more, each chapter is rich with scenario-based challenges and leadership practices that don’t merely resolve the issues at hand but further help you advance your school towards a holistically equitable and supportive climate.

The Influential School Leader is a unique, accessible guide for any leader seeking to improve their vision and positively influence school communities in the face of adversity. A successful school today requires a nimble learning environment that is supportive, welcoming, and inspiring for teachers, students, and families. Based on numerous contributions from social and organizational psychology, this book provides a dynamic framework that prepares education stakeholders to examine problems from multiple perspectives and dimensions to create durable solutions. An ideal resource for principals, superintendents, department heads, school psychologists, and other educators in positions of leadership, this expansive toolkit is packed with pragmatic strategies and relatable vignettes.

This practical resource draws on the best of neuroscience to inform decision-making about digital learning. We live in unprecedented times that have pushed schools to make many decisions that have been postponed for years. For the first time since the inception of public education, teachers have been invited to redesign the learning landscape by integrating an intelligent selection of digital educational resources and changing pedagogical approaches based on information from the learning sciences. This handbook will help teachers make the most of this opportunity by showing them how to use digital tools to differentiate learning, employ alternative options to standardized testing, personalize learning, prioritize social-emotional skills, and inspire students to think more critically. The author identifies some gems in quality teaching that are amplified in online contexts, including 40 evidence-informed pedagogies from the learning sciences. This book will help all educators move online teaching and learning to new levels of confidence and success. Book Features: Provides quick references to key planning tools like decision-trees, graphics, app recommendations, and step-by-step directions to help teachers create their own online learning courses.Guides teachers through a 12-step model for instructional design that meets both national and international standards.Shows educators how to use an all-new Digital Resource Taxonomy to select resources, and how to research and keep them up to date.Explains why good instructional design and educational technology are complementary with best practices in learning sciences like Mind, Brain, and Education Science.Shares ways teachers can leverage technology to create more time for the personalized aspects of learning. Shows educators how to design online courses with tools that let all students begin at their own starting points and how to differentiate homework.Offers evidence-informed pedagogies to make online intimate and authentic for students.

Get to know which practices related to curriculum, instruction, and assessment are essential to make learning the goal for every student! You’ll learn how to Create learning targets that are scalable and transferable within and across units Develop instructional scales for each learning target Design non-scored practice activities and assessments Introduce and model skills that will be assessed and design tasks that allow students to use these skills Differentiate instruction and activities based on data from various types of assessments Maintain a gradebook that tracks summative achievement of learning targets, and score assessments accordingly Communicate progress clearly and efficiently with students and families

This book deals with the relevance of recognition and validation of non-formal and informal learning education and training, the workplace and society. In an increasing number of countries, it is at the top of the policy and research agenda ranking among the possible ways to redress the glaring lack of relevant academic and vocational qualifications and to promote the development of competences and certification procedures which recognise different types of learning, including formal, non-formal and informal learning. The aim of the book is therefore to present and share experience, expertise and lessons in such a way that enables its effective and immediate use across the full spectrum of country contexts, whether in the developing or developed world. It examines the importance of meeting institutional and political requirements that give genuine value to the recognition of non-formal and informal learning; it shows why recognition is important and clarifies its usefulness and the role it serves in education, working life and voluntary work; it emphasises the importance of the coordination, interests, motivations, trust and acceptance by all stakeholders. The volume is also premised on an understanding of a learning society, in which all social and cultural groups, irrespective of gender, race, social class, ethnicity, mental health difficulties are entitled to quality learning throughout their lives. Overall the thrust is to see the importance of recognising non-formal and informal learning as part of the larger movement for re-directing education and training for change. This change is one that builds on an equitable society and economy and on sustainable development principles and values such as respect for others, respect for difference and diversity, exploration and dialogue.

A glance at successful people reveals a simple truth: successful people employ successful habits. Yet in schools, amongst all of the information and all of the skills that are taught, few concern how to employ and internalize these key habits of success. These skills are expected, even demanded, but are rarely taught, at least not with the attention of whatever else is deemed critical learning. The Missing Link seeks to place such skills as persistence, self-regulation, organization, time management, organization, and even the skill of appropriate “work-place social skills” into the strata of critically important learning. The Missing Link was written to help professional educators (as well as parents and others) employ straight-forward ways to teach success skills without adding to the enormous burdens they already shoulder. This book is a guide to teaching critical success skills in powerful ways by infusing them into the curriculum that is already in place. Teachers (and parents) just do what they usually do, but with a different focus to change outcomes and children’s lives for the better.