This text reveals the invisible inner landscapes of how educators teach children from a variety of backgrounds to meet the challenging expectations of today's standards without sacrificing support for their developmental needs or their diverse ways of learning.

This book shows how school improvement efforts are often undermined by the changing conditions around schools, as well as by some of the very policies and programmes designed to help them make improvements. The author argues that schools need to create the conditions for their own success and describes key practices to help achieve this.

Since it was first invented, Americans have been trying to re-design the American high school. One of the latest approaches funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is to find inventive high school designs that work well in one location and replicate them in other locations. The authors of this book followed a design team from Big Picture Learning as it worked to do exactly this, recording the challenges it faced, and the strategies it employed. Their accessible and entertaining account of Big Pictures work is laced with stories about scaling up by other school design teams, and in...

Teachers know how complicated their work is. They constantly balance considerations of individual students with those of the group; they think about how past events affect today's lessons; and they constantly adapt and revise for future lessons. But few people ever get to see teachers' work in this way. The most energizing, relational, complicated, inspiring, disheartening parts of teaching remain largely invisible. Over nearly a decade at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Desiree Pointer Mace worked with dozens of teachers across the country to 'open their doors' by...

A much-needed counterpoint to the sweeping rhetoric of reform, this important book offers a nuanced depiction of the challenges and possibilities at the school and classroom level. Through the experiences of urban high school teachers who partner with their local university, Del Prete provides unique insight into teaching and learning in the midst of reform. He effectively illustrates why focusing on teaching practice and school cultures - more than standards and accountability - is a more fruitful way to achieve real and lasting change. With powerful portraits from classrooms serving diverse...