Learning Power

In cities across the nation, low-income African-American and Latino parents hope their children's education will bring a better life. But their schools, typically, are overcrowded, ill equipped, and shamefully under-staffed. This work offers a radical approach to school reform that stresses grassroots public activism.

In The Learning Power Approach: Teaching learners to teach themselves Guy Claxton sets out the design principles of a pedagogical formula that aims to strengthen students' learning muscles and develop their independence, initiative, determination, and love of learning. Foreword by Carol S. Dweck. Learning is learnable! Educators can explicitly teach not just content, knowledge, and skills, but also the positive habits of mind that will better prepare students to flourish both in school and in later life. And as 'traditionalists' fight for rigour and knowledge, and 'progressives' defend the increasing focus on character and well-being, Guy Claxton's Learning Power Approach (LPA) brings resolution to this phoney and unnecessary war by offering teachers a win-win pedagogical formula that delivers good academic results while simultaneously turbocharging students' independence, initiative, and love of learning. In this groundbreaking book Guy distils fifteen years' experience with his influential Building Learning Power method to provide a set of design principles for strengthening students' learning muscles, and together with a wealth of practical strategies and the supporting evidence that underpins them details the small tweaks to daily practice that will help teachers attend more closely to the ways in which they can shape their students' learning dispositions and attitudes. Complemented by engaging and informative classroom examples of the LPA in action and drawing from research into the fields of mindset, metacognition, grit, and collaborative learning The Learning Power Approach describes in detail the suite of beliefs, values, attitudes, and habits of mind that go in to making up learning power, and offers a thorough explanation of what its intentions and guiding principles are. Furthermore, in order to help those who are just setting out on their LPA journey, Guy presents teachers with an attractive menu of customisable strategies and activities to choose from as they begin to embed the LPA principles into their own classroom culture, and also includes at the end of each chapter a Wondering section that serves to prompt reflection, conversation, and action among teachers. Suitable for teachers and leaders in all educational settings, The Learning Power Approach carefully lays the groundwork for a series of books to follow that are specifically tailored to primary teaching, secondary teaching, and school leadership.

Enrich, grow, and sustain AfL in your classroom. Twenty years after the publication of Inside the Black Box, the landmark review of formative classroom assessment, international education experts Christine Harrison and Margaret Heritage tackle assessment for learning (AfL) anew, with fresh insights gained from two decades of research, theory, and classroom practice. Packed with key AfL ideas and supports, vignettes that illustrate AfL in action, and practice-based evidence to enrich understanding of AfL from both the teacher’s and the student’s perspectives, this book is a ‘sounding board’ for educators to explore and reflect on their own AfL practices and beliefs.

This book is an engaging and accessible collection that celebrates the nuance and depth of student-faculty partnerships in higher education. It aims to break the mold of traditional and power-laden academic writing by showcasing creative genres such as reflection, poetry, dialogue, interview, vignette, and essay. The collection has invited chapters from renowned scholars in the field alongside new student and staff voices, and it reflects and embodies a wide range of student-staff partnership perspectives from different roles, identities, cultures, countries, and institutions.

This book illustrates hitherto unexamined connections between the present state of teacher education in the UK and past models of practice. It locates contemporary debates within ongoing historical tensions over what constitutes a sound and proper start to a career in teaching. Questions as to the constituents of a professional training, the essential skills, knowledge and attitudes desired of an effective teacher, the most suitable locus of expertise, the relative roles of participants, and the balance of theory and practice lie at the heart of this book. The book reviews apprenticeship and teach-exemplar models of training, expert-novice relationships, model and demonstration teaching, school-based practice and the elaboration of core pedagogical principles in educational debate and research. These developments are assessed against recent initiatives in ITT, such as partnership models of ITT, school-based mentoring, advanced skills teaching, training schools, a standards-driven model of assessment for student teachers and models of effective teaching. Central to the book is the concept of the power to teach. By reclaiming this notion, the book offers challenging new perspectives on current policy and practice in teacher education today and adds to existing histories of teacher training of the past.

The only first-year experience text with a unifying system for critical thinking and problem solving,P.O.W.E.R. Learningmaximizes students’ potential for success in college and in life. Using the simple, class-tested principles of the P.O.W.E.R (Prepare, Organize, Work, Evaluate, and Rethink) system, students gain a sense of mastery and achievement as they move through the text, and with the growth of their confidence comes the increased intellectual enthusiasm and personal discipline needed for them to excel. The third edition ofP.O.W.E.R Learninghas been substantially revised to include new assessments, critical thinking questions, an emphasis on academic honesty and integrity, and the importance of service learning.

Radical in its implications, this original and important work may change forever the views we hold about the nature of learning. In The Power of Mindful Learning, Ellen Langer uses her innovative theory of mindulness, introduced in her influential earlier book, to dramatically enhance the way we learn. In business, sports, laboratories, or at home, our learning is hobbled by certain antiquated and pervasive misconceptions. In this pithy, liberating, and delightful book she gives us a fresh, new view of learning in the broadest sense. Such familiar notions as delayed gratification, ”the basics”, or even ”right answers”, are all incapacitating myths which Langer explodes one by one. She replaces them with her concept of mindful or conditional learning which she demonstrates, with fascinating examples from her research, to be extraordinarily effective. Mindful learning takes place with an awareness of context and of the ever-changing nature of information. Learning without this awareness, as Langer shows convincingly, has severely limited uses and often sets on up for failure.With stunning applications to skills as diverse as paying attention, CPR, investment analysis, psychotherapy, or playing a musical instrument, The Power of Mindful Learning is for all who are curious and intellectually adventurous.