Rebound

From the New York Times best-selling author Kwame Alexander comes Rebound, the dynamic prequel to his Newbery Award–winning novel in verse, The Crossover. Before Josh and Jordan Bell were streaking up and down the court, their father was learning his own moves. Chuck Bell takes center stage as readers get a glimpse of his childhood and how he became the jazz music worshiping, basketball star his sons look up to. A novel in verse with all the impact and rhythm readers have come to expect from Kwame Alexander, Rebound goes back in time to visit the childhood of Chuck "Da Man" Bell during one pivotal summer when young Charlie is sent to stay with his grandparents where he discovers basketball and learns more about his family's past.

Written by a leading mental skills coach and contributing editor to Runner's World (US), this is a practical guide to building the psychological resilience that athletes need to recover from injury and rebound stronger. Injuries affect every athlete, from the elite Olympian to the weekend racer. In the moment, a traumatic crash, a torn muscle, or a stress fracture can feel like the most devastating event possible. While some athletes are destroyed by the experience, others emerge from their recovery better, stronger, and more confident than ever. The key to a swifter, stronger comeback is the use of mental skills: psychological tools that enable an athlete to take control of their recovery and ultimately use the experience to their advantage. Injury and other setbacks are inevitable – but with training, overcoming them skillfully and confidently is possible. This book will provide a clear, compelling explanation of psychological recovery from injury and a practical guide to building mental resilience. Weaving together personal narratives from star athletes, scientific research, and the specialized clinical expertise of mental skills coach Carrie Jackson Cheadle, it will contain more than 45 Mental Skills and Drills that athletes can use at every phase of their recovery process. These same strategies can help athletes who aren't currently injured reduce their vulnerability to injury, and enable any individual to reach new heights within their sport and beyond.

HERITAGE TORONTO 2022 BOOK AWARD NOMINEE From basketball hoops to cricket bats, the role community sports play in our cities and how crucial they are to diversity and inclusion. “The virus exposed how we live and work. It also revealed how we play, and what we lose when we have to stop.” For every kid who makes it to the NBA, thousands more seek out the pleasure and camaraderie of pick-up basketball in their local community centre or neighbourhood park. It’s a story that plays out in sport after sport – team and individual, youth and adult, men's and women's. While the dazzle of pro athletes may command our attention, grassroots sports build the bridges that link city-dwellers together in ways that go well beyond the physical benefits. The pandemic and heightened awareness of racial exclusion reminded us of the importance of these pastimes and the public spaces where we play. In this closely reported exploration of the role of community sports in diverse cities, Toronto journalist Perry King makes an impassioned case for re-imagining neighbourhoods whose residents can be active, healthy, and connected. "I couldn’t stop reading Perry King’s Rebound. An evocative essay about the transformative and uniting power of local sports in a city with residents from every country in the world, the book is well researched, entertaining, and informative. It spoke to my own experiences as a young athlete fitting into a new city when I first came to Toronto – and to the importance our city government must place on local recreation and sports if our city is to help all residents reach their potential. A fantastic contribution to understanding Toronto – and to the power of local recreation in any major city." —David Miller, former mayor of Toronto

Prejudice can be defined in more ways than one

In this inspirational two-color book full of poetry and inspiring lessons about the rules of life, Newbery Medal–winning Kwame Alexander shares his own poetic and uplifting words plus quotes from all-star athletes like Stephen Curry and Venus Williams and other wonderfully influential figures like Sonia Sotomayor and Michelle Obama. What can we imagine for our lives? What if we were the star players, moving and grooving through the game of life? What if we had our own rules of the game to help us get what we want, what we aspire to, what will enrich our lives? Illustrated with photographs by Thai Neave, The Playbook is intended to provide inspiration on the court of life. Each rule contains wisdom from inspiring athletes and role models such as Nelson Mandela, Serena Williams, LeBron James, Carli Lloyd, Steph Curry, and Michelle Obama. Kwame Alexander also shares his own stories of overcoming obstacles and winning games in this motivational and inspirational book for readers of any age and for anyone needing a little bit of encouragement. You gotta know the rules to play the game. Ball is life. Take it to the hoop. Soar.

For more than a year now, we educators have been tested and tested again. We’ve been stretched, we’ve been pulled, we’ve been put through the wringer. But now it’s time to "rebound." It’s time to bounce back, come back better, and benefit from the many lessons learned to reignite engagement, accelerate learning, and move forward with fresh optimism and better systems for schooling. Enter Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey, Dominique Smith, and John Hattie, whose Distance Learning Playbooks have supported more than a half million educators across pandemic teaching and who are here now to advise you on this next, absolutely critical leg of our ongoing journey. Complete with tools and strategies, prompts and exercises, Rebound: A Playbook for Rebuilding Agency, Accelerating Learning Recovery, and Rethinking Schools will help you: Address the collective traumas we have experienced during the pandemic and rebuild our sense of agency and self, so that we can attribute student success to both teachers’ and students’ efforts Evaluate what we have learned about remote teaching and learning to determine what to carry forward and what to leave behind Shift the narrative from learning loss to "learning leaps" and implement instructional and assessment practices that ensure our students reclaim lost knowledge, build skills, develop agency, and accelerate gains Redefine classrooms, learning experiences, the ways schools operate, and the very idea of schooling itself "The greatest travesty that can arise for schools after 2020/21," Doug, Nancy, Dominique, and John write, "is to rush back to the old normal, and learn nothing, or little, about what worked well. That’s why this book has focused on rebounding, and taking the opportunity to create an even better schooling system, one that serves even more students, and focuses more on what matters most." "Let′s agree not to reduce the impact that our expectations have on students′ learning. What if we talk about learning leaps instead of learning loss? What if we identify where students are in their learning and identify critical content that they must learn now to accelerate their performance in the future? And what if we raise our expectations for students rather than lower them?" —Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, Dominique Smith, and John Hattie

Beginning with the day Jordan's father was murdered, and stretching through a two-year odyssey across the American landscape, Rebound is the story of the world's most famous athlete's personal journey in search of himself. Bestselling author Bob Greene was there with Jordan every step along the way. Here is his detailed, intimate chronicle, rich with the sound of Jordan's own voice in long and candid conversations with Greene. In minor-league dugouts and packed NBA arenas, alone with Jordan at home or riding down the highway with him, during the lowest days in the backroads world of small-town baseball and the headiest nights in ornate basketball stadiums where thousands cried his name, Rebound is the story of a man who seemingly had everything the world could offer, and then, in pain, left it behind in an effort to rediscover who he once was, and who he wanted to be.

Let’s make the "next normal" a "better normal" If there ever was a time for our heroic school leadership to persevere, it’s now. Because now, well over one year since the pandemic stretched the resilience and reserves of our school systems, it’s time to "rebound." It’s time to leverage this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reboot teaching and learning as we know it so that we magnify the effective practices from the past while leveraging the so many recent lessons learned. This is where Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey, Dominique Smith, and John Hattie, coauthors of The Distance Learning Playbook series, are ideally equipped to serve as your collaborators. Inside Leading the Rebound: 20+ Must-Dos to Restart Teaching and Learning you’ll find immediate actions, mindsets, and approaches to take if we’re to reimagine and improve our schools and school systems. Step by step, you’ll discover explicit guidance on how to: 1. Take care of yourself 2. Take stock and find the path 3. Rebuild teacher agency 4. Rebuild collective teacher efficacy 5. Foreground social and emotional learning 6. Change the learning loss narrative 7. Guide teacher clarity 8. Ensure instructional excellence 9. Use assessments for a range of purposes 10. Design and implement interventions 11. Win back parent-teacher relationships 12. Establish restorative practices 13. Avoid stealing the conflict 14. Enhance teacher-student and student-student interactions 15. Develop early warning systems for attendance, behavior, and course completion 16. Confront cognitive challenges to learning 17. Ensure equitable and restorative grading 18. Enhance PLCs 19. Provide empathetic feedback 20. Host honest performance conversations 21. Maintain your social presence 22. Future-proof teachers and students What’s more Leading the Rebound is backed up with all kinds of resources--including VISIBLE LEARNING® research, sample planning tools, and other essential tips and strategies--to provide you with a start-to-finish roadmap for navigating this absolutely critical next leg in our journey toward a "better normal."