Softening The Edges

With foreword by Cassandra Erkens The assessment process can be a rich experience for you and your students. With Softening the Edges, you'll discover how to design and deliver differentiated instruction and assessment to address learners' diverse intellectual and emotional needs. By creating an effective assessment architecture, you can ensure your students are invested in their own learning and have the confidence to face any learning challenge. Examine how to use self-assessment, formative assessment, summative assessment, and preassessment in ways that cultivate a positive culture of learning. This book will show you how to use assessment responsibly to build enriching relationships among teachers and students: Spot the indicators of hard and soft edges in classroom practices to differentiate instruction and assessment for learning. Learn how to educate for the whole child to meet students' cognitive, physical, and ethical development needs and support their social and emotional learning. Examine the importance of a learning continuum to smoothly guide students and increase student engagement and positive learning experiences. Visualize the qualities of a shared space that supports students' learning targets. Contents: Foreword by Cassandra Erkens Chapter 1: Assessment and the Whole Person Chapter 2: Instruction and Assessment Planning Using a Learning Continuum Chapter 3: Preassessment Chapter 4: Formative Assessment and Feedback Chapter 5: Self-Assessment and Goal Setting Chapter 6: Summative Assessment Chapter 7: Systems of Reporting Appendix: Sample Learning Continuums

Increase the achievement of every learner with Student Self-Assessment. In this practical guide, author Katie White outlines how to plan and implement various self-assessment strategies to ensure student growth at all grade levels. She covers every stage of the process--from setup to goal setting to celebrating. In each chapter, you'll find helpful step-by-step guidelines as well as questions to guide conversation and reflection throughout the journey. Understand how self-assessment skills benefit students now and in the future. Learn how to set up a self-assessment process and document learning. Train students to analyze and reflect on their own performances. Set strong, achievable goals in order to motivate students to realize their potential. Celebrate successes and continue to engage students with self-assessment. Contents: Introduction: Embracing Student Self-Assessment Chapter 1: Making a Compelling Case for Student-Self-Assessment Chapter 2: Setting Up a Self-Assessment Process and Documenting Learning Chapter 3: Engaging in Analysis and Reflection Chapter 4: Imagining Possibilities and Setting Goals Chapter 5: Celebrating Growth Chapter 6: Examining Age, Security, Families, and Other Factors Epilogue Appendix: Sample Data Notebook Sequence References and Resources Index

Eliza Fricker gets it. Describing her perfectly imperfect experience of raising a PDA child, with societal judgements and internal pressures, it is easy to feel overwhelmed, resentful and alone. This book's comedic illustrations explain these challenging situations and feelings in a way that words simply cannot, will bring some much-needed levity back into PDA parenting. Humorous anecdotes with a compassionate tone remind parents that they are not alone, and they're doing a great job. If children are safe, happy, and you leave the house on time, who cares about some smelly socks? A light-hearted and digestible guide to being a PDA parent covering everything from tolerance levels, relationships and meltdowns to collaboration, flexibility, and self care to dip in and out as your schedule allows to help get to grips with this complex condition. This book is an essential read for any parent with a PDA child, to help better understand your child, build support systems and carve out some essential self care time guilt free.

Imagine waking up to the gentle noises of the city, and moving through your day with complete confidence that you will get where you need to go quickly and efficiently. Soft City is about ease and comfort, where density has a human dimension, adapting to our ever-changing needs, nurturing relationships, and accommodating the pleasures of everyday life. How do we move from the current reality in most cites—separated uses and lengthy commutes in single-occupancy vehicles that drain human, environmental, and community resources—to support a soft city approach? In Soft City David Sim, partner and creative director at Gehl, shows how this is possible, presenting ideas and graphic examples from around the globe. He draws from his vast design experience to make a case for a dense and diverse built environment at a human scale, which he presents through a series of observations of older and newer places, and a range of simple built phenomena, some traditional and some totally new inventions. Sim shows that increasing density is not enough. The soft city must consider the organization and layout of the built environment for more fluid movement and comfort, a diversity of building types, and thoughtful design to ensure a sustainable urban environment and society. Soft City begins with the big ideas of happiness and quality of life, and then shows how they are tied to the way we live. The heart of the book is highly visual and shows the building blocks for neighborhoods: building types and their organization and orientation; how we can get along as we get around a city; and living with the weather. As every citizen deals with the reality of a changing climate, Soft City explores how the built environment can adapt and respond. Soft City offers inspiration, ideas, and guidance for anyone interested in city building. Sim shows how to make any city more efficient, more livable, and better connected to the environment.

Are you missing opportunities for growth that are right in front of you? In today’s volatile economic environment, filled with uncertainty and sudden change, the forces pushing you to stay focused on the core business are extremely powerful. Profiting from the core is crucial, but the danger is that overfocus on the core can blind companies. Scanning the horizon for new markets and new products can also be tempting, but risky. Fixating too much on either strategy can cause you to miss the substantial opportunities for growth that are often hidden in plain sight, at the edge of the core business. In this insightful yet practical book, strategy experts Alan Lewis and Dan McKone articulate a mindset that helps leaders recognize and capitalize on these opportunities. The Edge Strategy framework challenges how the boundaries of your existing products and services map to your customers’ views of the world and then provides three different lenses through which you can see and leverage value: • Product edge. How to capture incremental profits and other benefits by slightly altering the elements and composition of a core offering • Journey edge. How to create and capture extra value by adjusting your role in supporting the customer’s journey to and through your offering • Enterprise edge. How to unlock additional value from resources and capabilities that support your core offering by applying them in a different context, for a different offering or different set of customers With engaging examples across many industries, Lewis and McKone coach you on how to identify and assess each of the different “edges” and then provide concrete insights and advice on applying edge strategy and tactics to use in specific business contexts. The book concludes with a ten-step process to help executives and managers find and leverage the edges in their own companies. Edge Strategy is the concise, hands-on guide for growing your business by getting more yield from assets already in place, relationships already established, and investments already made.

Creativity enhances the quality of our lives, encouraging us to look deeper, search wider, and explore multiple perspectives. With Unlocked, you'll discover how to effectively connect creativity and assessment of creativity within any classroom setting. A variety of practical ideas and tools helps you design rich, authentic learning experiences that encourage inquiry and growth rather than compliance and "right" answers. Learn how to develop creativity assessment methods that truly foster creativity: Develop an understanding of the creative process and its four critical stages. Explore the numerous benefits of encouraging and developing students' creative thinking skills. Examine, in depth, the connection between effective assessment and students' creative development. Acquire concrete strategies for developing assessment methods (such as formative and self-assessment for learning) that unlock students' creative skills. Access free online reproducibles and resources for teaching and assessing creativity in the classroom.

New York Times bestselling author Rachel Macy Stafford shares simple words of daily inspiration in this unique, seasonal devotional to help you find new and more connected ways to live undistracted, heart-led, and hands-free every day. Rachel Macy Stafford, known to millions as the Hands Free Mama, equips readers to breathe life into what really matters: the ordinary moments in our routine lives and the people in them. Her inspiring words fill this beautiful book of short pieces constructed around the seasons of life. From finding daily surrender in the autumn and daily hope in the winter to finding daily bloom and daily spark in the spring and summer, you will always find fresh, beautiful words for your day. With a flexible, non-dated devotional structure, Only Love Today offers life-giving words that remind you of the tools you already possess and insights you already have as you seek to find: Clarity when you're conflicted Unity when you're divided Faith when you're uncertain Rest when your soul is weary Meaning in the meaningless A reset button directing you back to what matters most Regardless of what you're experiencing or what season you're in, in these pages, you'll find wisdom, encouragement, strength, vision, and clarity to live for what really matters.

In an educational milieu in which standards and accountability hold sway, schools can become places of stress, marginalization, and isolation instead of learning communities that nurture a sense of meaning and purpose. In Ensouling Our Schools, author Jennifer Katz weaves together methods of creating schools that engender mental, spiritual, and emotional health while developing intellectual thought and critical analysis. Kevin Lamoureux contributes his expertise regarding Indigenous approaches to mental and spiritual health that benefit all students and address the TRC Calls to Action.