Stop Fake Work In Education

Don’t do more work—do the right work. Educators at all levels have increasing demands keeping them working harder than ever, but they are often working hard on things that don’t really help them reach the loftiest of goals—student success. This "Fake Work" can mire the most dedicated educator in exhaustion, burnout, and a lack of confidence that improvement is possible. Nielson and Burks show leaders and their teams how to stop doing Fake Work, by providing tools for gaining focus, building high-performance teams, and identifying and driving the right work with the right behaviors. When you offer your team a better way of working, planning, and collaborating, you turn Fake Work into Real Work—and stagnancy into dynamic change. This data-driven, research-based guide shows you • An overall approach to addressing your culture—the foundational elements that supports the change that sets you up for maximum performance. • A simple, three-part model—strategy, alignment, execution—for shedding Fake Work • Road maps for aligning organizational strategies and actions • Tools for gaining focus, building teams, and cultivating productive behaviors • Real educators’ stories • Exercises, reflection questions, charts, checklists, and more School change remains elusive when the path to success is murky. Clear the way for principals, teachers and students by turning Fake Work into Real Work—and uncertainty into true success.

How many countless working hours have you spent on projects, proposals, paperwork, and meetings that felt useless or were ignored or dismissed? Hard work is not the same as real work. Half of the work we do consumes valuable time without strengthening the short- or long-term survival of the organization. In a word, it's fake. Not only does fake work drain a company's resources without improving its bottom line, it steals conviction, care, and positive morale from employees, and adds the burden of high turnover, communication breakdowns, and cultural patterns of poor productivity. But how can you turn fake work into real work? Internationally renowned business consultants Brent D. Peterson and Gaylan W. Nielson explain how to identify needlessly time-consuming and sometimes difficult tasks (which aren't always as easy to spot as they seem) and shift your focus toward rewarding work that will achieve results. With more than twenty years of experience, Peterson and Nielson have successfully helped corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, schools, and community groups increase their productivity and retain talented employees by understanding and using their skills on things that actually matter. They illustrate their advice with stories about real world employees who have been trapped by fake work. Fake Work offers solutions that will change the way you view work, including how to recognize fake work and how to get out of it, how (and what) to communicate with your colleagues to eliminate fake work, how to recognize and counteract the personality traits that encourage fake work, and how to close the gap between your company's strategies and the work that needs to be done to reach the results critical to your and your company's survival.

Dial back and make room for impact With teacher and leader workloads and burnout at an all-time high, it’s time for de-implementation: de-prioritizing and deleting the less effective, higher-cost initiatives we implement in schools. De-implementation allows us to focus on practices that have more supporting evidence and a higher probability of positive impact on students, and at the same time gain much-needed work-life balance. In Making Room for Impact, the internationally respected education experts and authors provide a clear four-stage process for winnowing down teaching and learning to high-effect practices. Informed by the latest research in learning, education, healthcare, and psychology, each step and tool is designed to move educators through the hard parts of letting go. Inside, you’ll find: Research that tells us the process of schooling is often over-engineered and that gives us permission to dial back, carefully A step-by-step process for deciding which initiatives are most effective—and how to let go of the ones that are not Useful tools, templates, and charts that educators can immediately use in their de-implementation work—at school, in teaching teams, or at the system level It’s time to get our lives back—without harming student learning. If we can collectively learn to let go and understand how to identify which initiatives are worthwhile, we’ll have more time for what truly matters.

Turn any student into a bookworm with a few easy and practical strategies Donalyn Miller says she has yet to meet a child she can’t turn into a reader. No matter how far behind Miller's students might be when they reach her 6th grade classroom, they end up reading an average of 40 to 50 books a year. Miller's unconventional approach dispenses with drills and worksheets that make reading a chore. Instead, she helps students navigate the world of literature and gives them time to read books they pick out themselves. Her love of books and teaching is both infectious and inspiring. In the book, you’ll find: Hands-on strategies for managing and improving your own school library Tactics for helping students walk on their own two feet and continue the reading habit after they’ve finished with your class Data from student surveys and end-of-year feedback that proves how well the Miller Method works The Book Whisperer includes a dynamite list of recommended "kid lit" that helps parents and teachers find the books that students really like to read.

Completely revised and updated, a much-needed call to action for every parent, teacher, and citizen to help our children and stop the wave of killing and violence gripping America's youth Newtown, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine. Thereis no bigger or more important issue in America than youth violence. Kids, some as young as ten years old, take up arms with the intention to murder. Why is this happening? Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano believe the root cause is the steady diet of violent entertainment kids see on TV, in movies, and in the video games they play—witnessing hundreds of violent images a day. Offering incontrovertible evidence based on recent scientific studies and research, they posit that this media is not just conditioning children to be violent and see killing as acceptable but teaching them the mechanics of killing as well. Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill supplies the statistics, interprets the copious research that exists on the subject, and suggests the many ways to make a difference in your home, at school, in your community, in the courts, and in the larger world. In using this book, parents, educators, social-service workers, youth advocates, and anyone interested in the welfare of our children will have a solid foundation for effective action and prevention of future Columbines, Jonesboros, and Newtowns.

Some great teachers are born, but most are self-made. And the way to make yourself a great teacher is to learn to think and act like one. In this updated second edition of the best-selling Never Work Harder Than Your Students, Robyn R. Jackson reaffirms that every teacher can become a master teacher. The secret is not a specific strategy or technique, nor it is endless hours of prep time. It's developing a master teacher mindset—rigorously applying seven principles to your teaching until they become your automatic response: Start where you students are. Know where your students are going. Expect to get your students there. Support your students along the way. Use feedback to help you and your students get better. Focus on quality rather than quantity. Never work harder than your students. In her conversational and candid style, Jackson explains the mastery principles and how to start using them to guide planning, instruction, assessment, and classroom management. She answers questions, shares stories from her own practice and work with other teachers, and provides all-new, empowering advice on navigating external evaluation. There's even a self-assessment to help you identify your current levels of mastery and take control of your own practice. Teaching is hard work, and great teaching means doing the right kind of hard work: the kind that pays off. Join tens of thousands of teachers around the world who have embarked on their journeys toward mastery. Discover for yourself the difference that Jackson's principles will make in your classroom and for your students.

“Should be in the hands of every history teacher in the country.”— Howard Zinn James Loewen has revised Teaching What Really Happened, the bestselling, go-to resource for social studies and history teachers wishing to break away from standard textbook retellings of the past. In addition to updating the scholarship and anecdotes throughout, the second edition features a timely new chapter entitled "Truth" that addresses how traditional and social media can distort current events and the historical record. Helping students understand what really happened in the past will empower them to use history as a tool to argue for better policies in the present. Our society needs engaged citizens now more than ever, and this book offers teachers concrete ideas for getting students excited about history while also teaching them to read critically. It will specifically help teachers and students tackle important content areas, including Eurocentrism, the American Indian experience, and slavery. Book Features: An up-to-date assessment of the potential and pitfalls of U.S. and world history education. Information to help teachers expect, and get, good performance from students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Strategies for incorporating project-oriented self-learning, having students conduct online historical research, and teaching historiography. Ideas from teachers across the country who are empowering students by teaching what really happened. Specific chapters dedicated to five content topics usually taught poorly in today’s schools.