Transforming Students

It is preparation for life.--Rachel A. Heath "Reflective Teaching"

College has the power to transform students into intentional, critical, and engaged people. The recent trend of trying to measure higher education’s return on investment misses a fundamental point, argue Charity Johansson and Peter Felten. The central purpose of a college or university is to transform the lives of students—not to merely change them or help them mature. This transformation is an ongoing process of intentionally aligning one’s behavior with one’s core sense of personal identity. It is the university’s central role to lead students in this transformation, a process that shapes students into intentional, critical, and engaged individuals. Recognizing the remarkable influence of the college experience on peoples’ lives, the authors offer a guide to how colleges and universities can effectively lead students through this life-changing process. Drawn from extensive interviews with students and graduates, faculty and staff, Transforming Students gathers diverse stories to show how students experience the transformation process, which rarely follows a neat or linear path. The interviews illustrate central themes from the literature on transformative learning and the undergraduate student experience. A sequel of sorts to George Keller’s classic Transforming a College—which chronicled Elon University’s metamorphosis from struggling college to a top regional university—Transforming Students addresses the school’s core educational mission: to shape students into engaged adults who embrace learning as a lifelong endeavor. Given this effect, the college experience is much more than preparation for a career. It is preparation for life.

This book offers college professors and college students, as well as the general reader, a variety of ideas for developing techniques for creative and critical thinking and strategic writing and reading skills. Additionally, some of the contributions here present strategies to help students cultivate effective interpersonal skills, and foster a greater understanding of cultural diversity and skills for collaboration in a culturally inclusive workplace. Along with this, the book also utilizes technology in innovative ways across the curriculum. In teaching language courses, literature courses, psychology courses, or education courses, each contributor cultivates, through teaching and mentoring, the transformation of a student into a 21st century leader.

How can we create and sustain professional learning programs that actually lead to improved student achievement? In this thoughtful and informative guide for teachers, administrators, and policymakers, Douglas B. Reeves provides answers. First he casts a critical eye on professional learning that is inconsistent, unfocused, and ultimately ineffective, and explains why elaborate planning documents and "brand-name" programs are not enough to achieve desired outcomes. Then he outlines how educators at all levels can improve this situation by * Taking specific steps to move from vision to implementation; * Focusing on four essentials: teaching, curriculum, assessment, and leadership; * Making action research work; * Moving beyond the "train the trainer" model; and * Using performance assessment systems for teachers and administrators. If you're tired of professional development that takes up too much time and delivers too little, read Transforming Professional Development into Student Results and discover how to move toward a system that gives educators the learning experiences they need to make a measurable difference for their schools and their students.

This book chronicles a 10-year journey to develop and sustain Adelante, a university-school-community partnership designed specifically to address public education’s failure to meet the needs of students of color, particularly Chicana/o students. The authors examine the persistent barriers, mistakes, challenges, and successes that emerged in their community-based partnership with elementary school students, college students, teachers, parents, and educational leaders. Intertwining critical race theories with Chicana feminist theories, they propose a “critical race feminista praxis” and provide real-world examples of what this praxis can look like in the context of a racialized, gendered, and colonial landscape. The book offers practical advice and theoretical insight to those interested in disrupting pervasive inequities that shape the (mis)education of marginalized students. Book Features: Fills a void about how to engage in activist scholarship by describing concrete strategies and practices employed by the authors. Offers theoretical contributions through the braiding together of critical race and Chicana feminist theories. Proposes a partnership model for working with communities of color that promotes pathways to higher education. “Theoretically cutting-edge and with practical on-the-ground application, Transforming Educational Pathways is a brilliant example of how university–school–community collaborations can be reshaped into transformative praxis in the education of Chicanx, Latinx students. The balanced combination of community-engaged work and scholar-activist research in this groundbreaking book powerfully move us further in the spiritual journey of reimagining and transforming the inequities of educational institutions for Chicanx, Latinx students and their families and communities.” —Luis Urrieta, professor, The University of Texas at Austin “Delgado Bernal and Aleman start and end with the transformative idea that all students should be expected to attend college from their earliest experiences in public education—kindergarten. By challenging the deficit notions surrounding Chicana/o students and their communities, the authors provide the most compelling asset-based and theoretically grounded university–community partnership program I’ve seen in the K–8 sector.” —Daniel G. Solorzano, professor, University of California, Los Angeles “Transforming Educational Pathways for Chicana/o Students is a compelling and intimate account of the development of Adelante, an innovative university–school partnership. It is also an inspiring story of the impact of culturally affirming and anticolonial education on Latina/o children and their teachers, university student mentors, and parents. The process of changing deficit-based school culture is a difficult one, as the book shows. Yet, drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s feminist theorizing, Delgado Bernal and Alemán offer a theory of school change where collisions, difficult solidarities, and transformative moments constitute a praxis of hope, imagination, and social justice.” —Sofia Villenas, professor, Cornell University

A comprehensive student guide for women’s and gender studies that will help undergraduates to critically assess their skills and knowledge, communicate effectively about the value of their degree and consider ways to apply their strengths "in the real world."

The purpose of Transforming Schooling for Second Language Learners: Theoretical Insights, Policies, Pedagogies, and Practices is to bring together educational researchers and practitioners who have implemented, documented, or examined policies, pedagogies, and practices in and out of classrooms and in real and virtual contexts that are in some way transforming what we know about the extent to which emergent bilinguals (EBs) learn and achieve in educational settings. In the following chapters, scholars and researchers identify both (1) the current state of schooling for EBs, from their perspective, and (2) the particular ways that policies, pedagogies, and/or practices transform schooling as it currently exists for EBs in discernible ways based on their scholarship and research. Drawing on current and seminal research in fields including second language acquisition, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational linguistics, contributing authors draw on complementary theoretical, methodological, and philosophical frameworks that attend to the social, cultural, political, and ideological dimensions of being and becoming bi/multilingual and bi/multiliterate in schools and in the United States. In sum, we are deeply committed to asserting hope, possibility, and potential to discussions and discourses about bi/multilingual students. We value the urgency around improving the conditions, experiences, and circumstances in which they are learning languages and academic content. Our aim is to highlight perspectives, conceptualizations, orientations, and ideologies that disrupt and contest legacies of deficit thinking, linguistic purism, language standardization, and racism and the racialization of ethnolinguistic minorities.

7 Ways to Transform the Lives of Wounded Students provides a wealth of strategies and ideas for teachers and principals who work with wounded students—those who are beyond the point of "at-risk" and have experienced trauma in their lives. Sharing stories and examples from real schools and students, this inspirational book examines the seven key strategies necessary for changing school culture to transform the lives of individual students. Recognizing the power of effective leadership and empathy in creating a sense of community and safety for wounded students, Hendershott offers a valuable resource to help educators redesign their school environment to meet the needs of children and empower educators to direct students on a path to academic and life success.