What Brain Research Can Teach About Cutting School Budgets

With a strategy-builder chart for reinvesting and reallocating dollars, this unique resource applies brain research to the budgeting process to make decision making more objective.

Karen Olsen's What Brain Research Can Teach About Cutting School Budgets is a practical guide for school leaders who are charged with the painstaking task of making budget cuts--a task typically driven by emotion, tradition, and the power of social leaders, followed by disagreements and dissatisfaction. This book offers an alternative--a way to use brain research to create powerful but politically neutral decision-making criteria. The author offers clear action items, brain research summaries, and checklists to guide leaders through the budget cutting process, and to ensure that they reinvest money into the key programmes that will truly impact student achievement.

The author explores education from the essential principles of Tawhid (Oneness of God, humanity, knowledge); fitrah (concept of human nature); and the role of humans as vicegerents of God on earth (responsibility and stewardship). The current education system dates back a hundred years or more, and is in desperate need of a 'reboot'. In developing the industrialized society, the education system itself became like a factory, the end product being pupils who merely regurgitate facts, and themselves end up as cogs in the machine that is the wider industrial complex. The legacy of this is a soulless ‘functional’ educational system that fails to develop pupils to meet the present and future needs of individuals and their expectations. This failure inevitably impacts on society and humanity at large. Society has long since moved beyond the industrial revolution and into an age of global connectedness where the sum of human knowledge is freely available via the internet. It is an age where people are generally more well informed and on a variety of issues. An effective holistic educational philosophy is required, one that gives full spiritual meaning to all that a child learns. It should equip children with spiritual awareness, morals and values, social responsibility and accountability, self-discipline and self-determination, self-confidence and empowerment, ambition and aspiration tempered with thoughtfulness and a sense of gratitude.

Rediscover science from a child's perspective and enhance your inquiry-based science toolbox with brain-based strategies that integrate science across content areas and improve student outcomes.

Your guide to acing the TExEs exam This best-selling handbook is the definitive resource for prospective principals who want to boost student performance and demonstrate outstanding school leadership. Thoroughly updated to address the completely revamped TExES exam, this new edition details: The domains and competencies of successful school leadership The leadership philosophy on which TexES is constructed A sample test and important areas to focus on What to do in the weeks, days, and even the night before the test An extensive list of additional resources to supplement each domain

The premier guide to acing the exam—completely revised! The toughest test in Texas has been updated—and so has this best-selling preparation book. As you explore each element of the exam’s new structure—eleven competencies within six domains—you’ll make the transition from thinking like a teacher to reflecting, reacting, and responding like a learner-centered principal. Features of the third edition include: An overview of the updated TExES philosophy In-depth analysis of the new domains and competencies Real-life stories and applications Test-taking strategies—online and offline Tips for time management and stress relief before, during, and after the exam