Using a conversational voice, the authors provide a foundation as well as a blueprint and tools to craft a community-engaged course. Based on extensive research, the book provides a scope and sequence of information and skills ranging from an introduction to community engagement, to designing, implementing, and assessing a course, to advancing the craft to prepare for promotion and tenure as well as how to become a citizen-scholar and reflective practitioner. An interactive workbook that can be downloaded from Campus Compact accompanies this tool kit with interactive activities that are interspersed throughout the chapters. The book and workbook can be used by individual readers or with a learning community.
Student learning communities (SLCs) are more than just a different way of doing group work. Like the professional learning communities they resemble, SLCs provide students with a structured way to solve problems, share insight, and help one another continually develop new skills and expertise. With the right planning and support, dynamic collaborative learning can thrive everywhere. In this book, educators Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Almarode explain how to create and sustain student learning communities by - Designing group experiences and tasks that encourage dialogue; - Fostering the relational conditions that advance academic, social, and emotional development; - Providing explicit instruction on goal setting and opportunities to practice progress monitoring; - Using thoughtful teaming practices to build cognitive, metacognitive, and emotional regulation skills; - Teaching students to seek, give, and receive feedback that amplifies their own and others' learning; and - Developing the specific leadership skills and strategies that promote individual and group success. Examples from face-to-face and virtual K–12 classrooms help to illustrate what SLCs are, and teacher voices testify to what they can achieve. No more hoping the group work you're assigning will be good enough—or that collaboration will be its own reward. No more crossing your fingers for productive outcomes or struggling to keep order, assess individual student contributions, and ensure fairness. Student Learning Communities shows you how to equip your students with what they need to learn in a way that is truly collective, makes them smarter together than they would be alone, creates a more positive classroom culture, and enables continuous academic and social-emotional growth.
This book presents a theory of learning that starts with the assumption that engagement in social practice is the fundamental process by which we get to know what we know and by which we become who we are. The primary unit of analysis of this process is neither the individual nor social institutions, but the informal 'communities of practice' that people form as they pursue shared enterprises over time. To give a social account of learning, the theory explores in a systematic way the intersection of issues of community, social practice, meaning, and identity. The result is a broad framework for thinking about learning as a process of social participation. This ambitious but thoroughly accessible framework has relevance for the practitioner as well as the theoretician, presented with all the breadth, depth, and rigor necessary to address such a complex and yet profoundly human topic.
International education, service-learning, and community-based global learning programs are robust with potential. They can positively impact communities, grow civil society networks, and have transformative effects for students who become more globally aware and more engaged in global civil society – at home and abroad. Yet such programs are also packed with peril. Clear evidence indicates that poor forms of such programming have negative impacts on vulnerable persons, including medical patients and children, while cementing stereotypes and reinforcing patterns of privilege and exclusion. These dangers can be mitigated, however, through collaborative planning, design, and evaluation that advances mutually beneficial community partnerships, critically reflective practice, thoughtful facilitation, and creative use of resources. Drawing on research and insights from several academic disciplines and community partner perspectives, along with the authors’ decades of applied, community-based development and education experience, they present a model of community-based global learning that clearly espouses an equitable balance between learning methodology and a community development philosophy.Emphasizing the key drivers of community-driven learning and service, cultural humility and exchange, seeking global citizenship, continuous and diverse forms of critically reflective practice, and ongoing attention to power and privilege, this book constitutes a guide to course or program design that takes into account the unpredictable and dynamic character of domestic and international community-based global learning experiences, the varying characteristics of destination communities, and a framework through which to integrate any discipline or collaborative project. Readers will appreciate the numerous toolboxes and reflective exercises to help them think through the creation of independent programming or courses that support targeted learning and community-driven development. The book ultimately moves beyond course and program design to explore how to integrate these objectives and values in the wider curriculum and throughout formal and informal community-based learning partnerships.
Get a play-by-play guide to implementing PLC concepts. Each chapter begins with a story focused on a particular challenge. A follow-up analysis of the story identifies the good decisions or common mistakes made in relation to that particular scenario. The authors examine the research behind best practice and wrap up each chapter with recommendations and tools you can use in your school.
This popular text shows how teachers can create partnerships with parents and students that facilitate participation in the schools while also validating home culture and family concerns and aspirations. It reflects current research and theory in several areas related to literacy development, including family literacy, bilingual and multicultural education, critical pedagogy, participatory research, cooperative learning, and feminist perspectives. Teachers of students who are immigrants, non-native speakers of English, and members of marginalized groups will find this book especially pertinent.
Like the first edition, the second edition of Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work helps educators close the knowing-doing gap as they transform their schools into professional learning communities (PLCs).
This book focuses on special organizational configurations for schools in diverse parts of the world. Some of these new organizational and institutional designs are called multi-service schools, others are called extended service schools and still others are called community learning centers. While these schools have different names and notable different characteristics, they belong in the same category because of a common feature in their design: they connect schools with once-separate community programs and services.Chief among the prototypes for these new organizational and institutional designs are the ones featured in the book’s title. Some are called multi-service schools to indicate that they selectively provide some new programs and services. Others are called extended service schools to indicate that they serve young people beyond the regular school day, seeking influence and control over out-of-school time while enabling alternative teaching-learning strategies, and providing services other than typical “pupil support services.” Still others are called community learning centers, a name that showcases the educational functions and priorities of schools and announcing priorities for adult learning and development. Community schools, still called in some places full-service community schools, serves as a prototype that increasingly positions schools as multi-purpose, multi-component, anchor institutions serving identifiable neighborhoods and entire rural communities. The book is structured to enhance understanding of these organizational prototypes and provides comparative social analysis. It also identifies knowledge needs and gaps as well as developmental territory for the future.
As schools struggle to teach all students, the multi-age teaching and learning framework has emerged as one of today’s most effective ways to structure schools. Multi-age Learning Community (MAC) Program is a professional development program in action. It presents a framework that can transform schools from a graded system to a multi-age learning environment. This multi-age school targets students’ individual and personal needs and allows students to excel and succeed. The school reform climate today focuses on schools of choice and building effective school environments. This multi-age program creates a unique school niche that is marketable to families. Parents have the option of sending their children to schools that concentrate on achievement that best meets the needs of the learner without disrupting the mandates of the curricula. This book is intended to assist educators at all levels of all school organizations, as well as give policymakers, educators and parents the information on an effective school program. This book gives information on how to transform schools into multi-age classrooms. This book is divided into four parts that explain both the theory and the practice of effective strategies for the multi-age school program: Organizational Practice, Building Culture, Learning Processes, and Assessment and Systemic Improvement. There are specific basic principles and practices that are integrated into a quality and effective framework discussed in the chapters of this book. Each chapter begins with a vignette based on my experiences in multiage schools and concludes with an educator’s reflection to recap the concepts in the chapter. Each chapter also integrates snapshots that areshort real-to-life passages that bring to life concepts discussed in the chapter. Although this book discusses multi-age schools, these ideas may be applied to all school environments. To accommodate all school programs, at the end of each chapter, a section titled Application for All Schools is a framework that discusses just how to apply chapter concepts in any school or classroom program. It is recommended that the reader review the book one time in sequence and then reread each chapter as needed, to give meaning to the reader’s purpose.
