Learning to Improve
Learning to Improve

Author: Anthony S. Bryk

Publisher: Harvard Education Press

Published: 2015-03-01

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 161250793X

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As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.” Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rates of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies for improving feedback to novice teachers. Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation’s schools and colleges.

The Improvement Guide
The Improvement Guide

Author: Gerald J. Langley

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-06-03

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 0470549033

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This new edition of this bestselling guide offers an integrated approach to process improvement that delivers quick and substantial results in quality and productivity in diverse settings. The authors explore their Model for Improvement that worked with international improvement efforts at multinational companies as well as in different industries such as healthcare and public agencies. This edition includes new information that shows how to accelerate improvement by spreading changes across multiple sites. The book presents a practical tool kit of ideas, examples, and applications.

I Am the Utterance of My Name
I Am the Utterance of My Name

Author: Temple Tsenes-Hills, PhD

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2006-08

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 0595406874

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This work traces the genesis and evolution of African American women's feminist discourse and intellectual enterprise from the beginning of slavery in the United States to the end of the 19th century. It does so in three ways. First, Dr. Tsenes-Hills almost solely utilizes the primary and secondary sources of African American women in order to locate and excavate the truly fascinating and extraordinary world of the 19th century Black woman. Second, she discusses this world via examination of the interior, exterior, and alternative realities that delineated the 19th century Black woman's experience. And how the combination of these realities ultimately developed, from a 'grassroots' expression of identity re-claimation and re-formation, to an intellectualized articulation of Black feminist thought and action. Third, Dr. Tsenes-Hills identifies and examines the palpable presence of African American women at the Columbian Exposition, in Chicago Illinois (1893), as one of the earliest public instances of a coherent expression of a distinct Black feminist discourse and intellectual enterprise. The end result is an innovative and in-depth examination of the unique, complex, and contradictory inner-workings of a largely unexplored sub-group of American and African American History-Black Victorian Feminists.

Organization Excellence: Productivity and Improvement (A Simple Approach)
Organization Excellence: Productivity and Improvement (A Simple Approach)

Author: David Kong

Publisher: David Kong

Published: 2014-07-13

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13:

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Throughout my years of productivity and IT consultancy with implementation, I have encountered numerous challenges faced by organization to implement an efficient and effective system that works for them. When such challenges are not handled properly, it resulted in implementations which are not optimized to the organization business requirement. I would like to provide some useful information, which can help organizations to implement productivity and improvement activities into their daily operations. There are many factors that can affect productivity of an organization. As it is not possible for me to cover every tool which can help to improve productivity, I have decided to concentrate on some of the key ones here. I will be touching on plant layouts, proper quality frameworks and management system for the discussion in this book. An organization with an optimized system in place, can contribute to good output performance. It increases the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization. Internal controls should be installed to ensure that products at every stage of the process are being checked for conformance. Enforcement of the compliance to the procedures and internal controls that were implemented should also be available to ensure that the defined goals and objectives are met. A good organization should stress on training for staff. Such training should be structured in a way that it is geared towards equipping staff with the relevant skill sets and knowledge to perform their job. Job skill matrix table could be put up to develop staff further and also serve as a tool for resource planning. I cannot stress enough the importance of how a good proper strategic planning and implementation can contribute greatly to the success of an organization performance. Due to this, I have also included Business Continuity Planning as one of the criteria for organization excellence. With the occurrence of natural disaster, haze, pandemic flu episode and any unexpected happening, it warrants some form of planning to prepare the organization to systematically react in the event such occurrence is to happen. As a value added service, I have included a few Excel templates for some of the tools cover in this book in the website: http://pqi.dscloud.biz. You will need to be a registered user in order to gain access to them. They are listed as follows: - Fish Bone Diagram using Excel - Moving Average using Excel - Correlation using Excel - Covariance using Excel - Percentile using Excel - Pareto Chart using Excel - Solver using Excel - Goal Seek using Excel

Organizing Schools for Improvement
Organizing Schools for Improvement

Author: Anthony S. Bryk

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-03-15

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0226078019

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In 1988, the Chicago public school system decentralized, granting parents and communities significant resources and authority to reform their schools in dramatic ways. To track the effects of this bold experiment, the authors of Organizing Schools for Improvement collected a wealth of data on elementary schools in Chicago. Over a seven-year period they identified one hundred elementary schools that had substantially improved—and one hundred that had not. What did the successful schools do to accelerate student learning? The authors of this illuminating book identify a comprehensive set of practices and conditions that were key factors for improvement, including school leadership, the professional capacity of the faculty and staff, and a student-centered learning climate. In addition, they analyze the impact of social dynamics, including crime, critically examining the inextricable link between schools and their communities. Putting their data onto a more human scale, they also chronicle the stories of two neighboring schools with very different trajectories. The lessons gleaned from this groundbreaking study will be invaluable for anyone involved with urban education.

The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers
The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers

Author: Hollis Robbins

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-07-25

Total Pages: 673

ISBN-13: 014310599X

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A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2017. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from forty-nine writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women. The diverse selection includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Taken together, these incredible works insist that the writing of African American women writers be read, remembered, and addressed. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Succeeding with Agile
Succeeding with Agile

Author: Mike Cohn

Publisher: Pearson Education

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 0321579364

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Proven, 100% Practical Guidance for Making Scrum and Agile Work in Any Organization This is the definitive, realistic, actionable guide to starting fast with Scrum and agile-and then succeeding over the long haul. Leading agile consultant and practitioner Mike Cohn presents detailed recommendations, powerful tips, and real-world case studies drawn from his unparalleled experience helping hundreds of software organizations make Scrum and agile work. Succeeding with Agile is for pragmatic software professionals who want real answers to the most difficult challenges they face in implementing Scrum. Cohn covers every facet of the transition: getting started, helping individuals transition to new roles, structuring teams, scaling up, working with a distributed team, and finally, implementing effective metrics and continuous improvement. Throughout, Cohn presents "Things to Try Now" sections based on his most successful advice. Complementary "Objection" sections reproduce typical conversations with those resisting change and offer practical guidance for addressing their concerns. Coverage includes Practical ways to get started immediately-and "get good" fast Overcoming individual resistance to the changes Scrum requires Staffing Scrum projects and building effective teams Establishing "improvement communities" of people who are passionate about driving change Choosing which agile technical practices to use or experiment with Leading self-organizing teams Making the most of Scrum sprints, planning, and quality techniques Scaling Scrum to distributed, multiteam projects Using Scrum on projects with complex sequential processes or challenging compliance and governance requirements Understanding Scrum's impact on HR, facilities, and project management Whether you've completed a few sprints or multiple agile projects and whatever your role-manager, developer, coach, ScrumMaster, product owner, analyst, team lead, or project lead-this book will help you succeed with your very next project. Then, it will help you go much further: It will help you transform your entire development organization.

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography

Author:

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2009-07-16

Total Pages: 10985

ISBN-13: 0080449107

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The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography provides an authoritative and comprehensive source of information on the discipline of human geography and its constituent, and related, subject areas. The encyclopedia includes over 1,000 detailed entries on philosophy and theory, key concepts, methods and practices, biographies of notable geographers, and geographical thought and praxis in different parts of the world. This groundbreaking project covers every field of human geography and the discipline’s relationships to other disciplines, and is global in scope, involving an international set of contributors. Given its broad, inclusive scope and unique online accessibility, it is anticipated that the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography will become the major reference work for the discipline over the coming decades. The Encyclopedia will be available in both limited edition print and online via ScienceDirect – featuring extensive browsing, searching, and internal cross-referencing between articles in the work, plus dynamic linking to journal articles and abstract databases, making navigation flexible and easy. For more information, pricing options and availability visit http://info.sciencedirect.com/content/books/ref_works/coming/ Available online on ScienceDirect and in limited edition print format Broad, interdisciplinary coverage across human geography: Philosophy, Methods, People, Social/Cultural, Political, Economic, Development, Health, Cartography, Urban, Historical, Regional Comprehensive and unique - the first of its kind in human geography