Overcoming Student Apathy: Motivating Students for Academic Success provides a candid look into the hearts and minds of many of today's struggling students. Frustrated teachers and administrators typically stop at labeling the symptoms shown by these students: apathy, low motivation, laziness. Overcoming Student Apathy clarifies the situation, while proposing tips to rise to the challenge. Apathy plagues many of today's middle and high school classrooms, and the problem will not spontaneously disappear. Teachers must be willing to move beyond the 'they don't care' attitude to discover how we can eradicate this nemesis to learning. Overcoming Student Apathy guides the reader toward success with the disenfranchised, the downtrodden, the devalued, and the demoralized. Eight archetypes are used in narrative form to represent the various forms that apathy assumes in our classrooms (e.g., The Rebel, The Downtrodden, The Invisible). Teachers will identify with both the students and the teachers portrayed in the book; thus, transferring understanding and applications back to their own classrooms.
"The best book on high school dynamics I have ever read."--Jay Mathews, Washington Post An award-winning professor and an accomplished educator take us beyond the hype of reform and inside some of America's most innovative classrooms to show what is working--and what isn't--in our schools. What would it take to transform industrial-era schools into modern organizations capable of supporting deep learning for all? Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine's quest to answer this question took them inside some of America's most innovative schools and classrooms--places where educators are rethinking both what and how students should learn. The story they tell is alternately discouraging and hopeful. Drawing on hundreds of hours of observations and interviews at thirty different schools, Mehta and Fine reveal that deeper learning is more often the exception than the rule. And yet they find pockets of powerful learning at almost every school, often in electives and extracurriculars as well as in a few mold-breaking academic courses. These spaces achieve depth, the authors argue, because they emphasize purpose and choice, cultivate community, and draw on powerful traditions of apprenticeship. These outliers suggest that it is difficult but possible for schools and classrooms to achieve the integrations that support deep learning: rigor with joy, precision with play, mastery with identity and creativity. This boldly humanistic book offers a rich account of what education can be. The first panoramic study of American public high schools since the 1980s, In Search of Deeper Learning lays out a new vision for American education--one that will set the agenda for schools of the future.
If you lead a student organization and you're frustrated that you and a few others do all the work, you need to motivate a specific set of overlooked members. It's the concept that will set student leaders free. Stop focusing on those who check out or cause problems, and start focusing on those "middle third members" who hate drama, care for your organization, and prefer to play a supporting role. Directing your efforts toward the middle -- and understanding what they can contribute -- may solve your most pressing leadership challenges. Motivating the Middle offers a simple, empowering strategy for student government officers, team captains, chapter presidents, club leaders, residence life staff, and other college students looking to make a difference on today's campuses. About the Author T.J. Sullivan is the cofounder and CEO of CAMPUSPEAK. Since 1992, T.J. Sullivan has spoken professionally to millions of college students, empowering them to take nontraditional approaches to advanc-ing their organizations. Visit his blog at www.tjsullivan.com.
Some educational practices have contributed to the apathy of students. These include a perceptual view of behavior, the view that self-worth equals achievement, norm-referenced evaluation, and success as ability and effort. Four strategies which have the potential for allowing students to experience success from reasonable levels of effort include: (1) individual goal-setting structures that allow students to define their own criteria for success; (2) outcome-based instruction and evaluation which make it possible for slower students to experience success without having to compete with faster students; (3) attribution retraining which can help apathetic students view failure as a lack of effort rather than a lack of ability; and (4) cooperative learning activities which help students realize that personal effort can contribute to group as well as individual goals. Educators must confront the discrepancies between the actual and stated goals of education. Students have the power to choose how much effort to expend on any task. If the goal is to differentiate students according to their ability, then slower students will choose to reject school by avoiding effort. For those students who are forced to choose between rejecting schooling or rejecting their sense of self-worth, time is short. (ABL)
Streamline literacy instruction while increasing student achievement Dave R. Stuart Jr.’s work is centered on a simple belief: all students and teachers can flourish. Yet that seemingly simple goal can feel unattainable when teachers are expected to teach core content within the disciplines and improve literacy in their classrooms. How can teachers and students flourish under so much pressure? Stuart’s advice: Take a deep breath and refocus on six known best practices— establish and strengthen key beliefs, then build knowledge and increase reading, writing, speaking and listening, and argumentation in every content area, every day. These 6 Things is all about streamlining your practice so that you’re teaching smarter, not harder, and kids are learning, doing, and flourishing in ELA and content-area classrooms. In this essential new resource, teachers will receive Proven, classroom-tested advice delivered in an approachable, teacher-to-teacher style that builds confidence Practical strategies for streamlining instruction in order to focus on key beliefs and literacy-building activities Solutions and suggestions for the most common teacher and student "hang-ups" Numerous recommendations for deeper reading on key topics In addition to teaching English and world history for more than a decade, Stuart is well-known for his blog DaveStuartJr.com, which has over 35,000 visitors each month. This popular resource has been a beacon of light for more than 10,000 subscribers who refuse to freak out about the everyday challenges of teaching in a high-stakes era. He presents professional development workshops and institutes for schools around the United States and offers a number of online learning tools and experiences on his website.
Chamberlin and Matejic present a new way of approaching these quitting. The Quit Point--their theory on how, why, and when people quit and how to stop quitting before it happens--will transform how teachers reach the potential of each and every student.
A new approach to help kids with ADHD and LD succeed in and outside the classroom This groundbreaking book addresses the consequences of the unabated stress associated with Learning disabilities and ADHD and the toxic, deleterious impact of this stress on kids' academic learning, social skills, behavior, and efficient brain functioning. Schultz draws upon three decades of work as a neuropsychologist, teacher educator, and school consultant to address this gap. This book can help change the way parents and teachers think about why kids with LD and ADHD find school and homework so toxic. It will also offer an abundant supply of practical, understandable strategies that have been shown to reduce stress at school and at home. Offers a new way to look at why kids with ADHD/LD struggle at school Provides effective strategies to reduce stress in kids with ADHD and LD Includes helpful rating scales, checklists, and printable charts to use at school and home This important resource is written by a faculty member of Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry and former classroom teacher.
Over the past century, educational psychologists and researchers have posited many theories to explain how individuals learn, i.e. how they acquire, organize and deploy knowledge and skills. The 20th century can be considered the century of psychology on learning and related fields of interest (such as motivation, cognition, metacognition etc.) and it is fascinating to see the various mainstreams of learning, remembered and forgotten over the 20th century and note that basic assumptions of early theories survived several paradigm shifts of psychology and epistemology. Beyond folk psychology and its naïve theories of learning, psychological learning theories can be grouped into some basic categories, such as behaviorist learning theories, connectionist learning theories, cognitive learning theories, constructivist learning theories, and social learning theories. Learning theories are not limited to psychology and related fields of interest but rather we can find the topic of learning in various disciplines, such as philosophy and epistemology, education, information science, biology, and – as a result of the emergence of computer technologies – especially also in the field of computer sciences and artificial intelligence. As a consequence, machine learning struck a chord in the 1980s and became an important field of the learning sciences in general. As the learning sciences became more specialized and complex, the various fields of interest were widely spread and separated from each other; as a consequence, even presently, there is no comprehensive overview of the sciences of learning or the central theoretical concepts and vocabulary on which researchers rely. The Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning provides an up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the specific terms mostly used in the sciences of learning and its related fields, including relevant areas of instruction, pedagogy, cognitive sciences, and especially machine learning and knowledge engineering. This modern compendium will be an indispensable source of information for scientists, educators, engineers, and technical staff active in all fields of learning. More specifically, the Encyclopedia provides fast access to the most relevant theoretical terms provides up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the most important theories within the various fields of the learning sciences and adjacent sciences and communication technologies; supplies clear and precise explanations of the theoretical terms, cross-references to related entries and up-to-date references to important research and publications. The Encyclopedia also contains biographical entries of individuals who have substantially contributed to the sciences of learning; the entries are written by a distinguished panel of researchers in the various fields of the learning sciences.
