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Bricks and Mortar
The Making of a Real Education at the Stanford Online High School
Jeffrey Scarborough and Raymond Ravaglia
CSLI, 2014
The rise of online learning is rapidly transforming how and what teachers teach, and even who—or what—teachers are. In the midst of these changes, the characteristics that have historically defined a high-quality education are easily lost. Not only content knowledge, but also ways of thinking and habits of mind are the hallmarks of the well-educated individual, and these latter qualities are not so easily acquired online. Or are they?

This volume shows how a group of online-learning believers built the best high school in the world without laying a single brick: the Stanford Online High School (SOHS). By chronicling SOHS’s distinctive approach to curriculum, gifted education, and school community over SOHS’s first seven years, Bricks and Mortar makes the case that the dynamic use of technology and the best traditional methodologies in education are not, in fact, mutually exclusive. Indeed, while SOHS has redefined what is possible online, a great education is ultimately the product of an interactive community of teachers and students.
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Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices
Innovating Teaching across Disciplines
edited by Angela Glotfelter, Caitlin Martin, Mandy Olejnik, Ann Updike & Elizabeth Wardle
Utah State University Press, 2022
Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices demonstrates that it is possible for groups of faculty members to change teaching and learning in radical ways across their programs, despite the current emphasis on efficiency and accountability. Relating the experiences of faculty from disciplines as diverse as art history, economics, psychology, and philosophy, this book offers a theory- and research-based heuristic for helping faculty transform their courses and programs, as well as practical examples of the heuristic in action.
 
The authors draw on the threshold concepts framework, research in writing studies, and theories of learning, leadership, and change to deftly explore why faculty are often stymied in their efforts to design meaningful curricula for deep learning and how carefully scaffolded professional development for faculty teams can help make such change possible. This book is a powerful demonstration of how faculty members can be empowered when professional development leaders draw on a range of scholarship that is not typically connected.
 
In today’s climate, courses, programs, and institutions are often assessed by and rewarded for proxy metrics that have little to do with learning, with grave consequences for students. The stakes have never been higher, particularly for public higher education. Faculty members need opportunities to work together using their own expertise and to enact meaningful learning opportunities for students. Professional developers have an important role to play in such change efforts.
 
WAC scholars and practitioners, leaders of professional development and centers for teaching excellence, program administrators and curriculum committees from all disciplines, and faculty innovators from many fields will find not only hope but also a blueprint for action in Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices.
 
Contributors: Juan Carlos Albarrán, José Amador, Annie Dell'Aria, Kate de Medeiros, Keith Fennen, Jordan A. Fenton, Carrie E. Hall, Elena Jackson Albarrán, Erik N. Jensen, Vrinda Kalia, Janice Kinghorn, Jennifer Kinney, Sheri Leafgren, Elaine Maimon, Elaine Miller, Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., Jennifer J. Quinn, Barbara J. Rose, Scott Sander, Brian D. Schultz, Ling Shao, L. James Smart, Pepper Stetler
 
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Improving Science Education
International Perspectives
Edited by Barry J. Fraser and Herbert J. Walberg
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Specialists from Australia, Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States present a broad range of perspectives for improving science education in primary and secondary schools.

This volume offers educators and researchers a glimpse at what peers from around the world have done to help science students achieve high levels of success. The introduction is a concise account of worldwide reform movements, from modernizations in the 1950s that dramatically improved the teaching of chemistry and physics to such changes in the 1980s as the emphasis on the learning-to-learn approach and the trend toward using social issues as a vehicle for teaching science.

The nine essays survey topics that include teaching inquiry skills and other techniques to foster a joy of science; creating an understanding of real-world applications of science; managing course instruction with computers; encouraging teachers to adopt new styles of teaching; cross-national comparisons of science achievement; and the differences between boys and girls in attitude, learning, and degree of participation.
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Learning in Depth
A Simple Innovation That Can Transform Schooling
Kieran Egan
University of Chicago Press, 2011

For generations, schools have aimed to introduce students to a broad range of topics through curriculum that ensure that they will at least have some acquaintance with most areas of human knowledge by the time they graduate. Yet such broad knowledge can’t help but be somewhat superficial—and, as Kieran Egan argues, it omits a crucial aspect of true education: deep knowledge.

Real education, Egan explains, consists of both general knowledge and detailed understanding, and in Learning in Depth he outlines an ambitious yet practical plan to incorporate deep knowledge into basic education. Under Egan’s program, students will follow the usual curriculum, but with one crucial addition: beginning with their first days of school and continuing until graduation, they will eachalso study one topic—such as apples, birds, sacred buildings, mollusks,circuses, or stars—in depth. Over the years, with the help and guidance of their supervising teacher, students will expand their understanding of their one topic and build portfolios of knowledge that grow and change along with them. By the time they graduate each student will know as much about his or her topic as almost anyone on earth—and in the process will have learned important, even life-changing lessons about the meaning of expertise, the value of dedication, and the delight of knowing something in depth.

Though Egan’s program may be radical in its effects, it is strikingly simple to implement—as a number of schools have already discovered—and with Learning in Depth as a blueprint, parents, educators, and administrators can instantly begin taking the first steps toward transforming our schools and fundamentally deepening their students’ minds.

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New Technologies and Renaissance Studies
Edited by William R. Bowen and Raymond G. Siemens
Iter Press, 2008
Near the forefront of any examination of disciplinary pursuits in the academy today, among the many important issues being addressed is the role of computing and its integration into, and perhaps revolutionizing of, central methodological approaches. The series New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies addresses this context from both broad and narrow perspectives, with anticipated discussions rooted in areas including literature, art history, musicology, and culture in the medieval and Renaissance periods.

The first volume of the series, New Technologies and Renaissance Studies, presents a collection of contributions to one ongoing forum for the dialogue which lies at the heart of the book series, the annual "conference within a conference" of the same name which takes place during the Renaissance Society of America gathering, dedicated specifically to the intersection of computational methods and Renaissance studies. Papers in this volume exemplify those fruitful and productive exchanges, from their inception at the 2001 meeting in Chicago to the 2005 meeting in Cambridge.
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New Technologies and Renaissance Studies II
Edited by Tassie Gniady, Kris McAbee, Jessica Murphy
Iter Press, 2014
Near the forefront of any examination of disciplinary pursuits in the academy today, among the many important issues being addressed is the role of computing and its integration into, and perhaps revolutionizing of, central methodological approaches. The series New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies addresses this context from both broad and narrow perspectives, with anticipated discussions rooted in areas including literature, art history, musicology, and culture in the medieval and Renaissance periods.

In the fourth volume of the New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies series, volume editors Tassie Gniady, Kris McAbee, and Jessica Murphy bring together some of the best work from the New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies panels at the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) annual meetings for the years 2004–2010. These essays demonstrate a dedication to grounding the use of “newest” practices in the theories of the early modern period. At the same time, the essays are interested in the moment—the needs of scholars then, the theories of media that informed current understanding, and the tools used to conduct studies.
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New Technologies and Renaissance Studies III
Edited by Matthew Evan Davis and Colin Wilder
Iter Press, 2022
These essays explore problems with digital approaches to analog objects and offer digital methods to study networks of production, dissemination, and collection. Further, they reflect on the limitations of those methods and speak to a central truth of digital projects: unlike traditional scholarship, digital scholarship is often the result of collective networks of not only disciplinary scholars but also of library professionals and other technical and professional staff as well as students.
 
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Right Where We Belong
How Refugee Teachers and Students Are Changing the Future of Education
Sarah Dryden-Peterson
Harvard University Press, 2022

A leading expert shows how, by learning from refugee teachers and students, we can create for displaced children—and indeed all children—better schooling and brighter futures.

Half of the world’s 26 million refugees are children. Their formal education is disrupted, and their lives are too often dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about what the future holds. Even kids who have the opportunity to attend school face enormous challenges, as they struggle to integrate into unfamiliar societies and educational environments.

In Right Where We Belong, Sarah Dryden-Peterson discovers that, where governments and international agencies have been stymied, refugee teachers and students themselves are leading. From open-air classrooms in Uganda to the hallways of high schools in Maine, new visions for refugee education are emerging. Dryden-Peterson introduces us to people like Jacques—a teacher who created a school for his fellow Congolese refugees in defiance of local laws—and Hassan, a Somali refugee navigating the social world of the American teenager. Drawing on more than 600 interviews in twenty-three countries, Dryden-Peterson shows how teachers and students are experimenting with flexible forms of learning. Rather than adopt the unrealistic notion that all will soon return to “normal,” these schools embrace unfamiliarity, develop students’ adaptiveness, and demonstrate how children, teachers, and community members can build supportive relationships across lines of difference.

It turns out that policymakers, activists, and educators have a lot to learn from displaced children and teachers. Their stories point the way to better futures for refugee students and inspire us to reimagine education broadly, so that children everywhere are better prepared to thrive in a diverse and unpredictable world.

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Run School Run
Roland Barth
Harvard University Press, 1980

Roland Barth believes that there is a way to create a school which, instead of insisting upon uniformity, builds upon diversity among students, teachers, and teaching styles. Unlike many educational theorists, Barth has had ample opportunity to test his beliefs during his many years as an elementary school principal. Run School Run is the chronicle of his theory in action, a nuts-and-bolts study of one school’s rocky but ultimately quite successful transition toward pluralist education.

For Barth, the case against an elementary education that is uniform in content and method is clear-cut: teacher abilities differ radically, and so do student needs. In the pluralist school, the problem is to find ways to put this variety to good use. Barth shows that the solution is essentially a matter of organization; he sets up a principal’s blueprint that offers teachers more control over curriculum content, teaching materials and methods, and composition of classes, in a way that ensures an educational coherence for each student.

Run School Run is a rich, readable account, a how-to book as well as a personal reminiscence on the initiation and administration of an environment in which teaching and learning are allowed to take on shapes of their own design.

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The Schoolhome
Rethinking Schools for Changing Families
Jane Martin
Harvard University Press, 1995
Drawing selectively from reform movements of the past and relating them to the unique needs of today’s parents and children, Jane Martin presents a philosophy of education that is responsive to America’s changed and changing realities. As more and more parents enter the workforce, the historic role of the domestic sphere in the education and development of children is drastically reduced. Consequently, Martin advocates removing the barriers between the school and the home.
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