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    Suicide is a significant problem for many adolescents in Native American Indian populations. American Indian Life Skills Development Curriculum is a course for high school students and some middle school students that is designed to drastically reduce suicidal thinking and behavior.
     Created in collaboration with students and community members from the Zuni Pueblo and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, this curriculum addresses key issues in Native American Indian adolescents’ lives and teaches such life skills as communication, problem solving, depression and stress management, anger regulation, and goal setting. The course is unique in its skills-based approach. After first increasing awareness and knowledge of suicide, it then teaches students specific methods to help a peer turn away from suicidal thinking and seek help from an appropriate help-giver.
     The skills-based approach of this curriculum follows well-established teaching methods to develop social skills. Teachers and peers inform students of the rationale and components of a particular skill, model and demonstrate the skill for them, and later provide feedback on individual skill performance.

School reform and accountability tests have been hotly debated for decades, but the goal of reform and accountability has not. Most agree that the main problem with contemporary education is that it fails to adequately prepare students with the “21st century skills” needed to find jobs and promote national competitiveness in the global economy. Tony Armstrong challenges both the morality and the consequences of pushing this purpose of education. He says it is immoral because it neglects our children’s deepest aspiration—happiness—and treats them as mere cogs in the economic machine. Dr. Armstrong shows how methods of well-being based on happiness research—mindfulness, gratitude, perspective—can greatly improve kids’ chances to feel better in the present and to live happier lives in the future. And the kindergarten-through-college “happiness pedagogy” he presents would also be a superior way to teach those “21st century skills.”

Every day we make intuitive decisions—from the mundane choice of what clothes to wear to more important issues such as which new car "feels right" or which person would be "good" for a particular job. To varying degrees, logic plays a role in these decisions, but at a certain point all of us rely on intuition, our sixth sense. Is this the right way to decide? Should we trust our gut feelings? When intuition conflicts with logic, what should we do?

In Educating Intuition, Robin M. Hogarth lays bare this mysterious process so fundamental to daily life by offering the first comprehensive overview of what the science of psychology can tell us about intuition—where it comes from, how it works, whether we can trust it. From this literature and his own research, Hogarth finds that intuition is a normal and important component of thought that has its roots in processes of tacit learning. Environment, attention, experience, expertise, and the success of the scientific method all form part of Hogarth's perspective on intuition, leading him to the surprising—but natural—conclusion that we can educate our sixth sense. To this end he offers concrete suggestions and exercises to help readers develop their intuitive skills and habits for learning the "right" lessons from experience.

Artfully and accessibly combining cognitive science, the latest research in psychology, and Hogarth's own observations, Educating Intuition eschews the vague approach to the topic that has become commonplace and provides instead a wholly engaging and practical guide to enhancing our intuitive skills.

Winner of the 2019-20 Distinguished Book Award - Midwest Sociological Society

In Lesson Plans, Judson G. Everitt takes readers into the everyday worlds of teacher training, and reveals the complexities and dilemmas teacher candidates confront as they learn how to perform a job that many people assume anybody can do. Using rich qualitative data, Everitt analyzes how people make sense of their prospective jobs as teachers, and how their introduction to this profession is shaped by the institutionalized rules and practices of higher education, K-12 education, and gender. Trained to constantly adapt to various contingencies that routinely arise in schools and classrooms, teacher candidates learn that they must continually try to reconcile the competing expectations of their jobs to meet students’ needs in an era of accountability. Lesson Plans reveals how institutions shape the ways we produce teachers, and how new teachers make sense of the multiple and complicated demands they face in their efforts to educate students.