In High-Payoff Strategies, Jody Spiro promises a toolkit of strategies and templates for school leaders to facilitate change. Principal Matt Renwick says Spiro tackles too many agendas in the brief book but thinks readers can pull out some useful ideas, including a culture scan.
Jody Spiro provides leaders with three essential building blocks to improve school culture, instruction, and learning communities and offers case studies and videos showing how those building blocks apply to selected strategies, says teacher-leader Rebecca Berger.
Stephen Valentine and Reshan Richards outline core beliefs they believe can strengthen leadership by blending online and face-to-face communication. Mary L. Thompson notes the technical information may become dated quickly but finds the response to change valuable.
Ariel Sacks’ Whole Novels for the Whole Class is “the ultimate teacher-friendly manual for accommodating all students around a single book,” says ELA veteran Mary Tedrow, who finds Sacks’ practical specificity convincing and her confidence infectious.
Veteran principal Matt Renwick discovers it’s not too late to become a more organized and effective school leader as he gives the step-by-step advice in Maia Heyck-Merlin’s “The Together Leader: Get Organized for Your Success and Sanity!” a real road test.
Bambrick-Santoyo’s Get Better Faster offers a convincing argument and a comprehensive program for developing new teachers. Retired principal and teacher educator Mary Langer Thompson finds the 90-day plan sensible, fast paced, demanding, and dense with resources.
Ross W. Greene’s Lost & Found: Helping Behaviorally Challenging Students (and, While You’re At It, All the Others) can assist educators as they work with kids to build lagging skills and collaborate on unsolved problems, says reviewer Nicolette Lesniak.
In addition to clearly explaining research on the brain and mathematics education, math educator Anthony Jones says Stanford professor Jo Boaler ties all the research into practical, well-explained, innovative teaching strategies in “Mathematical Mindsets.”
Helen Hume’s survival guide for grades 7-12 art teachers, coordinators, content teachers and homeschoolers proves to be a rich resource for lessons, project ideas, and art history touching on all the arts. Retired principal Mary Langer Thompson recommends it.
Elena Aguilar’s “The Art of Coaching Teams ” is a practical resource full of proactive thinking gleaned from 20 years as a teacher and coach, says instructional specialist Deserie Bradvica. For those ready to lead teams with “a focus on trust, clarity and purpose.”
