Solving Academic and Behavior Problems: A Strengths-Based Guide for Teachers and Teams
by Margaret Searle and Marilyn Swartz, ASCD, Alexandria, Va., 2020, 184 pp., $34.95 softcover
If you are looking for a refreshing approach to examining student academic and behavior challenges, then
Solving Academic and Behavior Problems is the guidebook for you!
This guidebook moves professional educators and leaders away from the age-old deficit model to a model focused on appreciative inquiry. Appreciative inquiry is a team approach that seeks to change how we view student problems and find solutions.
The authors, both consultants in education, detail suggestions for implementing a strengths-based model using a coach. Together educators use strategies during the process to identify actual root causes. Thus, the team can develop an action plan focused on the root cause(s) rather than the symptoms. Teams of professional educators follow the six basic steps in the appreciative inquiry approach.
While the approach involves acknowledging the problem, it provides structures for moving beyond the problem to solutions. The six parts of the approach center on connecting as caring professionals, collaboratively reviewing the specific area of focus/concern, sharing some success stories, establishing a data goal, designing an action plan and committing to immediate action. Acting with a sense of urgency gives teachers the confidence to continue to work together to find and consistently monitor the effectiveness of implemented solutions that address the concerns and, most importantly, build on the student’s strengths.
Consistent practices and protocols are essential ingredients to success. So, it is vital to set up and adhere to meeting protocols and practices. Team members have specific roles and responsibilities to sustain the identified effective meeting practices. The conversations fostered among team members using this approach begin through positive questioning and involve using strengths charts.
The use of strengths charts as a part of this process sets it apart from most problem-solving processes seen in schools. A unique aspect is that the student completes a self-assessment with parents involved by supplying critical background information. Ultimately, the involvement of the student and parents leads to the strengthening of relationships and shared ownership of any action plan that is developed and implemented. It is important to note that the strengths charts include executive functioning and social-emotional skills and/or skill needs.
This book lays out an approach that offers an opportunity for reflection, values teacher experience, allows for productive dialogue and data analysis, includes collegial recommendations and requires specific action planning underpinned by a focus on opportunities and assets. By focusing on strengths, opportunities and assets, this approach provides an empowering and practical way to problem-solve differently. At this time in education, given the added stressors of the pandemic, Searle and Swartz offer a compelling case for changing the way we think about our students and work together to help them succeed academically and behaviorally.
Reviewed by Rita Goss, associate superintendent, Prince William County Public Schools, Manassas, Va.
The Way We Do School: The Making of Oakland’s Full-Service Community School District
by Milbrey McLaughlin, Kendra Fehrer and Jacob Leos-Urbel, Harvard Education Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2020, 315 pp. with index, $34 softcover
In 2009, when Superintendent Tony Smith began planning to remake all 86 district schools in Oakland, Calif., into full-service community schools, most other large districts in the U.S. relied on external partners to lead this work. Community-based organizations, universities and health agencies often provided non-academic programs and services at one or more sites within a district to support children and their families. Their efforts were not fully integrated into the mission, vision, goals and operation of the schools and the district.
The Way We Do School tells the story of Oakland’s journey and lessons learned in the development of full-service community schools, an ongoing commitment despite changes of leadership, budget shortages and staff turnover. The book is co-authored by Milbrey McLaughlin, professor emerita of education and public policy at Stanford University and founding director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities; Kendra Fehrer, senior research associate at the Gardner Center; and Jacob Leos-Urbel, formerly associate director at the Gardner Center and currently with Tipping Point Community, a poverty-fighting organization in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Part 1 of
The Way We Do School focuses on Oakland’s challenging context and the stakeholder engagement process that informed the development of its strategic plan. Part 2 describes what methods were used to effect district-level change and how they contributed to the plan’s continuity. Part 3 highlights school-based implementation and outcomes. Part 4 recounts the nearly 10 years of working with partners in Oakland and the results of this collaboration, including lessons learned.
The book wraps up with a poignant afterword by Smith, who shares his reflections, characterizing Oakland’s effort as an expression of our national need for equitable human relationships and thriving communities. Educational leaders implementing community schools in Oakland Unified School District, and in my district, view the whole-child, whole-system approach as essential to improving outcomes equitably for all students regardless of their background and individual circumstances. Given enormous societal and global challenges, we recognize educators alone cannot prepare future ready graduates. We need broad and deep engagement of stakeholders to create a shared vision and a strategic plan with full-service community schools at its center.
The Way We Do School is a valuable resource for superintendents and administrators as they help their students, families, employees and communities overcome the profoundly damaging aspects of the global pandemic. Now more than ever, public school systems throughout the U.S. must mobilize community resources and integrate supportive partnerships to meet both the academic and non-academic needs of all students.
Reviewed by Tom Hagley Jr., chief communications and public engagement officer, Vancouver, Wash.
Social-Emotional Learning and the Brain: Strategies to Help Your Students Thrive
by Marilee Sprenger, ASCD, Alexandria, Va., 2020, 219 pp., $30.95 softcover
There is little to no doubt that the need to fully understand and effectively implement social emotional learning within the school setting is a vital aspect of both fostering and maintaining a positive climate and culture in schools.
In
Social-Emotional Learning and the Brain: Strategies to Help Your Students Thrive, Marilee Sprenger offers what may be the best book to date on the topic with the accompanying strategies needed to execute implementation. Shared through the lens of brain-based learning, Sprenger explicitly details brain science (i.e., what we know about how the brain works) and how it can be applied to social emotional learning.
Throughout the book, Sprenger, an education consultant, offers sound advice on how to address the key aspects of social-emotional learning. These key aspects and how-to’s include: how to build strong, caring relationships with students in order to create a sense of belonging, how to teach and model empathy for students to be both understood and understand, how to awaken students self-awareness/perceptions/confidence/efficacy, how to help students manage their behaviors through impulse control, stress management, and other positive skills, how to improve students’ social awareness and interaction with others, and how to teach students to handle relationships, including relationships with individuals whose backgrounds differ from their own.
Perhaps the most unique aspect of the book is the easy-to-understand explanations of the brain activity accompanied by diagrams throughout the text. This alone alleviates any confusion on the topic as a whole and helps the reader better understand social-emotional learning and the brain. Another highlight of the book is that the content and strategies shared are grade-level specific. Thus, teachers (and school leaders alike, through an instructional leadership lens) can easily determine what strategies are suggested for the grade levels in which they teach and apply the strategies accordingly.
In just eight chapters, Sprenger does a magnificent job of ensuring no stone is left unturned as it applies to social-emotional learning and the brain. In doing so, she reminds us all “that every child has a story,” and that her goal in writing this book was to “help rewrite some of those stories and reinforce others.” Finally, as the author so duly shares, she has a story too… and as with all books, reading about the topic from someone who experienced some of the hardships mentioned at the beginning of this review, garners attention.
This book belongs on the shelves of all stakeholders within the PreK-12 educational setting including students, parents, staff, administration, community members and business owners. Likewise, the book undoubtedly should be used in both teacher and administrator preparation programs. The need to fully understand and effectively implement social-emotional learning within the school setting is a vital aspect of both fostering and maintaining a positive climate and culture in schools.
Reviewed by Denver J. Fowler, department chair and associate professor of educational leadership & policy studies, Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, Conn.
Leading Data-Informed Change in Schools
by Selina Fisk, Solution Tree, Bloomington, Ind., 2021, 205 pp. with index, $36.95 softcover
Educators spend a great deal of time engaged in assessment and evaluation, but often do not have opportunities to logically address the results. Educational leaders often find themselves having to develop systems and implement processes to effectively support teachers’ understanding of the assessment data.
Leading Data-Informed Change in Schools by Selena Fisk, an education consultant based in Australia, provides a road map for educators and educational leaders to follow as they attempt to integrate the assessment data they produce, to positively try to impact student achievement. Written in a very straightforward, common-sense manner, Fisk lays out 10 steps educational leaders can take to better organize their programs and better support their staffs in creating effective assessment results by focusing on data. Steps for action, activities, documentation and opportunities for reflection are included.
Texts that provide prescriptive, developmental approaches to solve intricate educational problems usually fall flat with me. They tend to trivialize the content and ignore the complexities of the situation. In this case, I believe Fisk’s text has avoided these pitfalls. Her common-sense approach to conceptualizing the assessment needs of a program will assist administrators as they establish or revisit their data-informed processes in their schools.
Leading Data-Informed Change in Schools is an incredibly readable yet insightful look into the processes educational leaders must address when utilizing data to inform change in their schools. The reproducible items at the end of the book will assist school communities as the move through the change processes in their schools.
Reviewed by Mark E. Deschaine, associate professor of educational leadership, University of Mississippi, University, Miss.
The Instructional Playbook: The Missing Link for Translating Research into Practice
by Jim Knight, Michelle Harris and Sharon Thomas, ASCD, Alexandria, Va., 2020, 210 pp. with index, $35.95 softcover
Watching my son prepare for games during his 11-year career as a quarterback, I always noticed two things the night before a big game: he would “carb-load” to give his body the extra energy it would need to keep going with less fatigue and he would study his playbook. The playbook was top-secret and was customized each week to give his team the best chance at victory. He knew every graph, chart and word in the playbook so he could be prepared to counter whatever the opponent presented during the game.
In
The Instructional Playbook, Knight, Jim Knight, Michelle Harris and Sharon Thomas explain why school administrators, especially instructional coaches, should create instructional playbooks that offer concise, specific strategies and approaches. Just as my son’s coaches revised their teams’ playbook each week to arm them with plays that would lead to a win, a school district’s instructional playbook should be aligned to its most critical school-improvement goals.
After reviewing student data and completing classroom walkthroughs, you may realize the playbook needs revision to give your school a better chance at victory. The authors offer specific advice on how to know it’s time for that realignment.
Just as with a playbook for an athletic team, the authors argue a school’s playbook should be “lean and clean” with 3 essential components: a table of contents (to itemize the strategies and approaches included in the playbook), a one-pager (to explain the purpose of each teaching strategy, offer the research that supports it, and describes what the teacher should be doing and what the students should be doing when using the strategy), and a checklist (to make it as easy as possible to implement each strategy.)
Using their decades of educational experience, Knight, Harris and Thomas walk readers through how to decide which strategies (or “plays”) to include for their school; they offer step-by-step guides for creating one-pagers for each strategy and share examples of the checklists you’ll want to include.
Every chapter in the book is based on research and contains rich advice and real examples of how schools have created and implemented their playbooks. After reading the first 140 pages, I was convinced our district needed an instructional playbook and I began to elicit the help of our core team to identify the key strategies we would include in our table of contents.
The next 70 pages of the book were gold for us. They contain samples of instructional playbooks from districts all over the U.S. From standards-based grading to academic vocabulary and culturally responsive teaching, they’ve covered it all in these stellar exemplar playbooks.
The Instructional Playbook: The Missing Link for Translating Research into Practice reminded me of my son’s football playbook, with one key difference. His quarterback playbook was top-secret; only certain positions on his team could see the playbook because the contents of that book held the secrets that would lead their team to a win. For school districts, every administrator, instructional coach, teacher and teaching assistant should know the playbook inside and out. Use the terms and strategies to create a common school-wide vocabulary with universal expectations to help your team grab their victory!
Reviewed by Lisa Stanley, superintendent, North Texas Collegiate Academy, Denton, Texas
Build Strong Communities Using Community Education: Schools and Communities Working Together
by George Pintar and Joe Herrity, independently published, Middletown, Del., 2021, 85 pp., $18 softcover
In
Build Strong Communities Using Community Education: Schools and Communities Working Together, authors George Pintar and Joe Herrity attempt to provide a roadmap to reacquaint communities with community education programming.
Pintar and Herrity together log over 75 years of experience with community education. Pintar’s experience includes positions as teacher, administrator, consultant and business owner while Herrity, with over 38 years of experience in public education, owns a company providing management consulting and training to organizations.
The loosely presented model, seemingly often used with disadvantaged populations and developing countries, contains components that may be transferred to typical school communities. The book cites statistics from 1994 and 1998 and refers to Wikipedia to provide basic knowledge of concepts and terms. Superintendents may find this information outdated and/or too basic for their own school communities.
While there are recommendations to include all public segments into the development of a community education program, this will not be reasonable for most communities. The authors cite 10 characteristics of healthy communities, but some are simply out school district leaders’ control. Moreover, the authors briefly discuss the lack of confidence in public education for any variety of reasons and posit that community education has become one avenue to assist in building confidence in public school partnerships.
While this may be true, the lack of confidence in public education is not a new concept and decreasing resources amid increasing accountability, both human and financial, present a real challenge for Boards of Education, superintendents and district leaders.
The book ends with takeaways about how community leaders can use the community education model. While not especially helpful, it does provide a summary of the points the authors attempted to address in the publication.
Reviewed by Lisa M. Antunes, superintendent, Hillsborough, N.J.