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You
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Recommended Reading
Teaching to Change the World
by Jeannie Oakes and Martin Lipton
McGraw Hill Higher Education, 1999
ISBN: 0071093818Jeannie Oakes is Professor of Education and Assistant Dean in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, where she directs Center X-- Where Research and Practice Interact for Urban School Professionals. She is a former public school teacher, Senior Social Scientist at RAND, and author of six highly acclaimed books on education. Martin Lipton has taught High School English for 32 years, and is co-author with Oakes of Making the Best of Schools and Becoming Good American Schools.
In the introduction to this informative, thought-provoking, and extremely timely book, the authors state that "This book has a point of view. It takes the position that a hopeful, democratic future depends on whether all students learn and experience academic rigor and social justice in school. If only a few citizens have such teaching when they are small children, young boys and girls, and teenagers, there is no hope for change‹just more of the same. This book aims to help teachers know whey they should, and how they can, pursue social justice teaching and have sufficient hope to pursue it relentlessly."
The authors discuss, from historical as well as current perspectives, the key issues that all educators must deal with, i.e., learning theory, curriculum and instruction, classroom management, assessment and testing, grouping, and school culture. Along with each topic, we hear from classroom teachers presently working with challenges, finding some successes and some failures, determined to create a culture of curious, achieving students. (These teachers, who are graduates of Oakes' program, have now been in the classroom for five years, and there is a 90% retention rate of teachers from the program!) The book is alive with vivid examples and anecdotes about the challenges of teaching well, meeting higher standards, dealing with greater accountability and endless debates about how best to help all students to learn, as well as how we arrived at where we are today. Each chapter concludes with a section called "Digging Deeper" that identifies additional scholars, books, websites, and other resources related to the topic discussed.
We love this book! It offers hope and a vision of what education at its best can do to create a more humane world of educated citizens. Great for summer reading and pondering- great to prepare for and keep on hand for the coming school year!
For more information go to the website Teaching to Change LA.
Copyright July 2001 New Horizons for Learning, all rights reserved.
http://www.newhorizons.org
E-mail: info@newhorizons.org
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