PRODUCTS

Improvement Science Across the Disciplines: Driving Improvement in Healthcare, Business, and Social Services examines the way improvement science is employed outside of the traditional field of business. This book provides a multidisciplinary examination from the fields of education, nursing, social work, and criminal justice—and explores the universality of improvement methodologies in fields of service. Contributing authors will use an improvement lens to describe addressing problems of practice in their respective disciplines.

Improving Together: Case Studies of Networked Improvement Science Communities examines a range of network improvement communities who are using improvement science to examine problems of practice. Operating in varying contexts, NICs provide a platform for communication and other forms of data sharing in order to create meta-findings on a particular phenomenon. The text focus on not only the use of IS in each context/node, but also processes of building and launching networks and considers how particular media and infrastructure are used to share knowledge within the network.

Improvement Science: Methods for Researchers and Program Evaluators moves beyond traditional research methods textbooks by responding to people working in improvement science and program evaluation. This book is tailored to the need for specific improvement research methodologies and frameworks collected and presented in an edited volume written by research faculty associated with or teaching in leadership programs.

Traditionally, educator preparation programs only provide classes related to content, practical pedagogy, and classroom management. If we hope to see any level of justice in the education system, preparation programs must include courses that take an honest and deep dive into the ways in which racism shows up in schools and communities. Aspiring educators are craving and demanding the tools and resources to be the best educators they can be for our students in this country. They know the importance of advocating for and enacting anti-racism in their pedagogical practices, in school policy and culture, and in their community. The authors of this book will offer first-hand testimony of how deep racism permeates public education, an institution that, since its founding, was never meant for Black and brown students, as well as solutions to create truly just and equitable school communities.

The ultimate mission of Practicing Restorative Justice is to show readers the effectiveness of restorative justice practices in addressing a number of issues that impact Black and brown students. It takes a deep dive into the School-to-Prison Pipeline, in which failed education policies push students of color out of schools and into the penal system, dooming them for life. Other topics include policing in schools, systemic racism’s impact on classrooms and learners at all grade levels, and ways in which to decolonize the education system. The book provides classroom instructors, college of education faculty, and preservice teachers the concrete means to improve the learning experience of students of color in our public education system.

Virtually all national standards now require students and teachers to understand the particulars of disciplinary literacy. But recently emerging scholarship suggests that disciplinary literacy is, by itself, an incomplete and potentially problematic approach to secondary literacy instruction. By asking students to “think like” or even “be like” experts, students may receive implicit messaging about whose knowledge is—and isn’t—valued.

Critical disciplinary literacy (CDL) creates space for, and highlights connections between, critical literacies and disciplinary literacies. CDL acknowledges disciplines as unique communities with their own specialized (and often exclusionary) skills, norms, practices, and discourses, but deviates from conventional applications of disciplinary literacy by responding to the ways in which power systems and the analytic skills needed to understand them work differently based on the disciplines at hand. A CDL instructional approach acknowledges that applying the critical literacy skills of “reading the word and the world” to understand the power dynamics of vaccine distributions requires a different skill set and strategy approach than looking at textual representations of masculinity in Romeo and Juliet.

Written by a team of educators with over 70 combined years of classroom experience, Power Tools: 30 Critical Disciplinary Literacy Strategies for 6–12 Classrooms offers readers research-based, multidisciplinary, ready-to-implement disciplinary literacy strategies from critical literacy lenses. The book sets itself apart from other strategy textbooks by offering creative strategy implementation that calls attention to power systems. Educators can learn, for example, how they might employ read-alouds to explore the global refugee crisis, or use the exit ticket strategy to help students reflect on the relationship between race and COVID statistics/experiences.

Power Tools: 30 Critical Disciplinary Literacy Strategies for 6–12 Classrooms provides standards-aligned lessons that both challenge and extend traditional engagement practices to build a more just world. Each chapter includes:

• An overview of each strategy, situated within the research of best practices;
• Two disciplinary examples for each CDL strategy (e.g., an example of a CDL think-aloud in seventh grade math and tenth grade ELA classroom). Chapters provide resources such as examples of student work, discussion prompts, dialogue between teacher and students, and reprintables;
• Ideas for addressing resistance to CDL instruction.

Preservice and in-service teachers, as well as teacher educators and researchers, looking to do and support justice-oriented work in disciplinary spaces will find value in the book.

Power Tools is an ideal text to implement in courses such as Disciplinary Literacy, Secondary Literacy, Content Area Literacy, Methods/Strategies for Teaching Social Justice, Multicultural Education, ELA methods, Science methods, Social Studies methods, and Mathematics methods.

A Soul-Centered Approach to Educating Teachers has been created by A Black Education Network (ABEN), a national organization whose mission is to reverse the backward slide of Black students by utilizing culturally informed research, technology, and visionary community networking within the African Diaspora to facilitate academic and cultural excellence wherever scholars are. This interactive book presents portraits, narratives, and essays to illustrate the impact of ABEN on Black educators and those they serve.

Traditional teacher education, curriculum, and instruction is largely disconnected from the lived experiences of diverse students and their communities. Current debates around Critical Race Theory and its application to curriculum call into question culturally responsive practices while others are striving for ways to support equitable practices in the classroom. Questions about these practices include, What does teacher and learning look like when grounded in community voice and practice? How can we better integrate the history, context, experience, and voice of the communities being served? How can teacher education apply authentic problem solving to address the concerns of a community?

This inspirational and educational tale answers these questions for the myriad teachers, parents, administrators, school districts, community organizations, and community members who seek a better understanding of how to foster, access, and learn from spaces of Black excellence for Black children. Soul-Centered is essential reading for both scholars involved in a variety of disciplines in Education, and for community leaders interested in seeing how improved education practices can hugely benefit their constituents.

The Educational Leader’s Guide to Improvement Science: Data, Design and Cases for Reflection is a collection illustrating applied organizational problem-solving using methods of improvement science in educational leadership. Early chapters introduce improvement science and then the reader is led through a logical sequence of inquiry, presented with cases of educational dilemma matched with principles of improvement science and provided examples of research methodology applied in context. Because improvement science research is so quickly becoming a signature pedagogy and core subject area of inquiry in the field of educational leadership, the literature is still scant in its coverage of improvement science models; it is the purpose of this publication to fill the void by providing concrete examples, through case studies, of instances where improvement research methods and analyses can be embedded to enhance and strengthen efforts at organizational improvement. This text concentrates on the elements faculty, students, and administrators need; specific models where improvement science frameworks enhance the reliability and validity of improvement or quality enhancement efforts.

To learn more about Improvement Science and see our full list of books in this area, please click through to the Myers Education Press Improvement Science website.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Improvement Science, Seminar/Practicum in Educational Leadership, Introduction to Program Evaluation, Educational Research for Administrators, Action Research for School Practitioners, Educational Research, School Improvement, and Teacher Leadership.