This is a highly current and engaging, multicultural, critical overview of the teaching profession in the late twentieth century-both its challenges and its joys. Jeannie Oakes is a leading education researcher and director of the UCLA teacher education program. Martin Lipton is an education writer and consultant and has taught in public schools for 31 years. Together, they bring an excellent blend of theory and applications to the book. This ground-breaking book responds to the current national crisis in teaching and teacher education, considers the values and politics that pervade education, and asks critical questions about how conventional thinking and practice came to be and who benefits from them. The book takes the position that a hopeful, democratic future depends on whether all students learn. It pays particular attention to inequalities associated with race, social class, language, gender, and other social categories and looks for alternatives to the inequalities. The text provides a solid research base and practical treatment of essential topics that locates these topics within cognitive, sociocultural, and constructivist perspectives on learning, and within democratic values. The text infuses issues of diversity throughout its discussion of traditional elements of schools and teaching-learning, curriculum, instruction, etc. It presents educational foundations and history as alive and active in today's schools, and treats them as useful concepts for students to use as they think about and respond to more transitory, current "headline" issues, such as charter schools, vouchers, standards, and bilingual education. Central to the book is the belief that schools can and must be places of extraordinary educational quality and institutions for social justice. The authors explore the tensions between the democratic aims of schools and competition for always scarce high quality opportunities. Throughout the chapters are boxed personal observations of a diverse group of first-year teachers who voice their analyses and personal anecdotes about their own struggles to transform theory into practice. "Digging Deeper" sections that end each chapter feature scholars who are working on issues raised in the chapter. An innovative Instructor's Manual provides ways to teach the course consistent with cognitive and sociocultural learning theory, culturally diverse pedagogy, and authentic assessment.

Teaching to Change the World

Education & Teaching

Jeannie Oakes

Schools & Teaching

McGraw-Hill Companies

"A convincing portrait of teachers actively engaged in educational reform...offering a hopeful yet realistic vision of revitalized democracy inspired by a passion for the public good. This book is an eloquent defense of civic virtue." —Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace and Savage Inequalities 
"Rich, realistic, invigorating, and scary. Any middle school educator who has been part of an effort to reform the educational process will see himself or herself in this book--as the brave risk taker, the naive visionary, the frightened frontline trooper, and the touched individual who can make a difference." —Judy Cunningham, principal, South Lake Middle School, Irvine, California This book tells the stories of sixteen schools in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Texas, and Vermont that sought to alter their structures and practices and become places fostering innovative ideas, caring people, principles of social justice, and democratic processes. Based on longitudinal, comparative case-study research, these accounts attest to the power of committing to public virtue and the struggle of educators to transform that commitment into changed school practice. The authors argue that better schools will come only when policy makers, educators, and citizens move beyond technical and bureaucratic reforms to engage in the same educative, socially just, caring, and participatory processes they want for schoolchildren. Those processes constitute betterment--both the means and the ends of school reform. Becoming Good American Schools is for administrators, policy makers, practitioners, and citizens who are prepared to blend inspiration and caution, idealism and skepticism in their own pursuit of good schools.

Becoming Good American Schools: The Struggle for Civic Virtue in Education Reform (Jossey Bass Education Series)

Karen Hunter Quartz

Steve Ryan

Martin Lipton

Jossey-Bass

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Books by Jeannie Oakes