The Handbook of Research on School Choice
edited by Mark Berends; Matthew Springer, director of the National Center on Performance Incentives; Dale Ballou, associate professor of public policy and education; and Herbert J. Walberg, Routledge, April 2009.
What difference do schools of choice make? A new book from the National Center on School Choice at Vanderbilt explores that question from a variety of angles. The book brings together top research on major forms of school choice, including charter schools, vouchers, home-schooling, magnet schools, private schools, virtual schools, supplementary education services and tuition tax credits. The chapters explore choice from a range of perspectives–historical, political, sociological, economic, legal and psychological–at schools in this country and abroad.
Teach the Way the Brain Learns: Curriculum Themes Build Neuron Networks
by Madlon T. Laster, MA’67, Rowman and Littlefield Education, June 2009.
Teach the Way the Brain Learns discusses organizing learning experiences under themes. Once the brain has stored basic concepts in the curriculum, the storing-by-association system of the brain attaches new information to those basic concepts, building new ones as students have learning experiences that involve them in integrated subject matter. This book provides ways for teachers to link subjects and areas of learning for various teaching situations and takes readers from simple correlation through using published thematic units now available, on to developing their own interdisciplinary themes or developing themes with other colleagues.
Late Winter
by Bill Brown, lecturer in English education, Iris Press, 2008.
The idea of home, the magic of story and the healing power of nature inform the poems in Late Winter. These poems often mine the darkness of loss, war and our culture’s constant barrage of status and style. Even so “a closed heart can’t greet a winter sky. Even a rain puddle is filled with it, and a horse trough, and the slow current of creeks.”
Late Winter opens with a search for home. By the book’s end, Brown believes that, with the power of memory and love, home can be born like a covenant in each of us, and that “some ancient hope, like winter light, is allied with the gravity of stars.”
The Way of Boys: Raising Healthy Boys in a Challenging and Complex World
by Anthony Rao, PhD’89, and Michelle Seaton, William Morrow, August 2009.
Recognizing why young boys have more struggles early on, how their development is different than girls, and how these natural differences make early school experiences challenging, this guide to raising boys into happy and healthy young men urges parents, educators, pediatricians, psychologists and other developmental experts to reevaluate and radically alter how to deal with young boys. It teaches parents how to rear their sons with respect for their natural development, thus giving them the best shot at growing into confident and healthy men ready to make unique contributions to the world.