Guy Claxton

Bill Lucas

Tanya Byron

Octavius Black

With forewords by Professor Tanya Byron and Octavius Black, Educating Ruby: What Our Children Really Need To Learn is a powerful call to action by acclaimed thought-leaders Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas. It is for everyone who cares about education in an uncertain world and explains how teachers, parents and grandparents can cultivate confidence, curiosity, collaboration, communication, creativity, commitment and craftsmanship in children, at the same time as helping them to do well in public examinations. Educating Ruby shows, unequivocally, that schools can get the right results in the right way, so that the Rubys of tomorrow will emerge from their time at school able to talk with honest pleasure and reflective optimism about their schooling. Featuring the views of schoolchildren, parents, educators and employers and drawing on Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas' years of experience in education, including their work with Building Learning Power and the Expansive Education Network, this powerful new book is sure to provoke thinking and debate. Just as Willy Russell's Educating Rita helped us rethink university, the authors of Educating Ruby invite fresh scrutiny of our schools.

What our children really need to learn

Educating Ruby

Bill Lucas, a leading expert on lifelong learning and education, reveals simple ways to overcome personal barriers to learning, master powerful new skills and unlock the door to greater success in work, study, sport ... whatever your age. This complete manual of learning also includes advice on family learning and learning at work, a comprehensive summary of learning theories and how to apply them and a useful reference section - including common learning difficulties, a clear and simple guide to the brain, and who's who in the world of learning.

Discover Your Hidden Talents

Hadjer Nacer

Thinking about Learning for Improvement in Health Care

The Habits of an Improver

Bruce Johnson

Anna Sullivan

This is a deliberately provocative book. It critiques current student behaviour management practices, seeks to explain the flawed assumptions that justify those practices, and proposes how things could be better for children in our schools if different practices were adopted. It is one of the few books to offer alternative ways of addressing the issues associated with student behaviour at school, and exposes the field to serious and sustained critique from both a research perspective and a children’s rights ideological stance. The authors address the following questions: What ideas dominate current thinking on student behaviour at school? What are the policy drivers for current practices? What is wrong with common behaviour approaches? What key ideologies justify these approaches? How can we present ethical alternatives to current approaches? How can a human rights perspective contribute to the development of alternative approaches? In exploring these questions and some ethical alternatives to the status quo, the authors suggest practical ways to ‘answer back’ to calls for more authoritarian responses to student behaviour within our schools. In doing so, the authors advocate for reforms on behalf of children, and in their interests.

Answering Back

Challenging Dominant Views on Student Behaviour at School

Ellen Spencer

In Zest for Learning: Developing curious learners who relish real-world challenges, Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer explore the ways in which teachers can help their pupils to find their passions, develop independence and challenge themselves to become more expansive learners. Young people need more than subject knowledge in order to thrive they need capabilities. The Pedagogy for a Changing World series details which capabilities matter and how schools can develop them. A key capability is zest: the curiosity and desire to experience new things. Zest for Learning offers a powerful new synthesis of thinking about what it takes for young people to flourish both in education and in the wider world, especially at a time when preparing them for life beyond school often calls for brave leadership. This could be encouraged through, for example, greater engagement with sports and the arts, by collaborating with external bodies such as the Scouts and Guides or the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme or by working with libraries, museums, faith groups and environmental associations. In this book Bill and Ellen offer a framework for zest: a practical guide for teachers, underpinned by theory. They draw on a number of areas of knowledge and practice that each have something to contribute to the concept of zest for learning, bringing together ideas in concrete and actionable ways. Zest for Learning connects the co-curriculum with the formal curriculum, building both theoretical and practical confidence in the kinds of pedagogies which work well. Bill and Ellen have infused the book with a wide range of ideas for getting pupils to love learning so much that they will be able to learn whatever they want to throughout their lives. The authors also go further by presenting case studies that illustrate the successful integration of the co-curriculum with the formal curriculum at various educational institutions, and by providing an A to Z of practical ideas and activities for developing zest in young learners. Suitable for all teachers and leaders, in both primary and secondary settings.

Developing curious learners who relish real-world challenges (Pedagogy for a Changing World series)

Zest for Learning

الإبداع في التفكير

قوة العقل

Stephen Briers

Does your family ever drive you mad? Would you like yours to get on better and be happier? Families are becoming more complicated and, for many, living is increasingly stresful as parents juggle working responsibilities with family care. Bill Lucas, with Dr Stephen Briers, draws on proven research to introduce approaches that can transform your life. Discover the nature of happiness and how to develop positive feelings in your daily life. Learn how to create a positive environment for your children and family. Adopt effective strategies to overcome challenges. Understand how you react to situations in your family life.

Happy Families

Brenton Prosser

Alan D. Reid

CONNECTING LIVES AND LEARNING is a project dedicated to connecting learning to student lives, connecting teachers with the latest middle years research, and better connecting primary and secondary schools to keep students at school longer. Based in Adelaide's lower socio-economic northern urban fringe, the project helps teachers use students' everyday experience and expertise to develop new ways of teaching and learning that involve students in intellectually challenging tasks. This book tells the stories of real teachers, in real classrooms, making real attempts for change, and not always succeeding. It is a book about teachers making a difference in difficult times and tough places. But most importantly, this book reaffirms that being an educator is inherently about adopting socially just practices, building community capacity and contributing to a more socially sustainable world.

Renewing Pedagogy in the Middle Years

Connecting Lives and Learning

Boost your learning power and release your full potential with Discover Your Hidden Talents.

Welcome to the Base Security System Program Office - the BS SPO. Your assignment: recruit a non-human life form to guard Air Force bases. Your chief engineer is on parole for arson, your program manager is a lieutenant who just wants a woman, your boss is focused on his retirement, and your contractor thinks the whole thing is a game. Your new secretary - who doesn't have a security clearance - knows more about this secret program than you do, and her husband wrote a book exposing it. By the way, the Army's competitor to your system is already rolling around your base. You're way behind the schedule the General has set; can you catch up? Isn't that why they call you "Slick?"

Hell Is a Gas Station in Bluewater Bay

The processes involved in creative thought seem mysterious and can often elude us. Yet the ability to think creatively and productively is vital to our personal and professional lives.Creativity is a major economic force in the 21st century and an essential part of everyday life. Being smart in today's world means we have to be flexible to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Demands upon us can change daily, our personal circumstances alter and the markets within which we operate shift. To achieve harmony, balance and success through all this constant change we need to think creatively. But how do we do this? How do we know which skills and habits will directly increase and impact on our ability to think creatively? And how can we develop and nurture them? In this comprehensive full-colour guide the authors help us to advance our skills to meet the challenges we face in our daily lives in an innovative and creative way. Learn how you can strengthen and develop the attitudes that enable creativity, break those that stifle innovation and discover the techniques you need to draw out your positive and creative side. Through practical exercises and inspiring examples you'll instil a positive mind-set that will make innovative, productive and creative thinking a way of life. Take on new challenges and projects with confidence and find out how to create a creative and stimulating environment within your workplace. This book is for anyone who wants to tap into their creativity and develop a mind-set where good ideas flow more freely in all circumstances, reaping the benefits that creative and innovative thought can offer.

How to Generate Ideas and Solve Problems in Your Work and Life

The Creative Thinking Plan

In Teaching Creative Thinking: Developing Learners Who Generate Ideas and Can Think Critically,Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer define and demystify the essence of creative thinking, and offer action-oriented and research-informed suggestions as to how it can best be developed in learners. Where once it was enough to know and do things, young people now need more than subject knowledge in order to thrive: they need capabilities. Teaching Creative Thinking is the first title in the three-part Pedagogy for a Changing World series, founded upon Lucas and Spencer's philosophy of dispositional teaching a pedagogical approach which aims to cultivate in learners certain dispositions that evidence suggests are going to be valuable to them both at school and in later life. A key capability is creative thinking, and, in 2021, one of the guardians of global comparative standards, PISA, is recognising its importance by making creative thinking the 'innovative assessment domain' to supplement their testing of 15-year-olds' core capabilities in English, maths and science. Creative thinkers are inquisitive, collaborative, imaginative, persistent and disciplined and schools which foster these habits of mind in learners need to be creative in engaging children and young people by embedding creativity into their everyday educational experiences. In this extensive enquiry into the nature and nurture of creative thinking,the authors explore the effectiveness of various pedagogical approaches including problem-based learning, growth mindset, playful experimentation and the classroom as a learning community and provide a wealth of tried-and-tested classroom strategies that will boost learners' critical and creative thinking skills. The book is structured in an easy-to-access format, combining a comprehensive listing of practical ideas to stimulate lesson planning with expert guidance on integrating them into your practice, followed by plenty of inventive suggestions as to how learners' progress can be assessed and tracked along the way by both the pupil and the teacher. The authors then go further to offer exemplars of success by presenting case studies of schools' innovations in adopting these approaches, and dedicate a chapter to dispelling any pressing doubts that teachers may have by exposing the potential pitfalls and offering advice on how to avoid them. Venturing beyond the classroom setting, Teaching Creative Thinkingalso delves into the ways in which a school can work towards the provision of co-curricular experiences such as partnering with a range of external community groups and better engage its leadership team and pupils' parents with the idea of creative thinking in order to support learners with opportunities to grow. The authors offer many examples which will inspire schools to do just this, and collate these ideas into building a framework for learning that equips young people in schools today with the twenty-first century skills and capabilities that will enable them to thrive in the workforce of tomorrow. Replete with research-led insight and ready-to-use strategies, Teaching Creative Thinkingis a powerful call to action and a practical handbook for all teachers and leaders, in both primary and secondary settings, who want to embed a capabilities approach in their schools.

Developing learners who generate ideas and can think critically (Pedagogy for a Changing World series)

Teaching Creative Thinking

Lucas Bill Spencer Ellen Claxton Guy

This book offers a powerful manifesto for schools to articulate a different vision of education that looks beyond exam success.

Teaching Learners for the Real World

Expansive Education

Bill Lucas, a leading international expert on life-long learning, shows that while we have learned more about how the brain works in the last decade than we have ever known, only a fraction of this is grasped and applied by most people. Power Up Your Mind applies this practical knowledge for the first time and shows you how to learn. Drawing on research from a wide variety of subject areas, from neuroscience to psychology, from motivation theory to accelerated learning, from memory to diet, this book shows how everyone has the capacity to succeed and how most people use only a very small portion of their talents. For learning to be effective, an understanding of how the brain works is essential and unlike most of the recent thinking on the mind, Lucas connects an understanding of the brain with the reality of the workplace and translates what we know about the brain into useful insights for work. Much work-based training is a waste of time and money because the majority of people are neither emotionally ready nor practically inclined to apply their learning to the way they behave. Power Up Your Mind offers a new model of learning-READY, GO, STEADY-which will revolutionize the way you learn and perform.

Bill Lucas

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