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Designing Better Schools for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children

A Science of Performance Model for Research

By Stuart McNaughton

Published April 11th 2011 by Routledge – 184 pages

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Description

How can schools be better designed to enable equitable academic outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse children from communities lacking in economic, political and social power? Putting forward a robust ‘science of performance’ model of school change based on a specified process of research and development in local contexts, this book:

  • lays out the traditions of optimism and pessimism about effective schooling for at-risk students
  • reviews the international and national evidence for the effectiveness of schools and school systems in reducing disparities in achievement
  • describes the challenges educational research must address to solve the problem of school effectiveness, proposes strict criteria against which effectiveness should be judged, and examines in detail examples where change has been demonstrated
  • proposes how researchers, professionals, and policy-makers can develop more effective systems.

Bringing together structural and psychological accounts of the nature of schools, and establishing theoretically defensible criteria for judging effectiveness, this book is a critically important contribution to advancing the science of making schools more effective.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

  1. Ongoing optimism, persistent pessimism and their roots

  2. Weighing up the evidence

  3. Explaining our limitations

  4. Optimism in the detail.

  5. Problems for an Optimist - Matthew effects

  6. What is being effective? Accelerating and distributing achievement

  7. Summer learning

  8. Sustaining change

  9. Scaling up

  10. Understanding the contexts for effective teaching

  11. A science of performance: Research and development partnerships

  12. Building more effective schools: Notes on a cautious optimism

Author Bio

Stuart McNaughton is Professor of Education and Director of the Woolf Fisher Research Centre at The University of Auckland.

Name: Designing Better Schools for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children: A Science of Performance Model for Research (Paperback) – Routledge 
Description: By Stuart McNaughton. How can schools be better designed to enable equitable academic outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse children from communities lacking in economic, political and social power? Putting forward a robust ‘science of...
Categories: Educational Change & School Reform, Education Policy, English & Literacy/Language Arts