To close the achievement gap, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement. Culturally responsive instruction has shown promise, but many teachers have struggled with its implementation until now. In this audiobook, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction.

Create a system-wide plan for transforming the district office, schools, and classrooms into places that truly support all students achieving their highest levels! This updated edition of the best seller explains the need for candid, courageous conversations about race so that educators may understand why achievement inequality persists and learn how they can develop a curriculum that promotes true educational equity and excellence.  

Fully half the students in US schools have experienced trauma, violence, or chronic stress. In the face of this epidemic, it falls increasingly to teachers to provide the adult support these students need to function in school. But most educators have received little training to prepare them for this role. Tish Jennings, an internationally recognized leader in the field of social and emotional learning, shares research and experiential knowledge about the practices that support students' healing, build their resilience, and foster compassion in the classroom.

Most educators want to cultivate an antibias and antiracist classroom and school community, but they often struggle with where and how to get started. Liz helps us set ourselves up for success and prepare for the mistakes we’ll make along the way.

In Cultivating Genius, Dr. Gholdy E. Muhammad presents a four-layered equity framework—one that is grounded in history and restores excellence in literacy education. This framework, which she names "Historically Responsive Literacy", was derived from the study of literacy development within 19th-century Black literacy societies. The framework is essential and universal for all students, especially youth of color, who traditionally have been marginalized in learning standards, school policies, and classroom practices.

If we hope to interrupt educational inequities and create schools in which every child thrives, we must open our hearts to purposeful conversation and hone our skills to make those conversations effective. With characteristic honesty and wisdom, Elena Aguilar inspires us to commit to transforming our classrooms, lays bare the hidden obstacles to equity, and helps us see how to overcome these obstacles, one conversation at a time. 

In The PD Book, bestselling author Elena Aguilar and coauthor Lori Cohen offer seven habits—and a wealth of practical tools—that help you transform professional development. In this book, you'll learn how to inspire adult learners, the importance of having clear purpose, and how to navigate power dynamics in a group. You'll also learn a new way to plan PD that allows you to attend to details and be a responsive facilitator. The dozens of tips and tricks, anecdotes and research, and tools and resources will enable you to create the optimal conditions for learning.

Here at last - and none too soon - is a resource that delivers the research base, tools, and courage to tackle one of the most challenging and emotionally charged conversations in today’s schools: our inconsistent grading practices and the ways they can inadvertently perpetuate the achievement and opportunity gaps among our students.

The developing brains of our children need to “feel” safe. Children who carry chronic behavioral challenges are often met with reactive and punitive practices that can potentially reactivate the developing stress response systems. This audiobook deeply addresses the need for co-regulatory and relational touch point practices, shifting student-focused behavior management protocols to adult regulated brain and body states which are brain aligned, preventive, and relational discipline protocols.

Building on the ideas introduced in his New York Times best-selling book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, Christopher Emdin introduces an alternative educational model that will help students (and teachers) celebrate ratchet identity in the classroom. Ratchetdemic advocates for a new kind of student identity - one that bridges the seemingly disparate worlds of the ivory tower and the urban classroom.

In We Got This, Cornelius Minor describes how this conversation moved him toward realizing that listening to children is one of the most powerful things a teacher can do. By listening carefully, Cornelius discovered something that kids find themselves having to communicate far too often. That "my lessons were not, at all, linked to that student's reality." While challenging the teacher as hero trope, We Got This shows how authentically listening to kids is the closest thing to a superpower that we have. 

We need a fundamental shift in our values—a pivot in how we think, act, work, and connect. Despite what we’ve been told, the most critical mainspring of social change isn’t coalition building or problem analysis. It’s healing: deep, whole, and systemic, inside and out.

From Equity Talk to Equity Walk offers practical guidance on the design and application of campus change strategies for achieving equitable outcomes. Drawing from campus-based research projects, this invaluable resource provides real-world steps that reinforce primary elements for examining equity in student achievement, while challenging educators to specifically focus on racial equity as a critical lens for institutional and systemic change.

Drawing on her life’s work, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex. 

School discipline is broken. Too often, the kids who need our help the most are viewed as disrespectful, out of control, and beyond help, and are often the recipients of our most ineffective, most punitive interventions. These students - and their parents, teachers, and administrators - are frustrated and desperate for answers. Dr. Ross W. Greene, author of the acclaimed book The Explosive Child, offers educators and parents a different framework for understanding challenging behavior.

The Listening Leader is a practical guide that will inspire school, district, and teacher leaders to make substantive change and increase equitable student outcomes. Rooted in the values of equity, relationships, and listening, this luminous book helps reimagine what is possible in education today. Drawing from more than 20 years of experience in public schools, Shane Safir incorporates hands-on strategies and powerful stories to show us how to leverage one of the most vital tools of leadership: listening.

In this galvanizing audiobook for all educators, Kristin Souers and Pete Hall explore an urgent and growing issue - childhood trauma - and its profound effect on learning and teaching.   

This practical resource offers the foundational skills and tools needed by new coaching educators, as well as presenting an overview of the knowledge and theory base behind the practice. Established coaches will find numerous ways to deepen and refine their coaching practice. Principals and others who incorporate coaching strategies into their work will also find a wealth of resources. Aguilar offers a model for transformational coaching which could be implemented as professional development in schools or districts anywhere.

Classroom management is traditionally a matter of encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad by doling out rewards and punishments. But studies show that when educators empower students to address and correct misbehavior among themselves, positive results are longer lasting and wider reaching.

Every educator faces constraints — from budget restrictions to predetermined curriculum to “one-size-fits-all” mandatory assessments. The question is, how can you, as a teacher or administrator, ensure that regulations and limitations don’t impede authentic learning? In Innovate Inside the Box, George Couros and Katie Novak provide informed insight on creating purposeful learning opportunities for all students.

An expert in dignity studies, Donna Hicks contributes a specific, practical guide to achieving a culture of dignity. Most people know very little about dignity, and when leaders fail to respect the dignity of others, conflict and distrust ensue. She highlights three components of leading with dignity: what one must know in order to honor dignity and avoid violating it; what one must do to lead with dignity; and how one can create a culture of dignity in any organization.

One day, third-grade teacher Kyle Schwartz asked her students to fill in the blank in this sentence: "I wish my teacher knew _____." The results astounded her. Some answers were humorous; others were heartbreaking; all were profoundly moving and enlightening. The results opened her eyes to the need for educators to understand the unique realities their students face in order to create an open, safe, and supportive place in the classroom. When Schwartz shared her experience online, #IWishMyTeacherKnew became an immediate worldwide viral phenomenon.

To close the achievement gap, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement. Culturally responsive instruction has shown promise, but many teachers have struggled with its implementation until now. In this audiobook, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction.

This generation of students who have grown up in the 21st century are the most social, the most empowered, and also the most anxious youth population in human history. If you are struggling to connect with and lead them, you are not alone. The latest research presented in this audiobook, however, illuminates a surprising reality: The success of the next generation doesn’t depend entirely on them. Their best chance of success starts when adults choose to believe in them, challenge them, and walk with them through the nine greatest challenges today’s youth will face.

Are you or your teachers frustrated with carrots and sticks, detention rooms, and suspension-antiquated school discipline practices that simply do not work with the students entering our classrooms today? Our kids have complex needs, and we must empower and embrace them with restorative practices that not only change behaviors but transform students into productive citizens, accountable for their own actions.  

Help for Billy is a pragmatic manual to help guide families and educators who are struggling with traumatized children. Based on the concept of the neuroscience of emotions and behavior, Heather Forbes provides detailed, comprehensive, and logical strategies for teachers and parents. This easy to listen audiobook, clears the way for a better understanding of the true nature regarding traumatic experiences affecting the brain and learning.

Transforming School Culture provides a school improvement plan for leaders to overcome staff division, improve relationships, and transform toxic school cultures into healthy ones. Dr. Anthony Muhammad contends that in order to transform school culture, we must understand why teachers continue to hold on to models or beliefs contrary to those put forth by their school or district. He explores the human behavior, social conditions, and history that cause the underlying conflict among the four different types of teachers in a school.

Talking about race means naming the reality of white privilege and hierarchy. How do we talk about race honestly, then, without making our children feel bad about being white? Most importantly, how do we do any of this in age-appropriate ways? While a great deal of public discussion exists in regard to the impact of race and racism on children of color, meaningful dialogue about and resources for understanding the impact of race on white children are woefully absent. Raising White Kids steps into that void.

How can we go beyond performative allyship to creating real change in ourselves and in the world, together? In The Wake Up, Michelle MiJung Kim shares foundational principles often missing in today’s mainstream conversations around “diversity and inclusion”, inviting listeners to deep dive into the challenging and nuanced work of pursuing equity and justice, while exploring various complexities, contradictions, and conflicts inherent in our imperfect world. 

Ken Robinson is one of the world's most influential voices in education, and his 2006 TED Talk on the subject is the most viewed in the organization's history. Now, the internationally recognized leader on creativity and human potential focuses on one of the most critical issues of our time: how to transform the nation's troubled educational system.