A School Built On Ethos

In A School Built on Ethos: Ideas, assemblies and hard-won wisdom, James Handscombe explores how schooling is more than gaining qualifications, how learning is more than exams, and how academic success comes more readily to those who have grasped this idea. Harris Westminster Sixth Form has had enormous success in providing an academic education for students of all socio-economic backgrounds. This success is grounded in the development of a scholarly ethos that guides students and staff into successful habits - driven by a clear vision for the community and communicated through everything that the school says and does. In this book, founding principal James Handscombe takes readers through the school's development and illustrates its journey by sharing a selection of the assemblies that have underpinned and elucidated its ethos. In doing so he offers guidance on how such a staple of school life can be used to shape a community, and shares transferable lessons on how assemblies can be planned and delivered effectively. Furthermore, James discusses the challenges the school faced during its creation and offers an improved understanding of how academic and scholarly learning can be delivered and developed in a school - whether it be newly formed or already established. He also asks the fundamental question of how schools can encourage and enable disadvantaged young people to aspire to and engage in academic enquiry. Suitable for both established and aspiring school leaders, especially those who are thinking about the kind of school they would like to run and how they can shape it.

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo (Managing Director of Uncommon Schools) shows leaders how they can raise their schools to greatness by following a core set of principles. These seven principles, or "levers," allow for consistent, transformational, and replicable growth. With intentional focus on these areas, leaders will leverage much more learning from the same amount of time investment. Fundamentally, each of these seven levers answers the core questions of school leadership: What should an effective leader do, and how and when should they do it. Aimed at all levels of school leadership, the book is for any principal, superintendent, or educator who wants to be a transformational leader. The book includes 30 video clips of top-tier leaders in action. These videos bring great schools to you, and support a deeper understanding of both the components of success and how it looks as a whole. There are also many helpful rubrics, extensive professional development tools, calendars, and templates. Explores the core principles of effective leadership Author's charter school, North Star Academy in Newark, New Jersey, received the highest possible award given by the U.S. Department of Education; the National Blue Ribbon Print version includes an instructive DVD with 30 video clips to show how it looks in real life. E-book customers: please note that details on how to access the content from the DVD may be found in the e-book Table of Contents. Please see the section: "How to Access DVD Contents" Bambrick-Santoyo has trained more than 1,800 school leaders nationwide in his work at Uncommon Schools and is a recognized expert on transforming schools to achieve extraordinary results.

High Challenge, Low Threat is Mary Myatt's smart and thoughtful exploration of all the things that wise leaders do. Informed through thousands of conversations over a 20-year period in education, Mary shows the lessons that school management teams can learn from leaders in a wide range of other sectors and points to the conditions which these leaders create to allow colleagues to engage with difficult issues enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. This book makes the case that any leadership role is concerned primarily with the relationships between individuals. It is the quality of these, whatever the size of the organisation, which make the difference between organisations which thrive, and those which stagnate. This is not to argue for soft, easy and comfortable options. Instead it considers how top leaders manage to walk the line between the impossible and the possible, between the undoable and the doable, and to create conditions for productive work which transcend the difficulties which come towards us every day. Instead of dodging them, they embrace them. And by navigating high challenge, low threat, they show how others how to do the same.

The Entrepreneur Ethos is a book which combines the essential mindset required for success, along with the practical steps required to get there. It draws on the experiences of entrepreneurs from around the world to give a rare insight into how ethical, resilient, and inclusive entrepreneurs survive and thrive.

Pillars of the Republic is a pioneering study of common-school development in the years before the Civil War. Public acceptance of state school systems, Kaestle argues, was encouraged by the people's commitment to republican government, by their trust in Protestant values, and by the development of capitalism. The author also examines the opposition to the Founding Fathers' educational ideas and shows what effects these had on our school system.

From Ancient Greece to the present day, Trivium 21c explores whether a contemporary trivium (Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric) can unite progressive and traditionalist institutions, teachers, politicians and parents in the common pursuit of providing a great education for our children in the 21st century. Education policy and practice is a battleground. Traditionalists argue for the teaching of a privileged type of hard knowledge and deride soft skills. Progressives deride learning about great works of the past preferring '21c skills' (21st century skills) such as creativity and critical thinking. Whilst looking for a school for his daughter, the author became frustrated by schools' inability to value knowledge, as well as creativity, foster discipline alongside free-thinking, and value citizenship alongside independent learning. Drawing from his work as a creative teacher, Robinson finds inspiration in the Arts and the need to nurture learners with the ability to deal with the uncertainties of our age. Named one of Book Authority's best education books of all time.

The ethos, culture, and climate of a school lie at the very heart of its success and have a dramatic impact on the future of its students. This exciting new book shows how through values-based, inclusive, and aspirational leadership, teachers and school leaders can support students in becoming well rounded, globally minded change-makers of the future. Based on the principle that every young person can be a leader, it offers step-by step guidance to support the development of leadership skills and shows how leadership opportunities can be made accessible to all learners. Arguing that leadership needs to be actively and inclusively taught, the book explores how young leadership models, reward systems, risk-taking, well-being strategies, and growth-mindset implementation can transform student motivation levels by creating aspiration, fulfilling dreams, and building character. Packed with practical suggestions and resources, the chapters cover: diversity and leadership establishing a strong student leadership team how to meaningfully mark significant global days making the most of tutor time student well-being fear of failure and how to overcome this building links with the local and wider community. Written by a Director of Ethos at an outstanding Trust, this is essential reading for all teachers and school leaders wanting their students to become empathetic, ambitious, values-driven, and happy young people.

One of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories of the past twenty years When a friend told Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank that “you’ve just been hit in the ass by a golden horseshoe,” they thought he was crazy. After all, both had just been fired. What the friend, Ken Langone, meant was that they now had the opportunity to create the kind of wide-open warehouse store that would help spark a consumer revolution through low prices, excellent customer service, and wide availability of products. Built from Scratch is the story of how two incredibly determined and creative people—and their associates—built a business from nothing to 761 stores and $30 billion in sales in a mere twenty years. Built from Scratch tells many colorful stories associated with The Home Depot’s founding and meteoric rise; shows that a company can be a tough, growth-oriented competitor and still maintain a high sense of responsibility to the community; and provides great lessons useful to people in any business, from start-ups to the Fortune 500.

This fully revised edition sets out what we know about bullying and harassment in schools, and combines this with proven practical and effective resources to prevent, address and deal with bullying and harassment. The author provides a guide for the development, implementation and evaluation of effective anti-bullying philosophies, policies and programmes. He sets out guidelines for creating and clarifying school policy and practice to provide a strong foundation for the establishment of a whole-school approach to bullying. The author shows how to support a culture of problem-solving that is soundly based on research but also draws on the knowledge and experience of teaching and administrative staff, students and the wider community in developing and implementing anti-bullying programmes. This book is a useful resource for all schools, from those just starting to consider setting up an anti-bullying initiative, to those with well-established programmes that wish to consider anti-bullying best practice. New material in this edition includes: - What we know and can do about cyberbullying - Teaching the very young and children aged 5-12 about bullying - Confronting issues through collaborative and restorative justice techniques - Social Action Drama This book is a key resource for teachers, administrators, counsellors, therapists, psychologists, teacher trainers, students and parents. Keith Sullivan is a widely published author and professor of Education at the National University of Ireland, Galway.