Community Schools

As a response to the increasing violence in our culture, the widening ideological divides, and the growing gap in economic well-being, there is greater awareness that a deeper sense of community is desperately needed. But even as we acknowledge the need to build community, the dominant on-the-ground practices about how to engage people, civically and organizationally, remain essentially unchanged. We still believe community is built with better messaging, more persuasion, and social events for people to get to know each other better. All of which is naïve.

299 Days: The Community, the third book in the 299 Days series, reunites Grant Matson with his family after his wife, children, and in-laws accept that the only way to survive the Collapse is to flee the comfort of their suburban lives and join him at his isolated cabin in the woods. With riots becoming more violent, power outages more widespread, and the military crumbling, Grant and others throughout Washington State realize they must organize if they want to endure.

Modern society is plagued by fragmentation. The various sectors of our communities - businesses, schools, social service organizations, churches, government - do not work together. They exist in their own worlds. As do so many individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost.

In Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools, Ron Ritchhart, author of Making Thinking Visible, explains how creating a culture of thinking is more important to learning than any particular curriculum, and he outlines how any school or teacher can accomplish this by leveraging eight cultural forces: expectations, language, time, modeling, opportunities, routines, interactions, and environment.

Learn about community helpers at school.

In School Communities of Strength, Peter W. Cookson, Jr., lays out a blueprint for providing equitable educational opportunities for students from all socioeconomic strata, and particularly for the five million American children who live with the extreme material hardship known as deep poverty. This work issues an urgent call to action for K–12 schools to put in place the policies, practices, and programs that enable economically vulnerable students to thrive.

Belonging brings out the best in everyone. Whether you’re a parent, teacher, community organizer, or leader of any sort, your group is unlikely to thrive if the individuals don’t feel welcomed, included, and valued for who they are. The good news is that you can use design to create feelings of inclusion in your organization: rituals that bring people together, spaces that promote calm, roles that create a sense of responsibility, systems that make people feel respected, and more.

This book focuses both on how educators can cultivate compassion within themselves and lead together to cultivate humanizing school environments. Teachers, librarians, counselors, resource specialists, mental health professionals, and social workers who are working to create conditions for compassion and dignity in schools are all leaders who can impact change.

What does it mean to be a good citizen at school? Young listeners will learn what it looks like to be a part of a school community.

Confessions of an English Teacher: How High School and Community College English Departments Can Improve Instruction is designed to help English departments improve the instruction they deliver to students. It is a follow-up to the book Confessions of an English Teacher: A Memoir of My Teaching Years. In the memoir book, I discovered several vital things English departments can do to radically alter their approach to teaching English. Teaching English has fallen into patterns that research has indicated need to be revised.