Community Schools

Steels Creek is an idyllic retreat in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. It's a place where everyone knows their neighbors and no one locks their doors. Investigative journalist Lars Nilsson who has moved to the settlement following a public fall from grace is trying to live a quiet life far from the crime reporting he was once feted for. But when a backpacker's body is found floating in a nearby waterhole and hours later his best friend's daughter is reported missing, Lars is compelled to investigate, putting him back in the cross-hairs of police.

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.

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.

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.

Learn about community helpers at school.

Discover just how important thriving communities are to our wellbeing and the success of organizations—and learn what steps you can take to create them—in this illuminating and empowering guide from the author of Mastering Civility. Despite our deep desire to feel a sense of belonging, many...

A practical, illustrated guide to using the tools of design to create feelings of inclusion, collaboration, and respect in groups of any type or size—a classroom, a work team, an international organization—from Stanford University's d.school. “This is a beautiful book. Wise has applied the...

“The story of Mott Hall Bridges Academy is the story of American education. Nadia Lopez . . . must be a principal, a mentor, and sometimes a mother. I hope that you’re as impressed by her dedication to these kids as I’ve been." —Brandon Stanton, #1 New York Times bestselling author of...

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.

In Reducing Stress in Schools, Mathew Portell, Ingrid L. Cockhren, Tyisha J. Noise, Julie Kurtz, and Julie Nicholson provide a toolkit of actionable, evidence-based practices for PreK–12 teachers, administrators, and staff to support students' and adults' nervous system regulation. This book...

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.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics delivers a wise, timely, big-hearted novel of unplanned isolation and newly forged community. Where does one go, you might ask, when the world falls apart? When the immutable facts of your life—the mundane, the trivial, the...

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.

Captivating . . . Will appeal to fans of Room, The Lovely Bones and The Fault in Our Stars' – Independent Heartstopping. Heartbreaking. Heartwarming. Compelling, compassionate and powerful, Rhiannon Navin's Only Child is the most heartfelt book you'll read this year. We all went to school that...

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.