The Power to Transform: Leadership That Brings Learning and Schooling to Life - Hardcover

Marshall, Stephanie Pace

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 078797501X ISBN 13: 9780787975012

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2006

Synopsis

In this important new book, Stephanie Pace Marshall argues that by focusing on reforming the contents of schooling and not transforming the context and conditions of learning, we have created false proxies for learning and eroded the potentially vibrant intellectual life of our schools. Finishing a course and a textbook has come to mean achievement. Listening to a lecture has come  to mean understanding. Getting a high score on a standardized test has come to mean proficiency. Credentialing has come to mean competence. To educate our children wisely requires that we create generative learning communities, by design. Such learning communities have their roots in meaning, not memory; engagement, not transmission; inquiry, not compliance; exploration, not acquisition; personalization, not uniformity; interdependence, not individualism; collaboration, not competition; and trust, not fear.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"The nature of schooling as we know it has become the unquestioned answer to educating our children. It is not. Knowing what we now know, we can no longer do what we now do. It is time to reconnect our children and our systems to their abundant learning potentials and reengage them in the joy of learning."
—Stephanie Pace Marshall from the Preface

Educational reform is a global conversation. But decades of restructuring schools have not fundamentally transformed our system of schooling or the nature and quality of our children's learning and thinking.

In this important new book, Stephanie Pace Marshall argues that by focusing on reforming the contents of schooling and not transforming the context and conditions of learning, we have created false proxies for learning and eroded the potentially vibrant intellectual life of our schools. Finishing a course and a textbook has come to mean achievement. Listening to a lecture has come to mean understanding. Getting a high score on a standardized test has come to mean proficiency. Credentialing has come to mean competence.

To educate our children wisely requires that we create generative learning communities, by design. Such learning communities have their roots in meaning, not memory; engagement, not transmission; inquiry, not compliance; exploration, not acquisition; personalization, not uniformity; interdependence, not individualism; collaboration, not competition; and trust, not fear.

This book is a passionate and deeply resonant call to reconceive and redesign learning and schooling. It invites a new conversation and offers new language, new design principles, and a new map for creating vibrant, imaginative learning landscapes that integrate the properties of living systems and the principles of learning. It is from this new story that learning and schooling can be brought to life.

From the Back Cover:

Praise for The Power to Transform

"Stephanie Marshall's brilliant thesis invites us to think differently about learning and schooling both in the United States and around the globe. In fact, it does much more. It provides us with ways by which we can change our thinking about learning and thus offers a new map for schooling that can excite all students and leaders of progressive education."
—Robert W. Galvin, chairman emeritus, Motorola, Inc.

"For many years, Stephanie has been a wise, passionate, and courageous educator. Nobody cares more about children; no one honors their innate qualities more than she. Her book makes this visible to the world. She knows our children, she knows our schools, she knows the future if we don't change—we must take heed of her message."
—Margaret J. Wheatley, author, Leadership and the New Science

"At a time when 'education reform' is dominated by hollow slogans and political sleight of hand, here is a book that is wise, grounded, visionary, practical, and wonderfully well written. Authored by one of our nation's leading educators, it offers a model of teaching and learning forged in the real world that has the potential to transform public education. May this superb book be not only read but taken to heart by everyone who cares about our children and their future."
—Parker J. Palmer, author, The Courage to Teach,Let Your Life Speak, and A Hidden Wholeness

"Drawing on a lifetime in education and her experiences as the founding leader of the world-renowned Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, Stephanie Pace Marshall offers an original and compelling synthesis on the fostering of learning in the worlds of today and tomorrow."
—Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Education and Cognition,Harvard Graduate School of Education

About this edition

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 078797501X
• ISBN 13: 9780787975012
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272