Teaching Secondary School

What would it take to transform industrial-era schools into modern organizations capable of supporting deep learning for all? Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine's quest to answer this question took them inside some of America's most innovative schools and classrooms - places where educators are rethinking both what and how students should learn. The story they tell is alternately discouraging and hopeful. Drawing on hundreds of hours of observations and interviews at 30 different schools, Mehta and Fine reveal that deeper learning is more often the exception than the rule.

This book is about addressing the college-choosing problem. The rankings, metrics, analytics, college visits, and advice that we use today to help us make these decisions are out of step with the progress individual students are trying to make. They don't give students and families the information and context they need to make such a high-stakes decision about whether and where to get an education.

This book contains four essays written over 28 years ago while I was teaching writing and literature in the secondary school classroom. I do not wish to make apologies for the unpolished prose style of the essays or for arguments I once would have avidly defended, but today no longer stir a whole lot of zeal in me. Hopefully, a new generation of English teachers will find a few of the ideas contained in the essays of some value today.

This book is about my experiences in schools (and now academies which were formerly schools but run differently), as well as different teachers I have worked with, and how this all impacts the pupils we teach. It is an honest account revealing what it is like to be an aspirational teacher, and the difficulties we really find in this profession, with unprofessionalism often rife, senior leaders not in control and pupil behaviour varying from excellent to dangerous and often a challenge to manage. All of this in schools that parents hold in high esteem.

Does what it says on the tin. Top 10 tips for hitting the ground running for trainee teachers, newly qualified teachers, and teachers everywhere.