Leading the Rebound
20+ Must-Dos to Restart Teaching and Learning
- Douglas Fisher - San Diego State University, USA
- Nancy Frey - San Diego State University, USA
- Dominique Smith - Health Sciences High and Middle College, USA
- John Hattie - The University of Melbourne, Australia
If there ever was a time for our heroic school leadership to persevere, it’s now. Because now, well over one year since the pandemic stretched the resilience and reserves of our school systems, it’s time to “rebound.” It’s time to leverage this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reboot teaching and learning as we know it so that we magnify the effective practices from the past while leveraging the so many recent lessons learned.
This is where Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey, Dominique Smith, and John Hattie, coauthors of The Distance Learning Playbook series, are ideally equipped to serve as your collaborators.
Inside Leading the Rebound: 20+ Must-Dos to Restart Teaching and Learning you’ll find immediate actions, mindsets, and approaches to take if we’re to reimagine and improve our schools and school systems. Step by step, you’ll discover explicit guidance on how to:
1. Take care of yourself
2. Take stock and find the path
3. Rebuild teacher agency
4. Rebuild collective teacher efficacy
5. Foreground social and emotional learning
6. Change the learning loss narrative
7. Guide teacher clarity
8. Ensure instructional excellence
9. Use assessments for a range of purposes
10. Design and implement interventions
11. Win back parent-teacher relationships
12. Establish restorative practices
13. Avoid stealing the conflict
14. Enhance teacher-student and student-student interactions
15. Develop early warning systems for attendance, behavior, and course completion
16. Confront cognitive challenges to learning
17. Ensure equitable and restorative grading
18. Enhance PLCs
19. Provide empathetic feedback
20. Host honest performance conversations
21. Maintain your social presence
22. Future-proof teachers and students
What’s more Leading the Rebound is backed up with all kinds of resources--including VISIBLE LEARNING® research, sample planning tools, and other essential tips and strategies--to provide you with a start-to-finish roadmap for navigating this absolutely critical next leg in our journey toward a “better normal.”
Leading the Rebound is a must-read for every leader preparing to restart in-person teaching and learning. The 20+ must-dos create a practical road map that empowers leaders with the insight and confidence needed to focus on implementing the essential recommendations: Acceleration of student learning through instructional excellence, social and emotional needs of students and staff, leveraging strengths from distance learning, are just a few! This will be a welcome and game-changing resource to guide leaders in the challenging next steps of our new instructional normal.
Given the turbulent nature of our times, we are facing a nexus in public education. We need to re-establish our schools’ culture that will direct knowledge into wisdom, transform fear into hope and lift isolationism into compassionate engagement. It is more urgent than ever for leaders to be bold and courageous to take back the spirit of public education. Leading the Rebound will offer the reader crucial strategies to embark on this critical journey.
Leading the Rebound has tackled the most complex and difficult aspects of K–12 education during this unsettling time. This is an authentic and powerful call to action that inspires educators to do all that is necessary to create a school environment in which both students and adults thrive. Ultimately, we are shaping individual futures, and for that reason alone, this resource should be on every educator’s bookshelf.
It is time to stop saying we changed something in education because of COVID and start saying we changed this because COVID gave us the opportunity to rethink education. Leading the Rebound: 20+ Must-Dos to Restart Teaching and Learning is the perfect book to help districts and schools move forward from the pandemic. The book offers support and guidance on all aspects of the education process, including social and emotional learning; curriculum, instruction, and assessment; classroom management; teacher evaluation and feedback; and parent–teacher–student relationships. Instructional Leadership Teams can utilize this book as a reference to help them identify where their gaps are, consider the reality, the recommendations, redefine and redirect, and agree to commitments. I could not put this down. Books from Fisher and Frey never disappoint and this is no different.