new book by Russell Bishop, Dominic O'Sullivan and Mere Berryman

Scaling Up Educational Reform – Addressing the Politics of Disparity
by Russell Bishop, Dominic O’Sullivan and Mere Berryman (from Waikato University site: http://www.waikato.ac.nz/news-events/new-books.shtml)


What is school reform? What makes it sustainable? Who needs to be involved? How is scaling up achieved? This book is about the need for educational reforms that have built into them, from the outset, those elements that will see them sustained in the original sites and spread to others.

Using the Te Kotahitanga Project as a model Professor Russell Bishop, Dr Mere Berryman and Dominic O'Sullivan, branch out from the project itself to seek to uncover how an educational reform can become both extendable and sustainable.

Their model can be applied to a variety of levels within education: classroom, school and system wide. It has seven elements that should be present in the reform initiative from the outset. These elements include establishing goals and a vision for reducing disparities; embedding a new pedagogy to depth in order to change the core of educational practice; developing new institutions and organisational structures to support in-class initiatives; developing leadership that is responsive, proactive and distributed; and developing and using appropriate measures of performance as evidence for modifying core classroom and school practices.

This book is an essential read for anyone involved in the process of trying to achieve sustainable school reform that addresses the question of how mainstream schools can effectively address the learning needs of students currently not well served by education.