School Smarts: The Four Cs of Academic Success
“Expert teacher Jim Burke offers readers an important model for understanding student success. Through personal vignettes, letters from former students, and references to some of the best texts on teaching, Burke explores the skills and habits students need to develop to thrive in today's school systems.”–Denise Clark Pope, Author of "Doing School": How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students.“How many people are there in public schools these days who, like Jim Burke, teach as well as Jaime Escalante and write as well as Andy Rooney? There are not enough of them, and parents like me often fight to get our kids into those teachers' classes. Burke's new book, School Smarts, gives us all a chance to step inside his classroom and soak up the insights of a master educator who will not only help our children, but teach even us a thing or two.”–Jay Mathews, Education Columnist, The Washington Post“School Smarts provides a concrete, engaging, and inspiring guide for teachers and other educators committed to the hard work of facilitating the kinds of shifts in academic identity and competence that are necessary to create life-changing learning for their own students.”–Ruth Schoenbach, Coauthor of Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms“Jim Burke provides a framework for understanding what teachers can do to help transform the academic experience of learners who struggle with the rules and logic of the school game. Eminently useful, deeply moving, and chock full of innovative ideas, this book and Jim Burke are gifts to the profession.”–Sam Intrator, Assistant Professor of Education and Child Study at Smith College, Author of Tuned In and Fired Up“Jim Burke is already known as a restless visionary in the field of English teaching, but in School Smarts he . . . cuts to the core of basic principles of teaching and learning. . . . At a time when standardization is being confused with excellence, Burke's new book is a bracing reminder of what it really means to think big.”–Tom Newkirk, Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, Author of Misreading Masculinity