What does it feel like to walk into your school? Is it a welcoming place, where everyone feels valued? Most school improvement efforts focus on academic goals. But sometimes what can make or break your learning community are the intangibles--the relationships and connections that make up its culture. Authors Fisher, Frey, and Pumpian believe that no school improvement effort will be effective unless school culture is addressed. They identify five pillars that are critical to building a culture of achievement:

1. Welcome: Imagine if all staff members in your school considered it their job to make every student, parent, and visitor feel noticed, welcomed, and valued.
2. Do no harm: Your school rules should be tools for teaching students to become the moral and ethical citizens you expect them to be.
3. Choice words: When the language students hear helps them see their own possibility and potential, students perform in ways that are consistent with that language.
4. It's never too late to learn: Can you push students to go beyond the minimum needed to get by, to discover what they  are capable of achieving?
5. Best school in the universe: Is your school the best place to teach and learn?

Drawing on their years of experience in the classroom, the authors explain how these pillars support good teaching and learning. In addition, they provide 19 action research tools that will help you create a culture of achievement, so that your school or classroom is the best it can be.   

After reading this book, you'll see why culture makes the difference between a school that enables success for all students and a school that merely houses those students during the school day.

See the book's table of contents and read excerpts.  

On January 1, 2015 and throughout the year, be sure to check out online these books that support the development of a culture for achievement:

• Creating a Culture for Achievement:
• The 5-Minute Teacher:  How Do I Maximize Time for Learning in My Classroom by Mark Barnes
• Affirmative Classroom Management:  How Do I Develop Effective Rules and Consequences in My School by Richard L. Curwin
• Fostering Grit:  How Do I Prepare by Students for the Real World by Thomas R. Hoerr
• Self-Regulated Learning for Academic Success:  How Do I Help Students Manage Their Thoughts, Behaviors, and Emotions? by Carrie Germeroth and Crystal Day Hess
• Closing the Attitude Gap:  How to Fire Up Your Students to Strive for Success by Baruti Kafele
• Better Learning through Structured Teaching:  A Framework for the Gradual Release of Responsibility, 2nd Edition by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey
• Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind:  Practical Strategies for Raising Achievement by Eric P. Jensen
• Essential Questions:  Opening Doors to Student Understanding by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins
• Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom by Carol Ann Tomlinson and Tonya R. Moon
• Causes and Cures in the Classroom:  Getting to the Root of Academic and Behavior by Margaret Searle 
• The Twelve Touchstones of Good Teaching:  A Checklist for Staying Focused Every Day by McREL, Elizabeth Ross Hubbell and Bryan Goodwin
• Engaging Teachers in Classroom Walkthroughs by Donald S. Kachur, Judith A. Stout, and Claudia L. Edwards
• Upgrade Your Curriculum:  Practical Ways to Transform Units and Engage Students by Janet A. Hale and Michael Fisher

Want to make your students more responsible for their own learning? Want to create an academic environment in which students thrive and develop a genuine thirst for knowledge? Want to improve your students' standardized test results but avoid a "teach-to-the-test" mentality that throttles creativity and freedom?

In this book, Mark Barnes introduces and outlines the Results Only Learning Environment-a place that embraces the final result of learning rather than the traditional methods for arriving at that result. A results-only classroom is rich with individual and cooperative learning activities that help students demonstrate mastery learning on their own terms, without being constrained by standards and pedagogy.

By embracing results-only learning, you will be able to transform your classroom into a bustling community of learners in which

• Students collaborate daily on a number of long-term, ongoing projects. 
• Students receive constant narrative feedback. 
• Yearlong projects target learning outcomes more meaningfully than worksheets, homework, tests, and quizzes. 
• Freedom and independence are valued over punitive points, percentages, and letter grades. 
• Students manage themselves and all but eliminate the need for traditional classroom management.

Learn how your students can take charge of their own achievement in an enjoyable, project-based, workshop setting that challenges them with real-world learning scenarios-and helps them attain uncommonly excellent results.

See the book's table of contents and read excerpts. 

•  Congratulations to Clemencia Spizzirri, 2015 Iowa Teacher of the Year.  Her passion for helping students and families stems from her own childhood in Ecuador.
   
•  First-year educators who are teaching in designated shortage areas are encouraged to apply for awards of up to $4,000 through the Teach Iowa Scholar Program.The awards, which can be received up to a maximum of five years, are designed for new teachers who are in their first contract with an Iowa school. They had to have graduated from a teacher education program during the 2013-14 academic year.

• Joshua Hughes, a senior from Interstate High School in Truro, and Jack Hostager, a senior from Hempstead High School in Dubuque, each will receive a $5,000 scholarship and a fully funded trip to Washington, D.C., this March, to participate in a U.S. Senate Program.

• The Iowa Department of Education was recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for increasing the number of students participating in lunch programs over the summer. A full 705,817 lunches were served this past summer, representing a 15 percent increase over 2013.

• Be sure to check out the School Leaders Update from the Iowa Department of Education.