Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

Absolutely phenomenal! While I know many of the big picture concepts, the book makes powerful connections between changes that hope to improve schools and whether those changes really improve student learning. I've seen many leveraging errors in my time as a teacher, and feel that every educator should read this book. The links between strategy, sample, structure, self, and standards might seem intuitive, but seeing them clearly stated with examples really opened my eyes to why some initiatives that seemed like they'd be beneficial have failed miserably. This book is a quick read, but filled with great insight.

Can't say enough about this book. Three years later I'm still going back to this book - it's all about what we believe in ourselves! That is always the strongest lever!

Great!

Frontier and Rickabaugh have analyzed many studies and meta-analyses and written a book that helps answer the question educators have been asking in recent years: with so many "good" ideas in education, how can we leverage the best ones to improve student outcomes? They use the analogy of a lever. More specifically, their term "leverage advantage" explains what factors are most likely to improve student learning. They explain that five levers (structure, sample, standards, strategy, and self) can be used to affect student outcomes. Their premise is basically that we often focus too much on structure (scheduling, one-to-one computing, class size reduction) and sample (student groupings, tracks, etc.), do not fully utilize standards, and under-use effective strategies and concepts of self (teacher and student views of learning). They also succinctly explain what John Hattie and Robert Marzano have found in their massive meta-analyses of practices that affect learning. Most importantly, the book does not tout ideas that have not been firmly grounded in recent educational research. It does not promote any particular magic solution to increase student achievement. The common core standards are barely mentioned. But that's not the point. We have decades of excellent research to guide us, and you can find most of the basic tried and true best practices in this short (165 pages plus appendices and references) book. I read it in one day. This is the best book for any school or district administrator to read if he/she is in the process of acquiring and aligning school resources. It would also be fantastic for a school leadership team to review.Note: it may seem a bit overpriced, but I found it to be more than worth it!