A hands-on and usable guide to making the first 90 days of your mentoring relationship a success In Starting Strong, mentoring experts Lois J. Zachary and Lory A. Fischler weave a compelling tale that exemplifies the concepts, highlights the dynamics, and outlines the issues involved in mentoring relationships. The authors use the form of a fable to tell the story of a budding mentoring relationship filled with possibilities, problems, and triumphs. The story of Cynthia, a seasoned professional, and her new mentee Rafa, brings to life Zachary and Fischler's wealth of mentoring suggestions and best practices and each episode of the fable is accompanied by reflection questions, key learnings, and strategies that readers can apply to their own mentoring relationships. The authors include a conversation playbook that guides mentors and mentees through six essential conversations that will help them establish a strong mentoring connection, and keep it moving forward. As organizations face the transition of departing Boomers and arriving Millennials, Starting Strong offers a hands-on and readable guide to create effective mentoring relationships that will ensure the success of that transition. The book: Covers the key components of a successful mentoring relationship including building trust, establishing a comfort zone (and then having the courage to leave it), holding productive meetings, dealing with power dynamics, setting goals, and keeping momentum going Shows how to avoid common pitfalls and overcome mentoring obstacles Applies to any organizational or institutional setting Starting Strong is more than an engaging story of mentorship, it's a vital resource for understanding how to implement and sustain a meaningful mentoring relationship.

The new teacher's handbook for understanding the roles, responsibilities, and relationships of teaching! Teaching is one of the most exciting careers you can choose. It’s also one of the most challenging, especially when you are first stepping into your new classroom. Presenting time-tested strategies specifically for new classroom instructors, Starting Strong, Second Edition, is the ideal survival guide for navigating through your crucial first year of teaching. Starting at the beginning, the authors offer basic classroom layout suggestions for an optimal learning environment and frameworks any novice teacher can use to establish procedures that promote positive individual and group behavior. Moving from classroom management to instructional responsibilities, this indispensable resource offers clear guidelines for designing curriculum and instruction and methods for effective assessment. Additional how-to features include: • Samples of oral and written communication for parents and colleagues • Ways to create classroom newsletters • Techniques for using Web sites for interactive learning • Reflection questions for teachers at the end of each chapter With plenty of food-for-thought ideas to evaluate your own practice, this invaluable text helps teachers gain confidence and competence and reduce stress during that all-important first year!

Starting Strong: Evidence-Based Early Literacy Practices shows teachers how to use four proven instructional approaches-;standards based, evidenced based, assessment based, and student based-;to improve their teaching practice in all areas of early literacy.Authors Katrin Blamey and Katherine Beauchat draw on their years of experience and early literacy expertise to guide you in figuring out what to teach and how to find the most instructionally sound method to teach it. They help you determine the instructional needs of your classroom and take full advantage of what you know about your students so you can engage them in learning.With chapters on oral language, vocabulary, phonological awareness, word recognition, comprehension, and writing skills, this comprehensive book explains each skill and provides research-based strategies for targeting each area. Supported by evidence-based research and aligned to key tenets of the Common Core, the book also includes classroom-tested activities and children's literature suggestions for each area of literacy.Starting Strong is an essential resource that any early literacy teacher or coach using a balanced literacy approach can use to build a solid foundation for their students.

Taking a broader and more holistic approach to early childhood than previous studies, this book provides a comparative analysis of major policy developments and issues in 12 OECD countries, highlights innovative approaches, and proposes policy options that can be adapted to varied country contexts.

This review of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in twenty OECD countries describes the social, economic, conceptual and research factors that influence early childhood policy.

This publication focuses on quality issues in early childhood education and care: it aims to define quality and outlines five policy levers that can enhance it.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) can help lay the foundations for future skills development, well-being and learning. Having timely, reliable and comparable international information is essential to help countries improve their ECEC services and systems.

The transition from early childhood education to primary school is a big step for all children, and a step which more and more children are having to take. Quality transitions Should be well-prepared and child-centred, managed by trained staff collaborating with one another, and guided by ...

This publication explores how countries can develop and use these systems to enhance service and staff quality for the benefit of child development.

This book explores the often controversial international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) in education and offers research-based accounts of international testing as a social practice. Assessment exercises, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), produce comparable international statistics and rankings on educational performance, and are influential practices that shape educational policy on a global scale. The chapters in this volume, written by expert researchers in the field, take the reader behind the scenes to document a broad range of ILSA practices – from the recruitment of countries into ILSAs, to the production and performance of large-scale testing, and the management, media reception and use of test data. Based on data that is only available to expert researchers with inside access, the international case study material includes examples from Australia, Ecuador, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Scotland, Slovenia, Sweden, the UK and the USA. The volume provides important insights for teachers, researchers and policy-makers who use and study assessment data and who wish to evaluate its significance for educational policy and practice.