Explores where new ideas come from, how to evaluate which ideas are worth pursuing, and how to customize ideas to suit and organization's unique needs.

Illustrated with examples of good practice and learning from several projects, The Big Idea offers practical guidance to support workers and project leaders who want to involve young people in built environment projects.

Preaching 2022 Book of the Year Haddon Robinson's widely used and influential text, Biblical Preaching, has influenced generations of students and preachers. In The Big Idea Companion for Preaching and Teaching, trusted leading evangelical homileticians, teachers of preaching, and experienced pastors demonstrate that Robinson's "big idea" approach to expository preaching still works in today's diverse cultures and fast-paced world. This accessible resource offers an insider's view on figuring out the big idea of each book of the Bible, helping preachers and teachers check their interpretation of particular biblical books and passages. The contributors offer tips on how to divide each book of the Bible into preaching and teaching passages, guidance on difficult passages and verses, cultural perspectives for faithful application, and suggested resources for interpreting, preaching, and teaching. Pastors, teachers, Bible study leaders, small groups, and college and seminary students and professors will find a wealth of valuable information in this resource.

Becoming an architect is a daunting task. Beyond the acquisition of new skills and procedures, beginning designers face an entirely unfamiliar mode of knowledge: design thinking. In Diagramming the Big Idea, Jeffrey Balmer and Michael T. Swisher introduce the fundamentals of design thinking by illustrating how architects make and use diagrams to clarify their understanding of both specific architectural projects and universal principles of form and order. With accessible, step-by-step procedures that interweave diagrams, drawings and virtual models, the authors demonstrate how to compose clear and revealing diagrams. Design thinking defines a method for engaging the world through observation and analysis. Beyond problem solving, design is a search for possibilities. Mastering design thinking begins with learning the fundamentals of visual composition. It embraces the ability to synthesize deductive and imaginative reasoning, combining both shrewd scrutiny and fevered speculation. Design diagrams make visible the abstractions that order the built environment. Premised upon the Beaux-Arts notion of the architectural parti, Balmer and Swisher adopt the ‘Big Idea’ as a foil and as a suitcase to organize fundamentals of architectural composition. The goal of this book is to make explicit to students what they are learning, why they are learning it and how to internalize such lessons toward their lifelong development as designers.

Introducing sophisticated mathematical ideas like fractals and infinity, these hands-on activity books present concepts to children using interactive and comprehensible methods. With intriguing projects that cover a wide range of math content and skills, these are ideal resources for elementary school mathematics enrichment programs, regular classroom instruction, and home-school programs. Reproducible activity sheets lead students through a process of engaged inquiry with plenty of helpful tips along the way. A list of useful terms specific to each activity encourages teachers and parents to introduce students to the vocabulary of math. Projects in this first of the two Big Ideas books include Straw Structures, where children get hands-on experience with measurement and 3-D visualization; Kaleidoscopes, in which students use geometry to build a mathematical toy; and Crawling Around the Mbius Strip, where kids build a physical example of infinity.

Engage students in mathematics using growth mindset techniques The most challenging parts of teaching mathematics are engaging students and helping them understand the connections between mathematics concepts. In this volume, you'll find a collection of low floor, high ceiling tasks that will help you do just that, by looking at the big ideas at the seventh-grade level through visualization, play, and investigation. During their work with tens of thousands of teachers, authors Jo Boaler, Jen Munson, and Cathy Williams heard the same message—that they want to incorporate more brain science into their math instruction, but they need guidance in the techniques that work best to get across the concepts they needed to teach. So the authors designed Mindset Mathematics around the principle of active student engagement, with tasks that reflect the latest brain science on learning. Open, creative, and visual math tasks have been shown to improve student test scores, and more importantly change their relationship with mathematics and start believing in their own potential. The tasks in Mindset Mathematics reflect the lessons from brain science that: There is no such thing as a math person - anyone can learn mathematics to high levels. Mistakes, struggle and challenge are the most important times for brain growth. Speed is unimportant in mathematics. Mathematics is a visual and beautiful subject, and our brains want to think visually about mathematics. With engaging questions, open-ended tasks, and four-color visuals that will help kids get excited about mathematics, Mindset Mathematics is organized around nine big ideas which emphasize the connections within the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and can be used with any current curriculum.

Engage students in mathematics using growth mindset techniques The most challenging parts of teaching mathematics are engaging students and helping them understand the connections between mathematics concepts. In this volume, you'll find a collection of low floor, high ceiling tasks that will help you do just that, by looking at the big ideas at the first-grade level through visualization, play, and investigation. During their work with tens of thousands of teachers, authors Jo Boaler, Jen Munson, and Cathy Williams heard the same message—that they want to incorporate more brain science into their math instruction, but they need guidance in the techniques that work best to get across the concepts they needed to teach. So the authors designed Mindset Mathematics around the principle of active student engagement, with tasks that reflect the latest brain science on learning. Open, creative, and visual math tasks have been shown to improve student test scores, and more importantly change their relationship with mathematics and start believing in their own potential. The tasks in Mindset Mathematics reflect the lessons from brain science that: There is no such thing as a math person - anyone can learn mathematics to high levels. Mistakes, struggle and challenge are the most important times for brain growth. Speed is unimportant in mathematics. Mathematics is a visual and beautiful subject, and our brains want to think visually about mathematics. With engaging questions, open-ended tasks, and four-color visuals that will help kids get excited about mathematics, Mindset Mathematics is organized around nine big ideas which emphasize the connections within the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and can be used with any current curriculum.

The way the human race acts now will shape - or break - all our futures. Neale Donald Walsch's dialogue with God continues, with a look forward to the New Spirituality that we all need to embrace right now - and how exactly we can apply this new way of thought to our lives. Humankind persists in believing that we are simply immune to self-destruction. In fact our behaviour threatens the whole of life as we know it. This challenging new book asks us to change the way we think about our faith and question our very beliefs, and shows us how we can do this within the framework of our everyday lives. This new spirituality will have an impact on the way we think about areas from TV and other mass media, to fashion, health and diet, and parenting and social mores. This book addresses age-old taboos, the mysteries of life, and ingrained ways of behaving, and provides us with the tools we need to redirect ourselves onto a new and infinitely better path. Powerful, inspiring and sometimes controversial, this book will help us to think again about all that we believe in, and to change our world for the better through changing our beliefs.

Almost eighty years after the Scopes trial, the debate over the teaching of evolution continues to rage. There is no easy resolution--it is a complex topic with profound scientific, religious, educational, and legal implications. How can a student or parent understand this issue, which is such a vital part of education? Evolution vs. Creationism provides a badly needed, comprehensive, and balanced survey. Written by one of the leading advocates for the teaching of evolution in the United states, this accessible resource provides an introduction to the many facets of the current debate--the scientific evidence for evolution, the legal and educational basis for its teaching, and the various religious points of view--as well as a concise history of the evolution-creationism controversy. Each of the four sections of Evolution vs. Creationism provides a resource that will assist the reader in better understanding these issues. The first section addresses the nature of how evolution works as part of the scientific enterprise, as well as a summary of the relationship between religious beliefs and science. A section on the history of the controversy provides a handy synopsis of the lengthy struggles, from before Darwin to the present day, between advocates of creationism and the proponents of evolution. A collection of primary source documents addressing cosmology, law, education, and religious issues from all sides of the debate constitute the third section. The book concludes with a selection of resources for further information for those who wish to study the topic in more depth.

This remarkable book shows teachers how to stop working harder and start working smarter. It describes a shift from “teach-test-move-on” to “teach-connect-apply” to optimize student learning. This valuable resource provides teachers with an understanding of simple, manageable, and sustainable strategies to change their approach immediately. These strategies build on helping students retain math concepts so they can apply them in novel situations down the road. The focus is on supporting teachers in framing instruction so that students strengthen their understanding, and can remember and apply learning. Making Math Stick is a game-changer that champions durable learning for all students.