McREL: Turning what works in teaching, leading, and learning into innovation and results

Simply Better: Doing What Matters Most to Change the Odds for Student Success

Product Description	In this book published by ASCD, McREL's Bryan Goodwin extends the ideas in the 2010 report, Changing the Odds for Student Success: What Matters Most, which identified key areas and principles that have the power to dramatically change the odds for student success. Goodwin uses narratives, real-life examples, and research findings to show how less is more in education reform and that, rather than wait for new innovations or programs, educators simply need to focus on doing what we already know works for students.
Authors	Bryan Goodwin
Target Audience	Administrators and teachers
Key Ideas	Goodwin identifies five key principles, distilled from thousands of research studies, that are at the heart of what it takes to help all students succeed in school and beyond: Guaranteeing challenging, engaging, and intentional instruction Ensuring curricular pathways to success Providing whole-child student supports Creating high-performance school cultures Developing data-driven, "high-reliability" systems To guide implementation of these principles, Simply Better also describes strategic "touchstones" for educators such as how to: challenge and nurture students; standardize yet personalize curriculum; counteract negative out-of-school factors; and reduce variance in teacher quality.
How to Get this Product	This book is available through ASCD.
APA Citation	Goodwin, B. (2011). Simply better: Doing what matters most to change the odds for student success. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.