Empowered Students - by Kerry Decker Rutishauser (Hardcover)

About the Book

Educators struggle with how to develop agency, ownership, curiosity, and persistence in learners. This book offers practical ideas and examples of how to do this.

Book Synopsis

All children deserve the opportunity to practice freedom of thought, voice, and movement in school. Giving students the opportunity to practice freedom--to teach them how to be autonomous, responsible, cooperative and critically literate--should be done in communities and schools across the country, and this book shows how.

The key ability of the human brain that cannot be digitized or mechanized is its ability to interpret--that is, to cope with the intentions of another, to understand what was said and what was meant. Humans have the ability to work together as a team toward a common goal (i.e. cooperate), to be altruistic and make sacrifices to help others, to build trust, and to feel empathy or sympathy--and robots do not.

Developing and using these interpretive and cooperative skills is essential to having a nation of thoughtful citizens who are capable of seeing themselves as solutions to the problems and issues we face.

Empowered Students: Educating Flexible Minds for a Flexible Future is a theory-to-practice story of how students at a segregated and failing New York City high school were released from years of oppressive schooling practices and learned how to practice freedom, told through the voices and the people who built it: the school leaders, teachers and students.

Review Quotes

"Rutishauser, a high school principal in New York City, gives readers a working guide with engaging descriptions for how to help students succeed by creating a learning environment based on the ideas of freedom and responsibility. The book opens by detailing the historical context that led to the current crisis in education, which lays the groundwork for understanding and incorporating the five principles of freedom (think, build, speak, act, and fight) into schools. Subsequent chapters provide both the theory and the practice of each principle, and explain how this approach changed the course of a failing school in New York. The pairing of educational, developmental, and social theories with real-world applications makes for a user-friendly, theory-to-practice text, while the stories from the trenches of school leadership add entertainment and inspiration. The book is a great resource for educators and leaders looking to step away from the traditional controlling approach to education and help students develop their own sense of power and possibility. Recommended." --Choice Reviews

"I cannot over-emphasize the importance of a book such as this. Educators struggle with how to develop agency, ownership, curiosity, and persistence in learners. This book offers practical ideas and examples of how to do this. Empowering Students tells a compelling true story about finding success in an incredibly challenging school setting. Kerry Decker provides reason for hope, built on a foundation of reality and experience. School leaders, regardless of the communities in which they serve, will find ideas and answers to consider, adopt, and build on to transform the experience of students and nurture learning success in their schools." --Jim Rickabaugh, author and senior advisor, Institute of Personalized Learning

"What a pleasure read this is! This is a dramatic story of a genuine turnaround, a school that was failing its students -- and that's the emphasis Kerry Decker makes -- which became a place where they could learn what they needed to know to be successful. Kids no one expected to do well. Good story. Good job." --Curtis Johnson, Minneapolis-based writer and consultant; managing associate, Education Evolving (www.educationevolving.org) and the executive director, Citiscope (www.citiscope.org)

"Wow. An inspiring story about a woman with an idea she's determined to put into practice. Decker tells the story convincingly, including wonderful real life dialogue with kids. Like most practitioners I'm not an easy person to believe in school 'miracles', but it's a tale worth reading at least twice." --Deborah Meier, MacArthur Award-winning founder of the Central Park East Schools in New York and the Mission Hill School in Boston

About the Author

Kerry Decker Rutishauser has earned her M.Ed.D in Eeducational Lleadership from Teachers College, Columbia University, and she is currently working as a high school principal in New York City. Kerry has been a teacher, school principal, and a leadership coach across pre-kindergarten through twelfth grades for the past eighteen years working internationally and nationally in some of the world's wealthiest and poorest schools, all with a high percentage of multilingual, special needs, and diverse learners.