Transfer of Ownership

The Shift to Student-Led: Reimagining Classroom Workflows with UDL and Blended Learning by Caitlin R. Tucker and Katie Novak
IMPress, November 9, 2022

The Shift to Student-Led, the new book by Caitlin R. Tucker and Katie Novak, is a toolkit designed both to improve students’ executive functioning and to return to educators some sorely-needed time. The latter can come through a commitment to shift many practices that are traditionally teacher-owned to opportunities for leadership and critical skill building for our students. Each chapter identifies a key area of opportunity – such as a transition from teacher assessment to self-assessment, or from teachers initiating parent communication to students owning conversations with home about their progress – where teachers tend to use up a lot of their bandwidth, and where students could gain invaluable skills by taking more responsibility in the process. While the book’s ideas alone have the capacity to be transformative for schools and educators, its resources and tools, embedded into each proposed workflow shift, are most useful. There are strategies for putting each workflow into practice based on research, as well as templates and reflection questions, all provided to make implementation as light of a lift as possible. Whether you’re a school leader or a teacher, this book will help you to identify key ways to win back some time while simultaneously increasing student leadership and ownership over our learning communities.