How Can I Fix It? Finding Solutions and Managing Dilemmas, An Educator's Road Map

With this highly accessible and unique little guide, Larry Cuban offers educators indispensable tools to make sense of the daily complexities they encounter in their work. Teachers face dozens of classroom situations where conflicts occur. Similarly, principals wrestle with school issues that call for changes in attitudes, behaviors, and procedures. Because the process is so familiar, even expert teachers and principals often have difficulty in explaining what it is that they do and how they go about solving problems and coping with dilemmas in their classrooms and schools. Using concrete and varied examples drawn from the workplace, Cuban presents vivid and provocative case studies of practitioners' experiences in urban and suburban schools that deal with the routine conflicts of school. He draws on his own extensive experience in public schools and his research into teaching and administration to set forth a practical framework for identifying, defining, and coping with both puzzling problems and tension-filled dilemmas. A much-needed resource for both new and experienced practitioners, How Can I Fix It? focuses on common skills that practitioners have -- but seldom take time to consider -- and applies these skills to concrete situations."This new book is vintage Larry Cuban. His analysis of the centrality ofdilemmas in educational leadership is superb." -- Lee S. Shulman, President, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching"Three cheers for Larry Cuban! In a world of mega-solutions (standards, testing, vouchers, etc.) Cuban's slight, sane book reminds us that in schools lasting change comes incrementally, from the day-to-day decisions made by practicing teachers and principals. What a welcome relief for practitioners on the firing-line!"-- Tom Sobol, Christian A. Johnson Professor of Outstanding Educational Practice, Teachers College, Columbia University"Teachers and administrators alike should read this book, particularly those who seek change and want to increase their understanding of the intractable dilemmas that continue to return to frustrate and haunt us." -- Lee Swenson, social studies teacher at Aragon High School, San Mateo, California