The Missing Link: Teaching and Learning Critical Success Skills

by Steve Heisler

Overview

A glance at successful people reveals a simple truth: successful people employ successful habits. Yet in schools, amongst all of the information and all of the skills that are taught, few concern how to employ and internalize these key habits of success. These skills are expected, even demanded, but are rarely taught, at least not with the attention of whatever else is deemed critical learning.

The Missing Link seeks to place such skills as persistence, self-regulation, organization, time management, organization, and even the skill of appropriate “work-place social skills” into the strata of critically important learning.

The Missing Link was written to help professional educators (as well as parents and others) employ straight-forward ways to teach success skills without adding to the enormous burdens they already shoulder. This book is a guide to teaching critical success skills in powerful ways by infusing them into the curriculum that is already in place. Teachers (and parents) just do what they usually do, but with a different focus to change outcomes and children’s lives for the better.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610489669
Publisher:	R&L Education
Publication date:	04/02/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Steven Heisler is a teacher and former school administrator in New York City and New Jersey. He currently works as a Senior Program Coordinator for the School Systems Improvement Project at Rutgers University. He thinks that being a parent and being a teacher are the two highest paying professions in the world, if what you value cannot be computed into a paycheck.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: What is is, what it ain’t
Chapter 2: Three keys: facilitate, engage, communicate
Chapter 3: We are a family, or we’re through
Chapter 4: Buying in is the easy part
Chapter 5: A simple prescription for decision making: take these each day
Chapter 6: Exercises and Outcomes I
Chapter 7: Exercises and Outcomes II
Afterword: In the End, Tomorrow Is All That Matters

Editorial Reviews

The premise of Steve Heisler’s The Missing Link: Teaching and Learning Critical Success Skills is a deceptively simple one: A teacher’s job is to help all students be successful by teaching them the habits of mind and behavior that enable success in both school and life. To that end Heisler underscores the importance of "compassionate and empathic adults” working together as a “professional family” to empower students by intentionally teaching the skills related to social interactions, self-regulation, decision making, organization, time management, and persistence. The results, he says, will be "success habits that lead students to greater self-efficacy, greater personal empowerment and greater control over the short and long term choices they make in their lives.” Everyone who cares about student success will benefit from the framework and skills Heisler describes in The Missing Link.

Dennis Sparks

Heisler highlights how educators make a difference in the lives of their students in school and well beyond. Through examples, personal vignettes, and resources, he provides educators a guide for cultivating in their students the core skills and habits that contribute not only to their academic, but also life success.

Joellen Killion