BOOKS
I have been fortunate during my career to have been able to eke out sufficient time to write many, probably too many, books on educational issues (for a full inventory see my Publications List). These have either been in concert with great colleagues, edited books - where a number of use have collaborated around a single theme, or just by myself when I have tried to engage and struggle with a topic or issue that I felt at the time was of particular importance. On reflection, I find it a little ironic that these single authored ‘academic’ books also have a strong auto-biographical theme to them. On looking back, it has come clear to me that as I have moved from one phase to another in my professional life, I have marked that transition with the publication of a book that has attempted to summarise what I have learned from that phase of work, perhaps in preparation for the next. That is particularly true of what I call the ‘school improvement trilogy’ and that tendency can be discerned through the five editions of the Classroom Research book. In light of this it is perhaps unsurprising that each of these books contain an unusually personal narrative introduction.
Below are a selection of my books that some have found helpful, either in terms of the research syntheses they provide or for the frameworks for action they present. They are all available on Amazon, and for the older ones, at a knock-down price!
• Unleashing Greatness – A Strategy for School Improvement
David’s new book is Unleashing Greatness outlines an eight-step strategy for school improvement. It that focuses on building capacity for pedagogic improvement in schools that has the potential for generating an increasingly specific language for teaching and learning in the quest for both excellence and equity for all students. The book also acts as a summary of the field of school improvement as well as a compendium of the author’s contribution to it.
• Ascents and Descents – An Alpinists Memoir
I had the privilege of editing my deceased friend Peter Allison’s handwritten memoir into a book called Ascents and Descents that was published by Baton Wicks in December 2019. This memoir is not just a series of personal reminiscences, it is also a piece of lived mountaineering history that illustrates how British climbing began to achieve maturity and captures the spirit of that age. It is here in the deft inter-weaving of the personal and the historical that the power and value of Peter’s memoir lies.
• Powerful Learning Manuals
The Powerful Learning Manuals are the product of a six-year enquiry into system reform in the schools in Northern Metropolitan Melbourne. They provide frameworks for practical action, based on globally acknowledged research and that respond to the contemporary policy context. The following manuals are available from Amazon as EBooks:
• A Teachers Guide to Classroom Research [Fifth Edition]
This was the first single authored book that I published in 1985. I am gratified that it is now in its Fifth edition. This has enabled me to update the text in light of developments in research, policy and practice. What remains constant is the belief that it is teaching that has the most immediate impact on the progress of our students and it is only the teacher who can provide outstanding teaching through reflective and self-conscious action.
• Exploding the Myths of School Reform
This is the last volume in the ‘School Improvement Trilogy’. It represents my attempt to understand the dynamics of school improvement at scale – at the system level. It also exhibits my on-going frustration with the ubiquity of policy borrowing, marketisation and top-down policy edicts. Taken together they create too many pervasive myths that inhibit the realization of the potential that can be achieved in terms of social equity if we authentically move to scale.
• Every School a Great School
Every School a Great School is my account of what we tried to do, when I was in Government in the early/mid 2000s, to transform the English school system. Working within the parameters of New Labour’s social justice agenda, and collaborating with outstanding politicians and public servants such as Estelle Morris, David Miliband and Michael Barber we, in hindsight achieved significant success and the life chances of a million children were enhanced. The book explains how to do it.
• School Improvement for Real
I had spent the fifteen years prior to the publication of this book, with many outstanding colleagues around the world, developing an empirical and practical base for the school improvement movement. This is my, admittedly personal, summary statement on what we had achieved to that point. It serves to summarise the field and lay the basis of what I have termed ‘authentic school improvement’.
• Models of Learning – Tools for Teaching
Bruce Joyce is one of America’s great educational thinkers and practitioners over the past half century. I have been privileged to have been mentored by him for much of that time. His seminal Models of Teaching, now in its tenth edition, has had a global impact. In Models of Learning – Tools for Teaching we together with his partner, Emily Calhoun, apply this work to the English and European context.
• Personal Growth through Adventure
My experience as a student on an Outward Bound course at the age of seventeen not only transformed my life, but also gave it direction, narrative and sustainability. It was therefore a great joy, some quarter of a century later, to co-author this book with Roger Putnam, another mentor, and a leader of the experiential learning movement in this country as well as being the longest serving Warden of Outward Bound Eskdale. In the book, we lay out the history of adventure learning, trace it’s philosophical and psychological routes and give many examples of practice.
• The Empowered School
In the late ‘80s, England embarked on a far-reaching experiment in educational transformation at the system level with the introduction of the Education Reform Act 1988. My colleague in Cambridge at the time was the distinguished Professor of Education and sociologist, David H Hargreaves. With David in the lead, we suggested to the Government that schools, confronted with all this un-precedented change, should be provided with some advice on how to manage their own development within an over-arching policy context. The Government agreed, and hence the introduction of ‘Development Planning’ to the educational system. The Empowered School tells that story; although written some time ago, the book still contains robust and timely advice.
• Evaluation for School Development
Following the publication of the Classroom Research book, I became increasingly pre-occupied by whole school improvement and system development. As a consequence, I then began to adapt the classroom research techniques to a whole school and system context. This introduced me to the critical distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods and how one evaluated policy change within a formative perspective. Evaluation for School Development was my response to this conundrum. I appreciate that this book is now almost thirty years old. I am pleased though that my Masters and Doctoral students still find it helpful in pursuing their own research. Copies are still available for 1p on Amazon!
For further information see – www.profdavidhopkins.com