Jack Orchard

Jack Orchard’s book, A Handbook for Improving Student Achievement in Secondary Schools, is a functional work centered on democratic citizenship, student ownership, and collaborative learning. An outgrowth of his experience, research, and reflection as a parent, teacher, department head, principal, secondary school district consultant, superintendent of schools, and provincial education facilitator.

His book distinguishes a series of clusters—interrelated factors contributing to high school reform. As we advance, we need practitioners supplementing university-based change research through books and articles describing first-hand secondary school observations, appreciations, concerns, failures, successes, reflections, understandings, interventions, and conclusions. This is one of them.