The Missing Link: Teaching and Learning Critical Success Skills

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, decision making, 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.

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

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.

Review :
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. 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.