'Why Fly That Way?': Linking Community and Academic Achievement. (Book Reviews).

The current national spotlight on school improvement has the potential to create an overemphasis on standardized testing in our schools. At the same time, we are faced with an outsiders' narrow vision of how schools used to be. These forces may leave us busy putting out multiple brush fires of resistance.

Kathy Greeley, a middle school educator in Cambridge, Mass., and author of "Why Fly That Way?": Linking Community and Academic Achievement, tells how one classroom teacher has addressed the link between good schooling and the building of good democracies. The story, following one group of students in one classroom during one academic year, offers an exciting transformation for improved learning by individual students and by the class as a whole.

The author credits this transformation to the ongoing commitment to building the sense of community within the classroom.

The book looks at practices used to create this type of learning culture. Her mission for the year was to "teach these students something about how they learn, about how to work together to strengthen themselves and the community of which they are a part."

In a section titled "Lessons Learned," Greeley suggests that letting go, risk taking, leaving comfort zones and experimenting in unknown territories are all areas that teachers must experience along with their students if real growth and learning are to take place.

("Why Fly That Way?": Linking Community and Academic Achievement, by Kathy Greeley, Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027, 2000, 133 pp. with index, $18.95 softcover)