Developing Community Empowered Schools

A community-empowered school is one in which administrators, teachers, staff, students, parents, and members of the community at large feel that they have a stake in the success of that school. Despite common reservations about the involvement of parents and volunteers in the classroom, this book makes clear the long-term advantages of onsite parent centers offering ESL classes, computer literacy/job-training classes, and classes in how to help students learn at home. The sources of financial and other help need not be limited to local businesses. District personnel, legislators, nonprofit agencies, and corporations can discover that they will benefit as a school succeeds. Chapter 1 examines what attracts community involvement, providing specific plans for volunteer programs and resource development. Chapter 2 identifies the stakeholders and what they can offer a school. Chapter 3 describes policies and procedures for program monitoring. Chapter 4 offers specific material for a workshop to train teachers in the use of tutors and mentors in the classroom, including overheads, worksheets, and memos. Chapter 5 outlines strategies using volunteers that increase literacy for students and their families. Chapter 6 addresses sources of funding. Chapter 7 explains the cost-effective nature of community support, and Chapter 8 shows how all the stockholders can affect public policy to increase the number of community-empowered schools. (Contains 43 references.) (RKJ)

Positive youth development is a strengths-based, positive psychology approach to fostering adolescents' educational engagement and achievement. It focuses not just on students' academic development but also on their vocational, social, and emotional development. The positive youth development philosophy is at the heart of Cynthia Hazel's unique model of secondary school change, which uses a multi-tiered system of support to challenge the status quo of widespread achievement gaps. In this thought-provoking book, Cynthia Hazel presents her positive youth development-multi-tiered system of support model, including its theoretical foundations, practical instructions for implementing the model, and case examples illustrating application. Recognising that students' own voices are critical to their empowerment and strong outcomes, the model calls for students to participate alongside parents, teachers, and administrators in designing and guiding the school's support structures. The resulting paradigm shift - truly empowered learning - offers hope for all secondary schools, especially those in which many students currently do not achieve postsecondary success.

This volume presents the grassroots experiences, problems encountered, and lessons learnt from initiatives launched in five Indian states. The contributors cover a range of important issues including how community participation works in an environment characterized by deep-rooted socio-economic divisions; the equitable distribution of participation; identifying and defining the community; and ensuring the genuine representation of those who are traditionally excluded from decision-making in rural areas./-//-/ The five case studies cover Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Bihar and Kerala. They collectively shed light on how decentralization in education has been actualized in different parts of the country. These experiences contain valuable insights which can be fruitfully applied to the primary education sector. A theme running through the volume as a whole is ways to bring about genuine partnerships between civil society, the administration and NGOs in the drive to achieve universal education.

For courses in Introduction to Educational Administration, Principalship, Educational Leadership and Supervision. The revision of this popular text examines the important issues of educational leadership that relate to today's movement towards restructuring and creating empowering environments for teachers and their students. To better understand how to build empowering environments in schools, it examines two national studies conducted over six years in 26 schools. This body of research provides an empirical framework that is used to draw conclusions about leadership in schools striving to provide an empowering environment.

Open up a new world of learning and engage students with these powerful ideas! This book helps you empower teachers and students to regain control of their own teaching and learning journey. With this helpful guide, cultivate enthusiasm for learning by changing the power dynamic and putting the reins back into the hands of students. Administrators and teachers learn to: Cultivate the experts at your school Create an environment of trust and collaboration Give students and staff a voice Includes real-life stories from other connected educators! Transform the learning experience and create lasting change with this breakthrough volume of the Connected Educators Series!

If you are curious about Educational Psychology, this book is for you. You can read the chapters in any sequence, or you can start at the beginning, because this book provides myriad keys to the wonderful variety of themes in Educational Psychology today. Written by leading psychologists, researchers and practitioners, this book focuses on all the positive constructs in Educational Psychology and reflects on the wide range of strengths, assets and resources available to the educational psychologist. Each chapter presents an integrated overview, cutting-edge definitions of key concepts, quotations from professionals and students, and reflective questions to guide your practice. Written primarily by South Africans, this book is particularly relevant to the local environment and presents practical application strategies. Indigenous knowledge is infused with international perspectives, and equal emphasis is placed on the learner and on the social context, on assessment and intervention, and on theory and practice. The book is extremely accessible to students, but will also be invaluable for teachers, psychologists, researchers and health professionals.

In this book, aspiring, new, and veteran principals will learn how to build better school-community alliances, and use community partnerships to narrow the achievement gap.

Written by leadership expert Elaine L. Wilmore, this ideal resource helps aspiring and practicing superintendents attain proficiency in the Educational Leadership Constituent Council (ELCC) standards.