Effective Collaboration For Educating The Whole Child

Synopsis: This book examines collaboration between teachers, administrators, student support specialists, community agencies, and service providers to improve outcomes for students with complex learning needs.

Synopsis: This book examines collaboration between teachers, administrators, student support specialists, community agencies, and service providers to improve outcomes for students with complex learning needs.

Educate the whole child by building a culture of collaboration in your school! This book for K–12 general and special education teachers, administrators, and student support specialists explores how to make collaboration and coordination work, who takes responsibility for the process, and why collaboration is central to improving outcomes for students with complex learning needs. The author: Discusses the roles, responsibilities, and relationships between school professionals, community agencies, and service providers Offers case examples as real-world illustrations of collaboration Emphasizes important developmental transitions from the elementary years through high school and after

While everyone wants students to be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged, it's tough to work toward that vision when there are so many other priorities and constraints. That's why we've developed this special tool to help you lead and implement a school- or district-wide initiative for the Whole Child. Using the tools and guidelines in this action tool, you can Convince teacher, parent, and other audiences of the rationale for a Whole Child initiative Focus your school and community on developing and maintaining an intellectually engaging and challenging learning environment Focus your school and community on preparing 21st century students Put forward a plan to address students' health and safety issues Guide your school toward a more personalized and supportive learning environment Included is a single use of the Whole Child Assessment Survey to give you baseline data and help you assess your school's current strengths and weaknesses. Downloadable professional learning activities with a Powerpoint presentation make it much easier for you to conduct a professional development focused on educating the Whole Child. Plus, a school improvement planning process gives you steps and strategies for leading a successful Whole Child initiative.

This book shows you how to teach K-12 students to work in pairs and groups more effectively, so that true collaboration can happen in the classroom. Coming from their experience in social work and classroom teaching, Christina M. Krantz and Laura Gullette Smith explain the problems that can occur with traditional Think-Pair-Share models and offer refreshing solutions. They provide practical strategies to help students build collegial peer relationships, learn to share tasks, and hold deeper discussions. Each chapter offers useful strategies that you can implement immediately. This book includes an invaluable appendix of resources that the authors share when leading workshops, as well as rubrics, agendas, and classroom tools designed with the strategies covered in each chapter in mind.

Among the many models of school reform that have emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, one has endured for more than 50 years: the School Development Program (SDP). Established in 1968 by renowned child psychiatrist James P. Comer and the Yale Child Study Center, the SDP is grounded in the belief that successful schooling—particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds—must focus on the whole child. With that in mind, the SDP encompasses both academics and social-emotional development, and it is founded on positive and productive relationships among students, teachers, school leaders, and parents. With the Whole Child in Mind describes the SDP's six developmental pathways (cognitive, social, psychological, physical, linguistic, and ethical) and explains how the program's nine key components (in the form of mechanisms, operations, and guiding principles) create a comprehensive approach to educating children for successful outcomes. Firsthand recollections by Comer, school leaders and teachers, and SDP staff members provide an inside look at the challenges and successes that eventually transformed severely underperforming schools into models of excellence. Linda Darling-Hammond, one of the country's foremost experts on K-12 education, and her colleagues argue persuasively for the continuing relevance of the SDP. Far too many schools still operate in a high-pressure environment that emphasizes testing and standardized curricula while ignoring the fundamental importance of personal connections that make a profound difference for students. Fifty years on, the SDP is still just as powerful as ever.

This essential text unpacks major transformations in the study of learning and human development and provides evidence for how science can inform innovation in the design of settings, policies, practice, and research to enhance the life path, opportunity and prosperity of every child. The ideas presented provide researchers and educators with a rationale for focusing on the specific pathways and developmental patterns that may lead a specific child, with a specific family, school, and community, to prosper in school and in life. Expanding key published articles and expert commentary, the book explores a profound evolution in thinking that integrates findings from psychology with biology through sociology, education, law, and history with an emphasis on institutionalized inequities and disparate outcomes and how to address them. It points toward possible solutions through an understanding of and addressing the dynamic relations between a child and the contexts within which he or she lives, offering all researchers of human development and education a new way to understand and promote healthy development and learning for diverse, specific youth regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or history of adversity, challenge, or trauma. The book brings together scholars and practitioners from the biological/medical sciences, the social and behavioral sciences, educational science, and fields of law and social and educational policy. It provides an invaluable and unique resource for understanding the bases and status of the new science, and presents a roadmap for progress that will frame progress for at least the next decade and perhaps beyond.

This book provides a unique examination on the ways in which educating the whole child in the community school serves to ameliorate the conditions of poverty and obstacles to learning faced by students. Using a case study approach the book will highlight the successful journey of one school that transformed itself into a community school. Given the rise in poverty nation-wide and the unprecedented economic crisis, many school districts are looking for innovative ways to garner resources for their schools. The strategies outlined in this book will provide suggestions for using the resources of community partnerships as a framework for school renewal and improvement in student achievement. The authors share their first hand experiences building a community school from the ground up, as well as providing the national perspective on community schools. Given the power of the community school, this book concludes with a "call to action" for the dissemination of this model and its embrace of whole child education