Hopeful Schools

Discover how to improve happiness, resilience, and achievement using the science of hope Based on research around the psychological science of hope, this guidebook provides strategies educators and school leaders can use daily to help students feel secure, build relationships, and improve academic outcomes. Included are actions and interventions that can be woven into classrooms and schools to foster mental wellness and happiness, such as Classroom materials, tools, reproducibles, and videos Scientific resources to quickly assess and monitor hope Simple plans of action to improve hope, engagement, and motivation Vignettes from classrooms and the author’s own experiences with children who have experienced extreme trauma Featuring illustrations by Brian Bicknell.

Hopeful describes the real life stories of children who were born in a rural poor village in an African country-Uganda. One of them, overcomes the challenges of poverty and cultural barriers with the help of his uneducated parents, who decided to do something that had not been done before; sacrifice everything including selling off their family land, become ridiculed by the villagers but believed, against all hope to send their son to school. Their son, determined to remove shame from his parents, knowing that his only way of ever escaping the cycle of poverty was through education, rose to the challenges from the rural poor villages into the country's Medical schools. The book also tells the story about girls in developing countries and their struggle to get an education. It sheds a light on the cultural and social barriers that the world needs to address, when it comes to the education of the girl child. In the end, the book tells the reader, how the success of one child, challenged and changed the perception about education in this part of the country. But also sheds a light about the real cause of the poor maternal and child health indicators in the developing world-lack of women empowerment through education.

Geraldlynn is a lively, astute 14-year-old. Her family, displaced by Hurricane Katrina, returns home to find a radically altered public education system. Geraldlynns parents hope their daughter's new school will prepare her college-but the teenager has ideals and ambitions of her own. ? ? Aidan is a fresh-faced Harvard grad drawn to New Orleans by the possibility of bringing change to a flood-ravaged city. He teaches at an ambitious charter school with a group of newcomers determined to show the world they can use science, data, and hard work to build a model school. ? ? Mary Laurie is a veteran educator who becomes principal of one of the first public high schools to reopen after Katrina. Laurie and her staff find they must fight each day not only to educate the city's teenagers, but to keep the Walker community safe and whole. ? ? In this powerful narrative non-fiction debut, the lives of these three characters provide readers with a vivid and sobering portrait of education in twenty-first-century America. Hope Against Hope works in the same tradition as Random Family and There Are No Children Here to capture the challenges of growing up and learning in a troubled world.

Discover how to improve achievement, happiness, and resilience using the science of hope The current mental health crisis is driving many teachers to leave the profession while students struggle with engagement and anxiety. Trauma-informed coping mechanisms are helpful, but this book goes a step further by incorporating much-needed but often-missing support to help learners feel hopeful and provide educators with resources to care for themselves. Based on research around the psychological science of hope, this guidebook provides strategies educators and school leaders can use daily to help students feel secure, build relationships, and improve academic outcomes. Included are practices and interventions that can be woven into classrooms and schools to foster mental wellness and happiness using Classroom materials, tools, and reproducibles Scientific resources to quickly assess and monitor hope Simple plans of action to improve hope, engagement, and motivation Vignettes from classrooms and the author’s own experiences with children who have experienced extreme trauma Backed by the latest research, The School of Hope will encourage higher academic attainment and equity, inspiring a sense of deeper fulfillment for both students and educators.

Democracy is struggling in America. Citizens increasingly feel cynical about an intractable political system, while hyper-partisanship has dramatically shrank common ground and intensified the extremes. Out of this deepening sense of political despair, philosopher of education Sarah M. Stitzlein seeks to revive democracy by teaching citizens how to hope. Offering an informed call to citizen engagement, Stitzlein directly addresses presidential campaigns, including how to select candidates who support citizens in enacting and sustaining hope. Drawing on examples from American history and pragmatist philosophy, this book explains how hope can be cultivated in schools and sustained through action in our communities -- it describes what hope is, why it matters to democracy, and how to teach it. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Discover a proven way to deal effectively with the white waters of change in education, and create a culture of hope in which students receive the support they need to achieve success. The authors’ extensive experience with effective schools research and the power of the professional learning community combine to create a uniquely hopeful approach that results in effective and efficient schools.

National surveys consistently reveal that an inordinate number of students report high levels of boredom, anger, and stress in school, which often leads to their disengagement from critical learning and social development. If the ultimate goal of schools is to educate young people to become responsible and critically thinking citizens who can succeed in life, understanding factors that stimulate them to become active agents in their own leaning is critical. A new field labeled "positive psychology" is one lens that can be used to investigate factors that facilitate a student’s sense of agency and active school engagement. The purposes of this groundbreaking Handbook are to 1) describe ways that positive emotions, traits, and institutions promote school achievement and healthy social/emotional development 2) describe how specific positive-psychological constructs relate to students and schools and support the delivery of school-based services and 3) describe the application of positive psychology to educational policy making. By doing so, the book provides a long-needed centerpiece around which the field can continue to grow in an organized and interdisciplinary manner. Key features include: Comprehensive – this book is the first to provide a comprehensive review of what is known about positive psychological constructs and the school experiences of children and youth. Topical coverage ranges from conceptual foundations to assessment and intervention issues to service delivery models. Intrapersonal factors (e.g., hope, life satisfaction) and interpersonal factors (e.g., positive peer and family relationships) are examined as is classroom-and-school-level influences (e.g., student-teacher and school-community relations). Interdisciplinary Focus – this volume brings together the divergent perspectives, methods, and findings of a broad, interdisciplinary community of scholars whose work often fails to reach those working in contiguous fields. Chapter Structure – to insure continuity, flow, and readability chapters are organized as follows: overview, research summary, relationship to student development, examples of real-world applications, and a summarizing table showing implications for future research and practice. Methodologies – chapters feature longitudinal studies, person-centered approaches, experimental and quasi-experimental designs and mixed methods.