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.

"The authors eloquently capture the tasks and interconnections of school and community professionals who share the responsibility of developing healthy environments so that all children have the opportunity to learn." —Renee H. Lacey, Supervisor of Alternative and Summer Programs Prince William County Public Schools, VA "Finally, a practical look at how professionals from different disciplines can work together and blend their skills and talents to address the developmental needs of all students." —Robert N. Ianacone, Associate Dean Graduate School of Education and Human Development The George Washington University Educate the whole child by building a culture of collaboration in your school! It takes a team of professionals working together to support a child′s emotional, physical, and academic development. Effective Collaboration for Educating the Whole Child examines collaboration between educators to successfully teach children with complex learning needs, both with and without identified disabilities. 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 considered at risk. Focusing on coordinating across systems to improve education, the author: Discusses the roles, responsibilities, and relationships between school professionals, community agencies, and service providers Offers case examples in each chapter as windows into schools and classrooms Emphasizes important developmental transitions from the elementary years through high school and after Presents personal reflections from parents, students, and professionals Developmentally responsive school environments depend on constructive relationships between the adults in a student′s life, making this a vital resource for anyone who interacts with children.

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.

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.

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.

Children in today's world are inundated with information about who to be, what to do and how to live. But what if there was a way to teach children how to manage priorities, focus on goals and be a positive influence on the world around them? The Leader in Meis that programme. It's based on a hugely successful initiative carried out at the A.B. Combs Elementary School in North Carolina. To hear the parents of A. B Combs talk about the school is to be amazed. In 1999, the school debuted a programme that taught The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Peopleto a pilot group of students. The parents reported an incredible change in their children, who blossomed under the programme. By the end of the following year the average end-of-grade scores had leapt from 84 to 94. This book will launch the message onto a much larger platform. Stephen R. Covey takes the 7 Habits, that have already changed the lives of millions of people, and shows how children can use them as they develop. Those habits -- be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think win-win, seek to understand and then to be understood, synergize, and sharpen the saw -- are critical skills to learn at a young age and bring incredible results, proving that it's never too early to teach someone how to live well.