Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.

Brings together current research on adult book reading to children; chapter authors are eminent scholars from fields of reading and literacy, child language, speech pathology, and psychology, representing diverse perspectives.

This book addresses a key need for child therapists--how to actively involve parents in treatment and give them tools to support their child's healthy development. Known for her innovative, creative therapeutic approach, Paris Goodyear-Brown weaves together knowledge about play therapy, trauma, attachment theory, and neurobiology. She presents step-by-step strategies to help parents understand their child's needs, reflect on their own emotional triggers, set healthy boundaries, make time together more fun, and respond effectively to challenging behavior. Filled with rich clinical illustrations, the volume features 52 reproducible handouts and worksheets. Purchasers get access to a Web page where they can download and print the reproducible materials in a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" size.

How can we make it easier for schools and families to work together on behalf of all students? It all begins by tapping into the different strengths educators and parents and caregivers can contribute to building a strong partnership. Partnering with Parents to Ask the Right Questions, by Luz Santana, Dan Rothstein, and Agnes Bain of the Right Question Institute, presents a deceptively simple strategy for how educators can build effective partnerships with parents—especially those who typically have not been actively involved in their children's schooling. It distills complex, important ideas on effective civic participation into an easy-to-learn process that teaches parents two fundamental skills they can use to support the education of their children, monitor their progress, and advocate for them: asking better questions and participating effectively in key decisions. Based on more than two decades of work and research in a wide range of low- and moderate-income communities, this book empowers overburdened and under-resourced educators and parents to work together and achieve their common goal of successful students. This indispensable guide includes case studies spanning K–12 classrooms, and it explores ways to assist struggling students, collaborate on IEPs, and communicate with families of English language learners. The accessible and easy-to-use format, field-tested advice, and vivid examples from schools that put the advice into practice make this a must-have for everyone from the classroom to the central office.

Includes a CD filled with handouts and letters that teachers can personalize and send home to parents! Bruce Johnson offers a unique and much needed resource on practical ways to get parents involved in reading with their children! Making parents partners in their children's reading development can make all the difference in helping students to master reading and become avid readers. This book is an excellent resource for teachers to maximize the potential of parent involvement. The book is full of field-tested material that teachers can immediately use with parents of children from pre-school to middle school. Whether teachers are reaching out through a parent-teacher conference, sending material home to parents, or putting together a parent involvement workshop, this book will provide everything they need-all in a format that is easy for them to customize to meet the specific needs of their students and parents.

The diverse and difficult needs of today's children far outstrip the ability of any one institution to meet them. Yet one of the richest resources for understanding a child's early learning experiences-parents-is quite often the most frequently overlooked. A Path to Follow suggests that parent "stories" can be a highly effective, collaborative tool for accessing knowledge that may not be obvious, but would obviously be of benefit. Pat Edwards and her coauthors have here defined "stories" as narratives gained from open-ended conversations and/or interviews, where parents respond to questions designed to shed light on traditional and nontraditional early literacy activities in the home. After all, as a child's first and most important teacher, a parent can offer memories of specific formative interactions, observations on early learning efforts, and thoughts on how their own backgrounds have impacted a child's attitude toward school. In sharing their anecdotes and observations, parents give us the keys to unlock a vault of social, emotional, and educational variables. The secondary benefit to the story approach, of course, is the empowerment that parents feel when they are given the chance to participate in a personally meaningful way-one that respects their viewpoint. As parents and schools continue to wrestle with prodigious challenges-shifting family demographics, time constraints, cultural divides, privacy issues, and of course, economics-stories remain a nonthreatening and practical vehicle for collaboration. With its step-by-step approach to creating parent story programs, sample questions, case studies, and useful guidelines on collecting and interpreting data, A Path to Follow will be hailed as a detailed and innovative roadmap to involving the whole community in a child's education.