Engaged families make a difference in the lives of their children! The children in today's early childhood classroom are more culturally, linguistically, and ability diverse than ever. As a teacher, your challenge is to partner with each family through recognizing their individual strengths, concerns, priorities, and resources. In The Welcoming Classroom: Building Strong Home-to-School Connections for Early Learning, Dr. Johnna Darragh Ernst offers practical ideas for creating a welcoming atmosphere for families that will encourage them to participate in their children's learning community. Learn practical ways to connect with families from varied cultural and language backgrounds and abilities. Gain new strategies for creating a home-school link to support learning. Create a richer learning environment by integrating unique family cultural perspectives. Learn ways to encourage family participation in decision making. Learn strategies to develop families as resources. Communicate the message that all families are valued members of the learning community. From improving children's school readiness to encouraging positive engagement with peers, promoting student academic achievement, increasing graduation rates, and helping reduce the negative impact of poverty, the benefits of engaging families early will impact the young children in your care long after they leave your classroom! Johnna Darragh Ernst, PhD, is a professor of early childhood education at Heartland Community College in Normal, Illinois. She specializes in helping early childhood professionals connect with families to create inclusive early childhood classroom communities.

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.

The need for strengthening the connections between university-based teacher education programs and schools has never been greater in an era where standards and accountability systems often play centric roles in practically all aspects of the education field. Within this context, university educators and school practitioners have increasingly focused their attention on how professional development schools produce the multiplicity of outcomes that address the exigencies of quality programs for educating teachers and improving school achievement. In keeping with the mission of producing a collection of papers that inform, enlighten, and motivate readers, Volume 3 of the Professional Development Schools book series provides practitioners and researchers with articles on a substantial variety of themes on the most recent developments of the field. Among the thematic threads that organize Volume 3 are 1) using the national standards to examine and evaluate PDSs; 2) implementation, development and leadership issues relevant to beginning and experienced PDSs; 3) using innovative means for student assessments and mentoring in preservice education within a PDS context; 4) the impact of PDSs on teacher education and student achievement; and 5) cases of PDSs and the value of lessons learned. Volume 3 is similar to the previous two volumes in that it includes both practitioner and researcher strands, however, the authors in the current volume carry a sense of maturity and exudes a tone of confidence in their voice. Professional development schools research is an important aspect of teacher education. The collection of articles in Volume 3 contribute to our understanding of their essential qualities and offer assurance that innovation, change, and quality are building blocks in professional development schools.

The book provides a treatment of college students' friendships that is long overdue. Students, parents, and anyone concerned with maximizing student success will learn much about how friendship networks matter for students' lives in college and beyond

A mentor, advisor, or even a friend? Making connections in college makes all the difference. What single factor makes for an excellent college education? As it turns out, it's pretty simple: human relationships. Decades of research demonstrate the transformative potential and the lasting legacies of a relationship-rich college experience. Critics suggest that to build connections with peers, faculty, staff, and other mentors is expensive and only an option at elite institutions where instructors have the luxury of time with students. But in this revelatory book brimming with the voices of students, faculty, and staff from across the country, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert argue that relationship-rich environments can and should exist for all students at all types of institutions. In Relationship-Rich Education, Felten and Lambert demonstrate that for relationships to be central in undergraduate education, colleges and universities do not require immense resources, privileged students, or specially qualified faculty and staff. All students learn best in an environment characterized by high expectation and high support, and all faculty and staff can learn to teach and work in ways that enable relationship-based education. Emphasizing the centrality of the classroom experience to fostering quality relationships, Felten and Lambert focus on students' influence in shaping the learning environment for their peers, as well as the key difference a single, well-timed conversation can make in a student's life. They also stress that relationship-rich education is particularly important for first-generation college students, who bring significant capacities to college but often face long-standing inequities and barriers to attaining their educational aspirations. Drawing on nearly 400 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at 29 higher education institutions across the country, Relationship-Rich Education provides readers with practical advice on how they can develop and sustain powerful relationship-based learning in their own contexts. Ultimately, the book is an invitation—and a challenge—for faculty, administrators, and student life staff to move relationships from the periphery to the center of undergraduate education.

An NPR Favorite Book of the Year “Breaks new ground on social and educational questions of great import.” —Washington Post “An essential work, humane and candid, that challenges and expands our understanding of the lives of contemporary college students.” —Paul Tough, author of Helping Children Succeed “Eye-opening...Brings home the pain and reality of on-campus poverty and puts the blame squarely on elite institutions.” —Washington Post “Jack’s investigation redirects attention from the matter of access to the matter of inclusion...His book challenges universities to support the diversity they indulge in advertising.” —New Yorker The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In this bracing exposé, Anthony Jack shows that many students’ struggles continue long after they’ve settled in their dorms. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This powerfully argued book documents how university policies and campus culture can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why some students are harder hit than others.

Forging closer links between university research and teaching has become an important way to enhance the quality of higher education across the world. As student engagement takes centre stage in academic life, how can academics and university leaders engage with their students to connect research and teaching more effectively? In this highly accessible book, the contributors show how students and academics can work in partnership to shape research-based education. Featuring student perspectives, it offers academics and university leaders practical suggestions and inspiring ideas on higher education pedagogy, including principles of working with students as partners in higher education, connecting students with real-world outputs, transcending disciplinary boundaries in student research activities, connecting students with the workplace, and innovative assessment and teaching practices. Written and edited in full collaboration with students and leading educator-researchers from a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, this book poses fundamental questions about learning and learning communities in contemporary higher education.