This book describes a specific program for teaching and mentoring expressive writing by at-risk youth—a program that can generate transformative change in the teens, and generate significant new satisfactions for you. When young people write personally and creatively, it helps them to overcome challenges in their lives. They feel better, think more clearly, are more self-confident, and are better able to relate to others, including their helpers. This personal creative process is enriching and enlivening for everyone. It brings emotional clarity and meaning to everyone. It brings closeness, in addition to learning and growth.Welcome to the Pongo Teen Writing Method.

Based on the book by the same title, the Reclaiming Youth at Risk video workshop takes viewers inside two schools and two residential treatment centers that have experienced great success in creating environments that allow young people to transfrom crisis into opportunity and failure into success.

"An eye-opening and heart-opening book." -Bonnie Benard, Senior Program Associate, WestEd Identify and promote overlooked strengths to cultivate resilience. Now more than ever, counselors, teachers, community youth workers, and parents are striving to prevent individual and school-wide tragedy before it happens. Critical to the success of their efforts is a deep respect for the adolescent experience. In this book, author and social worker Michael Ungar takes a fresh, hopeful approach to challenging youth by looking beyond the surface of "bad" behaviors to understand them as ways of coping with life′s adversities. Strengths-Based Counseling With At-Risk Youth provides the tools both to understand and access strengths buried beneath problem behaviors. It offers specific, effective strategies in working with adolescents to construct positive identities and realistic action plans. Features include Six strategies for youth engagement, covering common problem behaviors such as drug use, violence, delinquency, and promiscuity An entire chapter on bullying An abundance of real-life examples and counseling narratives A Resilient Youth Strengths Inventory to assess resilience and identify areas that need strengthening Sincere application of Ungar′s compassionate and open-minded strategies is sure to transform the lives of countless adolescents in need, and the institutions that serve them.

In this innovative book, elements of risk and resilience, positive youth development, and organizational collaboration are used to develop a comprehensive intervention framework, the Integrated Prevention and Early Intervention (IPEI) Model.

This text provides the conceptual and practical information on key issues and problems that students need to prepare effectively for work with at-risk youth. The authors describe and discuss the latest prevention and intervention techniques that will help future and current professionals perform their jobs successfully and improve the lives of young people at risk.

This book is about teaching writing and the gritty particulars of teaching adolescents. But it is also the planning, the thinking, the writing, the journey: all I've been putting into my teaching for the last two decades. This is the book I wanted when I was first given ninth graders and a list of novels to teach. This is a book of vision and hope and joy, but it is also a book of genre units and minilessons and actual conferences with students. -Penny Kittle What makes the single biggest difference to student writers? When the invisible machinery of your writing processes is made visible to them. Write Beside Them shows you how to do it. It's the comprehensive book and companion video that English/language arts teachers need to ensure that teens improve their writing. Across genres, Penny Kittle presents a flexible framework for instruction, the theory and experience to back it up, and detailed teaching information to help you implement it right away. Each section of Write Beside Them describes a specific element of Penny's workshop: Daily writing practice: writer's notebooks and quick writes Instructional frameworks: minilessons, organization, conferring, and sharing drafts Genre work: narrative, persuasion, and writing in multiple genres Skills work: grammar, punctuation, and style Assessment: evaluation, feedback, portfolios, and grading All along the way, Penny demonstrates minilessons that respond to students' immediate needs, and her Student Focus sections profile and spotlight how individual writers grew and changed over the course of her workshop. In addition, Write Beside Them provides a study guide, reproducibles, writing samples from Penny and her students, suggestions for nurturing your own writing life, and a helpful FAQ. Best of all, the online videos take you right inside Penny's classroom, explicitly modeling how to make the process of writing accessible to all kids. Penny Kittle's active coaching and can-do attitude alone will energize your teaching and inspire you to write with your students. But her strategies, expert advice, and compelling in-class video footage will help you turn inspiration into great teaching. Read Write Beside Them and discover that the most important influence for all young writers is their teacher. Penny was the recipient of the 2009 NCTE Britton Award for Write Beside Them.

While most children learn to read fairly well, there remain many young Americans whose futures are imperiled because they do not read well enough to meet the demands of our competitive, technology-driven society. This book explores the problem within the context of social, historical, cultural, and biological factors. Recommendations address the identification of groups of children at risk, effective instruction for the preschool and early grades, effective approaches to dialects and bilingualism, the importance of these findings for the professional development of teachers, and gaps that remain in our understanding of how children learn to read. Implications for parents, teachers, schools, communities, the media, and government at all levels are discussed. The book examines the epidemiology of reading problems and introduces the concepts used by experts in the field. In a clear and readable narrative, word identification, comprehension, and other processes in normal reading development are discussed. Against the background of normal progress, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children examines factors that put children at risk of poor reading. It explores in detail how literacy can be fostered from birth through kindergarten and the primary grades, including evaluation of philosophies, systems, and materials commonly used to teach reading.