School, Family, and Community Partnerships


Book Description

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.







Developing Caring Relationships Among Parents, Children, Schools, and Communities


Book Description

This book focuses on parents and teachers as adult learners, who should be growing and learning along with the children in their care. It lays out a theory of what parents and teachers need to care for children and themselves and then it shows how the author has assisted parents and teachers to put these theories into practice. McDermott relies on stories and listening to the voices of parents, teachers and children to make her case. She weaves together the latest theories and research with these stories. She uses narratives of actual school meetings, workshops, parent planning and discussion groups, testimonies, newsletters, and research of others in the field, to demonstrate applications of theory and research. She fills a gap by focusing on parents from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Key Features: o Focuses on parents and teachers as adult learners o Focuses on the dynamic process of parenting and teaching o Provides a theory to practice model to support parents, families and teachers o Provides a tool or guide for thinking through problems and finding solutions that take into consideration the needs of all involved.




School, Family, and Community Partnerships


Book Description

School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Preparing Educators and Improving Schools addresses a fundamental question in education today: How will colleges and universities prepare future teachers, administrators, counselors, and other education professionals to conduct effective programs of family and community involvement that contribute to students' success in school? The work of Joyce L. Epstein has advanced theories, research, policies, and practices of family and community involvement in elementary, middle, and high schools, districts, and states nationwide. In this second edition, she shows that there are new and better ways to organize programs of family and community involvement as essential components of district leadership and school improvement. THE SECOND EDITION OFFERS EDUCATORS AND RESEARCHERS: A framework for helping rising educators to develop comprehensive, goal-linked programs of school, family, andcommunity partnerships. A clear discussion of the theory of overlapping spheres of influence, which asserts that schools, families, and communitiesshare responsibility for student success in school. A historic overview and exploration of research on the nature and effects of parent involvement. Methods for applying the theory, framework, and research on partnerships in college course assignments, classdiscussions, projects and activities, and fi eld experiences. Examples that show how research-based approaches improve policies on partnerships, district leadership, andschool programs of family and community involvement. Definitive and engaging, School, Family, and Community Partnerships can be used as a main or supplementary text in courses on foundations of education methods of teaching, educational administration, family and community relations, contemporary issues in education, sociology of education, sociology of the family, school psychology, social work, education policy, and other courses that prepare professionals to work in schools and with families and students.




Beyond the Bake Sale


Book Description

Countless studies demonstrate that students with parents actively involved in their education at home and school are more likely to earn higher grades and test scores, enroll in higher-level programs, graduate from high school, and go on to post-secondary education. Beyond the Bake Sale shows how to form these essential partnerships and how to make them work. Packed with tips from principals and teachers, checklists, and an invaluable resource section, Beyond the Bake Sale reveals how to build strong collaborative relationships and offers practical advice for improving interactions between parents and teachers, from insuring that PTA groups are constructive and inclusive to navigating the complex issues surrounding diversity in the classroom. Written with candor, clarity, and humor, Beyond the Bake Sale is essential reading for teachers, parents on the front lines in public schools, and administrators and policy makers at all levels.




Building Family, School, and Community Partnerships


Book Description

This text focuses on understanding different types of family structures, cross cultural issues that teachers need to be aware of, and building strong family/school/community relationships. There are manyfeatures that adapt well to practicing teachers. Updated information for teachers to help understand and deal with the changing family structure, especially gay and lesbian parents, grandparents as parents, and blended and divorced families. Tools are provided for assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of parent involvement programs, activities, and initiatives; In this age of accountability, these tools are particularly valuable. Advocacy and classroom strategies are provided across all chapter topics and themes. These strategies provide classroom teachers with practical and measurable tools for strengthening their parent involvement activities. These strategies also constitute an important part of in-service training; Inclusion practice continues to expand, and this textbook provides excellent information on a variety of disabilities, developmental delays, and other special needs. Working with parents of children with special needs is discussed, and numerous advocacy and classroom strategies are presented for working with these children and parents. It is designed to be practical, useful, and informative for many different professionals who work with and are engaged in professional development and implementation with children and their families.




Handbook on Family and Community Engagement


Book Description

Thirty-six of the best thinkers on family and community engagement were assembled to produce this Handbook, and they come to the task with varied backgrounds and lines of endeavor. Each could write volumes on the topics they address in the Handbook, and quite a few have. The authors tell us what they know in plain language, succinctly presented in short chapters with practical suggestions for states, districts, and schools. The vignettes in the Handbook give us vivid pictures of the real life of parents, teachers, and kids. In all, their portrayal is one of optimism and celebration of the goodness that encompasses the diversity of families, schools, and communities across our nation.







Child, Family, and Community


Book Description

With its focus on the socialization of the child, this book helps readers understand how the child develops in a variety of contexts, including the family, community, and early childhood institutions. Child, Family, and Community gives readers the tools they need to work effectively with both children and parents in ways that support children to be healthy, secure, and socialized members of their families, and eventually society. Guidance strategies are presented, as well as child rearing strategies that parents, parent educators and other professionals and practitioners can put to immediate use. The author relates the many contexts in which the child exists–family, school, and community–to Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which divide’s a person's environment into five different levels: the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem, the macrosystem, and the chronosystem.




Critical Perspectives on Education Policy and Schools, Families, and Communities


Book Description

Critical Perspectives on Education Policy and Schools, Families, and Communities offers scholars, students, and practitioners important new knowledge about how current policies impact families, schools, and community partnerships. The book’s authors share a critical orientation towards policy and policy research and invite readers to think differently about what policy is, who policymakers are, and what policy can achieve. Their chapters discuss findings from research grounded in diverse theories, including institutional ethnography, critical disability theory, and critical race theory. The authors encourage scholars of family, school, and community partnerships to ask who benefits from policies (and who loses) and how proposed reforms maintain or disrupt existing relations of power. The chapters present original research on a broad range of policies at the local, state/provincial, and national levels in Canada and the USA. Some authors look closely at the enactment of specific district policies, including a school district’s language translation policy and a policy to create local advisory bodies as part of decentralization efforts. Other chapters reveal the often unacknowledged yet necessary work parents do to meet their children’s needs and enable schools to operate. A few chapters focus on challenges and paradoxes of including families and community members in policymaking processes, including a case where parents demonstrated a preference for a policy that research demonstrates can be detrimental to their children’s future education opportunities. Another set of chapters emphasizes the centrality of policy texts and how language influences the educational experiences and engagement of students and their families. Each chapter concludes with a discussion of implications of the research for educators, families, and other community partners.




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