Category: Tips and Guides

A Community Guide for Parents & Students to Special Education in Mississippi

Summary: This guide is designed to help parents and students become effective advocates in planning the student's special education program. By using this manual and by working with school staff, you will learn how to draft an educational program that helps students to lead independent and productive lives.

Big Ideas in Science Education

Summary: "Big Ideas in Science Education", a blog post from Teaching Science presents Principles and Ideas of Science Education, a great informal resource for teachers of young scientists who want students to know what real science looks like.

Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST)

Summary: CAST is a nonprofit research and development organization that works to expand learning opportunities for all individuals, especially those with disabilities, through Universal Design for Learning (UDL). UDL is a set of principles for curriculum development that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn.

CAST's work is inspired and informed by the learners who often get pushed aside in traditional education settings. In other words, "the future is in the margins," as Founding Directors David Rose and Anne Meyer write.

CIrcles of Change

Summary: Lending circles, self-help groups, and study circles are all examples of one of the oldest and most effective tools for creating personal and social change. Leveraging the potential of Circles requires a clear understanding of what they are and how they work.

Education for Liberation’s EdLib Lab

Summary: The Education for Liberation Network is a national coalition of teachers, community activists, researchers, youth and parents who believe a good education should teach people, particularly low-income youth and youth of color, how to understand and challenge the injustices their communities face. The Edlib Lab is an interactive database to find, share and discuss liberatory educational materials.

Rated: (5/5), based on 1 review Posted in Action and ChangeLesson Plans and ActivitiesToolsTips and Guides

Freechild Project Youth Engagement Workshop Guide

Summary: The Freechild Project Youth Engagement Workshop Guide features 24 workshop outlines designed to help learning groups explore different aspects of Youth Engagement. All exercises are hands-on, interactive, and focused on practical applications. The workshops are designed for learners of all ages, including youth-only and adult-only groups. There is also a great introduction on how to facilitate youth engagement workshops, as well as detailed directions for leading every workshop! Available as a free PDF at http://www.freechild.org/FPYEWG.htm

Freechild Project Youth Voice Toolbox

Summary: The Youth Voice Toolbox is an online resource comprised of a series of one-pagers on youth action, youth engagement, youth empowerment, and more. These tools identify a number of innovative practices, practical considerations and critical concepts related to youth voice, particularly among historically disengaged young people. Available as a free website at http://www.freechild.org/YouthVoice/

Rated: (5/5), based on 6 reviews Posted in ToolsTips and Guides

Guide to Cooperative Games for Social Change

Summary: These activities provide a basic exploration of trust, teambuilding, communication, and social change by actively involving all participants. Young people, community youth workers, classroom teachers, and others are encouraged to use this tool to promote youth engagement, community improvement, and active participation. Available as a free PDF at http://freechild.org/gamesguide.htm

Invigorating Innovation in Education

Summary: This essay illustrates several examples of innovation in teaching practices in different fields.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

Summary: A linchpin is that key thing that holds stuff together. Seth Godin lays out how the world has changed since we began preparing people to work in factories to the skills, values, and habits that make people valuable in today's world. He does this with humor, humility, and without apologies. He also throws down practical tips for how to grow and be a linchpin. This book is easy to read, hard to put down, and deserves attention!

Managing Your Cash Flow

Summary: This basic introduction to cash flow is a key resource for those new to creating and managing organizational budgets. You can click "next" to advance to the various sections, including understanding cash flow, analyzing cash flow, and a helpful budget worksheet.

Meaningful Student Involvement: Guide to Students as Partners in School Change

Summary: This powerful guide provides the theory, research, and numerous practical examples for working with students to take action together to improve schools, written by a leading practitioner in the field of youth voice and student involvement. If you can only have one resource on student involvement, this is it.

Rated: (5/5), based on 1 review Posted in InformationResearchStudent Involvement and Youth VoiceToolsTips and Guides

National Center on Universal Design for Learning

Summary: Founded in 2009, the National UDL Center supports the effective implementation of UDL by connecting stakeholders in the field and providing resources and information about advocacy, implementation, research, and other resources. It provides a community to connect with others in the UDL field.

New Creative Community

Summary: An inspiring, foundational book that defines the burgeoning field of community cultural development. Through personal stories, rousing accounts, detailed observation and histories, Arlene Goldbard describes how communities express and develop themselves via the creative arts. This comprehensive, photographically- illustrated book, which covers community-based arts such as theater grounded in oral history and murals celebrating cultural heritage, will appeal to the curious non-specialist reader as well as the practitioner and student.

Parenting for Social Change

Summary: At its core, parenting is about love. The parent-child relationship is the foundation from which we learn how to interact in the world. When parent-child relationships are approached from our culture's dominant paradigm of control, children learn that those who are more powerful have the right to control those who are less powerful. They lose their connection to their inner authority and internal motivation necessary to creating their own authentic lives.

Restorative Approaches to Conflict

Summary: This website provides an introduction to the theory and practice of restorative justice and how it can be used in schools with young people. Restorative justice "puts repairing harm done to relationships and people over and above the need for assigning blame and dispensing punishment. . . . The restorative approach is based on the belief that the people best placed to resolve a conflict or a problem are the people directly involved, and that imposed solutions are less effective, less educative and possibly less likely to be honoured."

Series on Meaningful Student Involvement

Summary: Meaningful Student Involvement: Guide to Students as Partners in School Change
Stories of Meaningful Student Involvement
Meaningful Student Involvement Research Guide
Meaningful Student Involvement Resource Guide

Slader

Summary: Slader is an academic community for students, by students. It is the first crowd-sourced approach to education online. Slader empowers students to shape their own educational experience.

SoundOut Student Voice Curriculum

Summary: The SoundOut Student Voice Curriculum is a collection of 27 lesson plans, a facilitator's guide, a student handbook and a planning guide designed to teach high school students about how they can become partners in school improvement. A free module and ordering information available at http://www.soundout.org/curriculum.html

Start Empathy

Summary: StartEmpathy is a community of individuals and institutions dedicated to cultivating empathy in the 21st Century. This website is meant as a platform to facilitate empathy learning in our schools and in our homes.

Cultivating empathy can start with really simple actions, like taking the time to stop, breathe, and listen when your child comes to you with a problem. It can start with a bedtime story. It can start by understanding what your strengths are as a school or as a teacher, and in honing in on ways you can embed empathy into your teaching, culture, and behavior. The bottom line: it can start today.