Learn how to use Relationship-Based Professional Development (RBPD) strategies to foster equitable, inclusive and socially just communities of collaboration and learning in PreK to age 8 programs. Packed with illustrative vignettes, checklists, and reflection questions to guide understanding, this resource helps administrators and teacher-leaders establish a cycle of inquiry to better understand each other’s common work and build more effective partnerships. Aligned with the NAEYC's Power to the Profession objectives, you'll find this book filled with invaluable tools to strengthen your professional community and better support your students.
Focus on the wonder of learning with infants, toddlers, and twos. Use sensitive and responsive interactions and curriculum planning that support their development as effective communicators, problem solvers, and creative thinkers.
Inclusive early childhood settings benefit all children, whether or not they have identified special needs. Including One, Including All provides theoretical, conceptual, and practical information on relationship-based, inclusive practices for early childhood classrooms, an approach that strengthens every child and supports the child’s behavioral, emotional, social, and learning challenges. Written by a team of professionals who are known for their successful work using this model, Including One, Including All includes blueprints for organizing this important work with children and their families and addresses the challenges and rewards of inclusion in early childhood classrooms, and chronicles the experiences of two children with special needs in early childhood settings.
The work presented here is a large-scale evaluation of a theory-driven school reform project in New Zealand, which focuses on improving the educational achievement of Māori students in public secondary schools. The project's conceptual underpinnings are based on Kaupapa Māori research, culturally responsive teaching, student voice, and relationship-based pedagogy. Data were produced by a research team who conducted a three-year external evaluation of the project in 22 of the 33 schools implementing its professional development initiative. The book shows the extent to which a well-conceptualized and culturally grounded program in culturally responsive pedagogy, supported by a well-conceptualized professional development program, can shift teacher practices and understandings. These shifts lead to a reduction in the achievement disparities of minoritized students, as well as support for the students as culturally located human beings. While the professional development project in this book addresses Māori students' educational achievement, the study's findings and messages are applicable far beyond New Zealand, because the educational experiences of Māori people are common to many Indigenous and other minoritized peoples in countries around the world.
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.
This guidebook for early-childhood professionals emphasizes the importance of building strong teacher and caregiver relationships with young children to promote a secure, healthy, and productive learning environment. The relationship-based phase model was developed at the Virginia Frank Child Development Center in Chicago by early-childhood professionals with backgrounds in education, social work, child development, psychology, and counseling. It's centered on the knowledge that having secure attachments with a caregivers is the basis of optimal cognitive growth and development for young children, and that their social and emotional needs change. The curriculum is based on three phases of relationships: the separation and attachment phase, the autonomy development phase, and the development of initiative and consolidation of skills phase. The book identifies behavior patterns and offers techniques for responding to each phase in the classroom, with strategies for managing emotions and skills for assisting children to cope, which include concrete suggestions for activities, songs, and books. Chapters on incorporating group discussions about children's feeling and experiences, the importance of teacher self-awareness, communication with parents, and help with children who have special needs and behavioral difficulties further emphasize the importance of focusing on young children's emotional health as an effective means of building strong foundations for lifelong learning.
Strong working relationships with families assist early intervention practices. This book provides new ways to develop the connections with families of children with disabilities and others that may be at risk.
The call for trauma-informed education is growing as the profound impact trauma has for the children’s ability to learn in traditional classrooms is recognized. For children who have experienced abuse and neglect their behavior is often highly reactive, aggressive, withdrawn or unmotivated. They struggle to learn, to make positive relationships or be influenced positively by teachers and school staff. Students become more and more at risk for mental health difficulties. Teachers become more and more frustrated and discouraged as they attempt to teach this vulnerable group of students. Even though it is relationships that have hurt students with developmental trauma, it is known that they must find safe relationships to learn and heal. Forming those relationships with children who have been hurt and no longer trust adults is not easy. This book focuses on three important and comprehensive areas of theory and research that provide a theoretical, clinical, and integrated intervention model for developing the relationships and felt sense of safety children with developmental trauma need. Using what is known from attachment theory, intersubjectivity theory, and interpersonal neurobiology, the reader is helped to understand why children behave in the challenging ways they do. This book offers successes and ongoing challenges as a means to continue the conversation about how best to support some of our most at-risk youth.
