Empowering Family-Teacher Partnerships: Building Connections Within Diverse Communities prepares students to work collaboratively with families and community professionals in support of children's early education and development. Students are invited to develop a personal philosophy of family involvement to guide their work with families and to join a community of learners in relying upon their collective insights and problem-solving skills to address family involvement challenges. The author takes a student-centered approach to delivering substantive information and framing activities, providing: (a) comprehensive coverage of the diversity of family lives represented in classrooms and strategies for working with those families; (b) challenges to family involvement and strategies for addressing them; (c) strategies for communicating effectively with and empowering families, and (d) reflections, activities, tip boxes, and field assignments designed to facilitate students' skills in building positive family-school-community partnerships.

Designed for alcohol and other drug abuse (AODA) and mental health professionals, paraprofessionals, administrators, and policymakers who want to learn more about family-centered treatment of adolescents with alcohol, drug abuse, and mental health disorders, this monograph explains the steps necessary to implement a family-centered approach to treatment. Includes a brief overview of family systems theory and practice; focuses on some specific aspects of family-centered clinical practice; examines admin., organizational, financing, and training issues and outlines strategies for addressing theses issues. Implementation checklist.

Blend of theory and practice, with pointers for applying the principles and case studies illustrating how to apply them.

This book integrates time-honored approaches to empowerment practice with today's more modest goals, mindful of what empowerment can and cannot do. Synthesizing several theoretical supports -- the strengths perspective, system theory, theories of family well-being, and theories of coping -- the author responds to the question "What works?" with today's families in need. Practice illustrations are provided throughout.

The home–school connection is important to student literacy achievement. However, it can be time-consuming to develop and implement programming that keeps families engaged and involved. Empowering Families makes it easier to accomplish these goals! Chock-full of step-by-step plans for arranging a variety of parent/caregiver meetings and literacy booster events, the book enables educators to get families involved in their children’s learning in ways that are fun and non-intimidating. By hosting these events at your school, you’ll be empowering families to... read aloud to their children at home; minimize the summer slide; encourage male involvement in literacy; help their children avoid homework hassles; and much, much more! Bonus: The book includes ready-to-use handouts for your events, such as announcement sheets, follow-up evaluations, and tipsheets that describe ways parents can reinforce literacy at home. These handouts are photocopiable and the tipsheets are also available for easy download from our website at www.routledge.com/9781138803114. Spanish versions of the tipsheets are available on our website as well.

An expanded follow-up to a CEC bestseller, this guide includes tools for assessing families’ and practitioners’ engagement in practices that promote positive post-school outcomes for youth with disabilities. Engaging and Empowering Families in Secondary Transition: A Practitioner’s Guide gives schools and agencies planning tools and practical strategies to foster family partnerships in five dimensions: collaborators in the IEP process; instructors in their youth’s emergent independence; peer mentors; evaluators and decision-makers; and systems-change agents.