Supporting California’s Children Through a Whole Child Approach: A Field Guide for Creating Integrated, School-Based Systems of Care
This field guide is a first step by a collaborative of California child-serving education, health, and social service experts and leaders to further California’s current efforts toward one effective, integrated, comprehensive, school-based child-serving system. The guide includes guidance for both local education agencies (LEAs) and state leaders, with details and implementation guidance on a wide variety of cross-sector initiatives to support the whole child.
Using a whole-child approach, this guide outlines resources and strategies for LEAs and state leaders to use to support the implementation of funding that centers children and families. The guide includes six major initiatives that can serve as part of an integrated, school-based system of care: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) Aware Initiative, Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI), Children and Youth System of Care, community schools initiatives, early childhood initiatives, and expanded learning.
The guide also focuses specifically on how to fund various components of an integrated, school-based system of care, providing strategies for funding sustainability and further details about funding sources for comprehensive services. The guide concludes with a discussion of how state leaders facilitate the ability of LEAs to establish integrated, school-based systems of care by modeling cross-sector collaboration at the state level to reduce the current barriers that LEAs face.
Professional Learning Community Facilitators' Guide to Discussion of "English Language Learners and the New Standards"
The book, English Language Learners and the New Standards, provides a clear, timely, and practical path for helping teachers engage English language learner (ELL) students in simultaneously learning subject-area content, analytical practices, and language.
This mathematics-focused facilitators’ guide is designed to help professional learning communities (PLCs) of teachers, administrators, and/or school district staff discuss the book and develop goals and steps toward improving mathematics learning for all students.
For each book chapter, the guide offers a set of engaging activities, conversations, and structured planning time for groups to get the most out of reading English Language Learners and the New Standards together.
Topics covered in both the book and facilitators’ guide include:
- Pedagogical shifts that support ambitious learning for ELLs
- Language acquisition in the mathematics classroom
- The role of formative assessment
- The role of summative assessment
- The role of policy
Originally developed for use in the Math in Common network of 10 California school districts, this guide is now available for free to any group interested in English learners and math performance.
Additionally, Math in Common’s webinar series with the book’s authors will further support PLCs’ learning in conjunction with the book and guide.
District Readiness to Support School Turnaround: A Guide for State Education Agencies and Districts, 2nd Edition
This updated resource provides state education agencies and districts with guidance on assessing a district’s readiness to support school turnaround initiatives. First published in 2013, the guide has been updated to highlight how its approach to assessing district readiness embeds and reflects key components of Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement, a framework developed by the Center on School Turnaround.
Using this framework, the guide aims to help policymakers or practitioners consider school turnaround as a system-level issue — fundamental district-level practices must be in place to establish the conditions for school turnaround to succeed. This perspective counters the tendency for school turnaround efforts to focus on only the school’s structure and leadership. By contrast, this guide provides an introduction to district-level turnaround readiness and the conditions that will help districts best position resources to enable turnaround schools to succeed and to sustain that success.
Magnet School Evaluation Guide
This guide is a valuable resource for helping you ensure an effective evaluation of your magnet program, whether funded by grants from the Federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP) or other funding sources.
The guide provides practices and norms for the planning and early grant phases that will help strengthen your evaluation. It describes the systematic phases of an evaluation, provides examples of what that evaluation may look like, and ways to ensure the evaluation is rigorous. Finally, the guide covers how to successfully learn from your evaluation to improve the implementation of your magnet program and equitably disseminate the evaluation findings.
For MSAP grantees, there are additional recommendations in this guide to help you self-assess your current evaluation plan or guide you in selection of an evaluation partner.
Participatory Systems Change for Equity: An Inquiry Guide for Child-, Youth-, and Family-Serving Agencies
When child-, youth-, and family-serving agencies facilitate systems change efforts without those who experience and are impacted by these systems, they run the risk of perpetuating inequity and causing harm to the very people they intend to serve. Participatory systems change involves community members and system leaders to collectively identify, design, decide, implement, and assess priorities, actions, and investments that work toward eliminating systemic oppression and generating system conditions that promote equity, opportunity, and well-being.
System leaders can use this guide to help facilitate participatory systems change. The guide features elements of participatory systems change that institutions and organizations can apply depending on local context and locally defined goals. With this guide, system leaders will:
- Understand what participatory systems change is and how it can contribute to transformative change at the systems level that promotes equity, opportunity, and well-being for young people, families, and communities
- Gain insights into integrating elements of participatory systems change into any initiative at any phase of implementation
- Consider key questions and resources in order to align change initiatives with elements of participatory systems change
Participatory Systems Change for Equity: An Inquiry Guide for Child-, Youth-, and Family-Serving Agencies is also available in Spanish. Download the Spanish version.
Engaging Students as Leaders to Reimagine School Safety: An Educator Case Story
This Guide shares the experience of one educator who adapted the Reimagining School Safety Guide to use in her classroom with pre-college students in New Orleans, Louisiana. It provides practical insights on how to use the Guide in a school setting with students as part of an effort to reconsider and shift paradigms of school safety.Â
Key Insights
- The Reimagining School Safety Guide can be adapted for a young adult audience and used to engage them in discussing and shifting school safety paradigms.
- For students, school safety is not a “neutral” topic; it is something they experience every day in the physical and social ways they engage with their school and the people in it. Thus, they are an essential partner for addressing challenges in school safety and contributing to efforts to reimagine what safety means and how to achieve it. Doing so takes commitment from the adults facilitating these conversations to effectively engage students in safe, supportive, and equitable ways.
- Educators must continuously examine their mindsets and practices to cultivate safe and supportive learning environments where students feel comfortable providing authentic feedback about their schools’ safety challenges.
Who is the Guide for?
The Guide is for educators and school site leaders—particularly those for students in middle school, high school, pre-college, and college—who are looking to include student perspectives in addressing school safety issues. Find actionable ideas to create a classroom that cultivates safety, inclusion, and engaged conversations about school safety, and explore school safety issues and specific strategies for engaging students in discussions about it.
Restorative Ways of Being to Embody What Is Possible: A Guide for Restorative Leaders
Educators and leaders looking to embrace restorative practices in educational settings must navigate countless decisions without simple or easily identifiable answers, and they must do so in a context that tends to be at odds with restorative values and principles. To help restorative practitioners navigate such challenging complexity, this guide frames restorative practices not as a program but as a paradigm, supporting a shift from asking “What is the right answer?” to instead asking “What are the steps I will try first?” and “How can I center my own and others’ humanity as I decide what to try?”
The guide offers insights into adopting a restorative paradigm by exploring five restorative ways of being that can guide decision-making in difficult situations: looking within oneself, getting to the root causes of incidents, holding complexity rather than seeking simple solutions, keeping dignity intact, and staying proximate to those most affected.
After the five ways of being are described, four fictional scenarios highlight common implementation challenges for restorative practitioners. Each scenario is followed by reflective questions that encourage readers to engage with the restorative ways of being in ways that can inform day-to-day decision-making and interactions. The guide also provides protocols to support implementation.
Serving the Whole Person: An Alignment and Coherence Guide for State Education Agencies
To advance equity, districts and schools must serve the whole person. Equitable outcomes are more likely to result when whole-person initiatives are implemented within an aligned and coherent system.
If educators at every level of the K–12 system — from the state level to the classroom — work in aligned and coherent ways to sustain the conditions that support whole-person learning and development, every student will have experiences that support personal purpose, healthy relationships, a sense of place in community, success in school and the workplace, and engaged citizenship.
This Alignment and Coherence Guide’s central purpose is to help state education agency (SEA) leaders implement conditions for equitable learning and development for students, families, and educators, through their work to improve the alignment and coherence of their whole-person initiatives.
This guide includes five chapters:
- Chapter 1. Establish a Shared Vision and Theory of Change
- Chapter 2. Inventory Whole-Person Initiatives
- Chapter 3. Analyze Interrelationships for Alignment and Coherence and Create an Action Plan
- Chapter 4. Implement the Action Plan and Monitor Progress
- Chapter 5. Refine the Alignment and Coherence Process
This comprehensive, adaptable, research-informed, and field-tested guide is also the basis of a related WestEd service. Discover how our technical assistance team can lead you through a structured yet flexible process to improve the alignment and coherence of whole-person efforts.
The Missing Piece: Quantifying Non-Completion Pathways to Success
Community colleges measure success by the outcomes their students achieve, in addition to the number of students they serve. However, while completion outcomes are important metrics of success, they do not measure all of the goals of community colleges. There are also significant metrics of success related to workforce development that can occur outside of the completion framework.
A surprising number of first-time community college students enroll in six or fewer units, succeed in those courses, but do not complete a credential or transfer. Many of those students, particularly those who enroll in career and technical education subjects, take a coherent cluster of related courses and, as a result, attain significant wage gains.
This guide, coauthored by WestEd’s Kathy Booth, outlines research on skills-builder students in California community colleges. Through built-in discussion questions, this guide also helps relate research results to key concerns in community colleges. It is intended to support conversations on college campuses and in the policy arena regarding:
- How to better understand students’ goals by examining their course-taking behavior
- The types of measures that are needed to improve the assessment of community college outcomes and impacts
- The potential implications and effects of current policy and institutional reform efforts
Download the guide and executive summary.
Making Sense of SCIENCE: Genes & Traits for Teachers of Grades 5-12 (Facilitator Guide Bundle)
Proven through rigorous research to be effective with both teachers and students, Making Sense of SCIENCE’s professional learning course for 5-12 science teachers provides all the necessary ingredients for building scientific thinking in both teachers and students.
These comprehensive course materials guide staff developers and teacher educators in leading the Genes & Traits Teacher Course designed to deepen the science understanding of grades 5–12 teachers in the context of student learning.
Developed to complement any curriculum, these materials support the learning of key concepts related to genetics—from the origins of traits to the many factors that influence gene expression. The concepts are central to Next Generation Science Standards and aligned with Common Core State Standards in literacy.
The Facilitator Guide Bundle includes:
- The Genes & Traits Facilitator Guide, which contains extensive background information and detailed procedures
- The Genes & Traits Teacher Book, which contains teaching cases of actual classroom practice, science background information, and guided investigations that explore science in conjunction with related literacy supports and teaching practices
- Making Sense of Student Work: A Protocol for Teacher Collaboration, designed to support the learning of teachers during the school year by providing guidance in collaboratively examining and learning from their students’ work
- Digital resources that include all course materials—including the eBook edition of Making Sense of Student Work: A Protocol for Teacher Collaboration—and the Genes & Traits Formative Assessment Task Bank
Also Available
- Teacher Book Bundle: Contains the Teacher Book, Making Sense of Student Work: A Protocol for Teacher Collaboration, and a digital download that includes all course handouts, additional classroom resources, the eBook edition of Making Sense of Student Work: A Protocol for Teacher Collaboration, and the Genes & Traits Formative Assessment Task Bank
- Charts: A set of single-use 24″x 32″ wall charts that are used by facilitators to anchor discussions and provide a visual archive of teachers’ thinking in the Teacher Course
- Formative Assessment Task Bank: A collection of 20 formative assessment tasks for use with grades 5–12 students
Professional Learning
- Facilitation Academies prepare staff developers, district science leaders, and other teacher educators to effectively lead a Making Sense of SCIENCE Teacher Course
- Teacher Courses empower teachers to educate students in ways that increase engagement, promote critical thinking and analysis, and ultimately improve achievement
Visit Making Sense of SCIENCE for more information about professional development services and resources.