The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative study was to explore how educators describe the impact of SEL instruction provided by the guidance counselor. Additionally, this study also sought to explore how educators perceive the supporting role they play in the delivery of SEL instruction alongside the guidance counselor. The overarching two…

Restorative practices hold significant promise for school transformation. However, because of the widespread popularity of their restorative justice component, many educators mistakenly assume that restorative practices are merely responsive, focused on repairing harm to relationships as an alternative to traditional disciplinary approaches that…

More students with High Functioning Autism (HFA) are in inclusive settings than ever before. The sheer physical combination of students with autism and their typical peers is insufficient to address the social deficits of students with autism. While evidence-based practices (EBPs) for social skills exist, these practices are not being implemented…

A growing body of research shows that school-based mentoring programs can be a flexible and cost-effective way to improve student outcomes. Effective mentoring programs create close bonds between students and caring adults, providing students with an important source of emotional support. This study tests the effects of a new model--whole…

Literacy is an essential means of communication. It enables individuals, communities and institutions to interact, over time and across space, as they develop a web of social relations via language. Effective literacy policies, programmes and practices expand the scale of social communication and interaction. Thus, literacy thrives when a state of…

The quality of student-teacher interactions is shaped by both the capacity of the teacher to cultivate trusting relationships with students and his or her ability to establish a safe, supportive classroom environment. This proves especially important for individuals teaching in multicultural and urban education settings. In recent literature,…

The purpose of this study was to analyze and report on a "different" model of leadership preparation that was customized to prepare school leaders to practice in schools where the student population is predominantly Latino and in an urban school setting. It is a preparation program designed to advance interactive collaboration between…

Given established links between social-emotional skills and academic achievement, there is growing support for implementing universal social/behavioral interventions in early schooling (Jones & Bouffard, 2012). Advocates have been particularly interested in implementing such programming in low income urban schools where students are likely to…

This dissertation investigates how relational trust manifests within schools that have recently enacted the distributed leadership framework, a program implementation by the Penn Center for Educational Leadership. First, the dissertation highlights research that connects the distributed leadership and relational trust frameworks in the task of…

The Disabilities Education Act was introduced in June, 1997 in the Turkish Education System. The Act states that schools have a duty to educate children with disabilities in general education classrooms. All children with disabilities should be educated with non-disabled children at their own age and have access to the general education…

The collection of articles in this special issue on relational aggression gives a glimpse into the complex social networks, first, of children's relational aggression and, second, of the collaborators who develop and validate children's prevention programs. The programs described in this special section are among the first to address relational…

Early childhood educators are concerned with the growing number of children who enter programs lacking social competence and exhibiting challenging behaviors. This article describes how early childhood programs in New Hampshire are addressing this challenge by adapting evidence-based School-Wide Positive Behavior Supports to meet the needs of…

This book discusses topics designed to assist school leaders and teachers in creating safe schools. It explains how to develop, implement, and evaluate an anti-bullying program and describes how to teach students to use three methods when dealing with bullies (social skills, assertiveness, and conflict resolution techniques). Seven chapters focus…

Three classroom teachers and their 23 students with significant developmental disabilities were studied across 8 weeks as a new literacy and communication instructional program, "MEville" to "WEville," was implemented. Before and after the implementation, the students were tested on a variety of literacy measures, their…

This paper describes the development and implementation of an adventure-based counseling program with six groups of junior high and high school students having severe emotional disturbances in Riverside County, California. The program's objectives were: (1) to improve students' communication skills, self-confidence, trust, respect for others, and…