This brief emphasizes the importance of including the voices and experiences of students, families, staff, and community partners in educational decision-making processes. It provides five key considerations for schools to effectively engage with their educational partners, such as making authentic connections through listening sessions and…

Mantua Township is a small rural town located in southern New Jersey, about 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia. Students in the township attend one of three neighborhood schools, pre-K through sixth grade. Sewell School educates students in grades pre-K to K, Centre City School educates students in Grades 1 to 3, and J. Mason Tomlin School…

The transformation of teacher education programs is needed. To be authentic and sustainable, efforts at transformation need to be grounded in shifting power and policy making away from just the university to shared decision making among stakeholders. This paper examines what are seen as first steps towards this objective. The effort described here…

Playbuilding is one response to the search for creative ways to approach leadership and learning. Drawing upon their practical experiences within community-based, secondary school, and university settings, the authors share stories and strategies for fostering collaborative leadership through playbuilding.

Education reformers must resist the tendency to use "community engagement" as a means for getting stakeholders to rubber-stamp a predetermined agenda. The tokenism of key grassroots stakeholders and the field of community engagement must be avoided. To do so, leaders and their institutions must continually reflect on how they include…

This Practice Brief was developed as result of the roundtable dialogue that occurred at the 2019 PBIS Leadership Forum in Chicago, Illinois, with the purpose to describe the Family-School-Community Alliance (FSCA) and the FSCA's recent work focused on family-school collaboration in Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS). An…

Too many students still experience the factory model evident in most U.S. high schools, which were designed to put young people on a conveyor belt and move them from one overloaded teacher to the next, in 45-minute increments, to be stamped with separate, disconnected lessons 7 or 8 times a day. While these factory-model designs may have worked…

Community school strategies have emerged as a promising approach to mitigate the social and learning impacts of COVID-19. This brief draws on how the crisis-motivated responses of educators and school leaders might serve as integral investments in successful and sustainable community schools. Schools and districts interested in such an approach…

Maximal citizenship educators are committed to advancing an approach to citizenship learning with the following staple features: learner-centred; experiential; problem-and action-oriented; racialised, classed and gendered analysis of power; and strengthening the public sphere and democracy. This type of approach to education shares many…

Educators in this day and age may have to reframe how they think about interacting with parents, students and community members. Viewing these relationships as 'customer' relationships may seem like a stretch, but it is a reality. Research shows the many benefits of providing positive customer experiences for our stakeholders, and the costs of…

Recent surveys have indicated a worryingly low level of support for democracy among Australian youth and around the world. For example, in the 2017 Lowy Institute Poll, 36% of Australians indicated that, in some circumstances, a nondemocratic government is preferable. Such concerns, while hardly new, have triggered calls for more civic education…

Many professionals in the early childhood field are inspired by community-driven initiatives that hold great promise for transforming outcomes for the youngest children and their families. However, most collective impact efforts are mobilized in large urban areas, where early childhood professionals and civic leaders take the lead. New Mexico has…

The report on which this brief is based synthesizes the research evidence about the impact of community schools on student and school outcomes. Its aim is to support and inform school, community, district, and state leaders as they consider, propose, or implement community schools as a strategy for providing equitable, high-quality education to…

Over the past decade, states have dramatically expanded prekindergarten services (Pre-K), given the evidence that high-quality early childhood education can put children on a path to success in school and later life. To support the expansion, most of those states have adopted a mixed delivery system, developing the new educational opportunities in…

Community schools have gained attention as mechanisms to bring about equitable access to high-quality educational resources, extended learning time and opportunities, integrated student supports, and collaborative engaging relationships with parents and communities. In order to effectively create conditions that provide equitable access to such…