This guidebook's aim is to encourage the development of good working relationships between parents and service professionals for the benefit of children or young people with disabilities. It begins with a list of reasons for partnership and a discussion of the needs and strengths of families. It then examines the essence of partnership, which is…

This guide assists in establishing a collaborative unit or a task group to deliver services to children and youth with serious emotional disabilities and their families. The guide is not intended to be an exhaustive manual, but does address the primary activities of professionals using interagency collaboration to establish comprehensive systems…

An Illinois elementary school district concerned about unnecessary referrals for possible special education designed and piloted a regular education assistance team system which brought about greater regular teacher collaboration and increased accuracy in referral for case study evaluation. The building level teams consisted of regular education…

The usefulness of microcomputers for teaching social science research methods has been the subject of numerous articles. This article describes how microcomputers can be used to teach public policy content, particularly topics involving controversial issues. The discussion is organized into four sections. Section 1, "Four Important Elements,"…

This annotated directory provides practitioners and service providers with references to existing programs, tools, and resources that school improvement teams may use to design and implement projects. The directory draws on a variety of products developed or used by state departments of education, school districts, regional educational…

This narrative about new and old technologies in communicating school election issues to the voting public discusses desktop publishing, word processing, television tapes, and public opinion sampling techniques. Groundwork involves understanding how campaigns are organized to determine appropriate application of technology to strategies and to…

Cooperative Learning is a teaching methodology based on the belief that learning increases as students develop cooperative skills. A recent experiment with cooperative learning at the Philippine Refugee Processing Center indicates that it can be used effectively with low-level learners of English as a second language to foster both language…

Two studies evaluated a comprehensive cooperative learning approach to elementary reading and writing instruction, called Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC). The subjects in the first study, 461 third- and fourth-grade students in a suburban Maryland school district, were divided into experimental and control groups, with the…

This book discusses practical ways to improve a school's climate by increasing both productivity and satisfaction concurrently. Chapter 1, "Defining School Climate," identifies the overarching goals of school climate improvement, the basic human needs that school climate must address, the factors that make up a school's climate and…

Directed to college of education faculty members, this paper provides practical advice for developing model education projects by means of interagency cooperation. The first section describes the numerous Macomb Projects that have received state and federal funding including Handicapped Children's Early Education Program funding. Projects focus on…

Action research conducted by teams of university professors and middle school teachers investigated the relationship between teachers' developmental stages, collaborative research, and individual teacher change. Section 1 describes the study's purposes and objectives and the methods used in analyzing teachers' stages of development. An overview of…

The symposium from which these papers were taken dealt with the processes and problems involved in developing a fully collaborative relationship among the federal government (specifically, the National Institute of Education), the Research and Development Center for Teacher Education at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Austin, Texas,…

This paper describes the assessment procedures used by the Child and Family Resource Program (CFRP) to identify and address the needs of families and of individual family members. CFRP was developed as part of the Head Start Improvement and Innovation effort to provide individualized comprehensive developmental services to families with children…

Guidelines for teachers of English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) who wish to undertake an ESOL materials development project are presented. Three areas that affect all such projects are discussed: (1) writing for a local or a wider audience, (2) writing as a team effort, and (3) writing as a decision-making process. In creating for a local…

In the Netherlands, the immediate support and coaching of primary schools and kindergartens is institutionalized in a nationwide network of local and regional school support agencies. This research study sought information about the role and characteristics of external consultants and their relationship to the school. Explorative case studies were…