Leveraging Socio-Emotional Assessment to Foster Children’s Human Rights focuses on teaching and assessing students’ social and emotional attributes within the broader context of children’s rights. School teachers are charged with more than just academic development – every day, they have opportunities to guide children toward humanistic, justice-orientated perspectives and to serve as role models and relationship-builders. Built from a growing body of research on the benefits of socio-emotional learning and assessment in classrooms, this book prepares pre-service and in-service teachers to take on the shifting mindset that is required for learning processes that promote dignity and respectful relations in the classroom. These concise, accessible chapters address the value and effects of positive student-teacher relationships, classroom implementation and assessment methods, student- and parent-inclusive feedback and more.

Understanding Instructionally Useful Assessment offers new insights into how various types of assessments, from the state to the classroom, will differ in their usefulness for supporting instructional decision-making and student learning. In order to most effectively serve students, it is essential that educators avoid conflating the assessment information that teachers use for instructional purposes and the data that leaders and administrators use for evaluative or monitoring purposes. This book provides classroom teachers as well as school and district leaders with a clear conception of what makes assessments—their purpose, design, reporting, and resulting information—useful or not for informing instruction and how they can select assessment tools suited to specific purposes. Each chapter addresses the knowledge and skills that K-12 staff need in order to challenge claims made by policymakers, test vendors, or even other educators that any assessment can be used to inform instruction. Educators will come away better prepared to remove unnecessary or redundant assessments from their systems and to create structures, policies, and processes that best support the instructional usefulness of assessments for student learning.

Using Grading to Support Student Learning offers an accessible foundation for using grading practices to support student learning through classroom assessment. Purposeful, defensible grading and reporting mechanisms cannot be neglected in today’s reform climate, and new approaches are needed to understand and refine the roles of homework, formative and summative assessments, and standards across grade levels. Evidence-based and full of illustrative examples, this book bridges research and theory on grading and assessment with classroom practices for pre-service and in-service teachers and fresh perspectives for educational researchers studying grading practices.

Now more than ever, there is a need for early childhood professionals to comprehensively integrate trauma-sensitive practices into their work with children and families. This essential resource offers instructional strategies teachers can use daily to support their students dealing with trauma in early learning environments. Readers will learn to create opportunities for children to use their natural language—play—to reduce their stress, to cope with adversity, to build resilience, and even to heal from trauma. Nicholson and Kurtz provide vignettes, case study examples, textboxes, photographs, and descriptions of adapted therapeutic strategies ready for implementation in the classroom. Practical and comprehensive, this book is ideal for both prospective and veteran early childhood educators seeking to understand trauma-informed practices when working with young children (birth–8) in a range of environments.

This second edition of Trauma-Informed Practices for Early Childhood Educators continues to guide childcare providers and early educators working with infants, toddlers, preschoolers and early elementary-aged children to understand trauma as well as its impact on young children’s brains, behavior, learning and development. The book covers a range of trauma-responsive teaching strategies that readers can use to create strength-based environments that support children’s health, healing and resiliency. Updates include a greater emphasis on resilience and collaborating with mental health specialists, new chapters on developing children’s body awareness/sensory literacy and pathways to regulation that reduce stress through breathing techniques and mindful movement, as well as new vignettes and case studies to use in workshops or professional development. Supervisors and coaches will learn a range of powerful trauma-responsive practices that they can use to support workforce development and enhance their quality improvement initiatives.

For many students, working while in college is a defining characteristic of the undergraduate experience. However, student workers often view campus employment as a money-making opportunity rather than a chance for personal development. Likewise, institutions often neglect to consider campus jobs as a means to education and student engagement.It is the distinction between work for remuneration and work for personal development which shapes much of the discussion of student employment throughout A Good Job. This book makes the case for campus employment as a high-impact practice in higher education and provides models for institutional efforts to implement new student employment strategies.Carefully designed campus employment opportunities can have numerous benefits, including career exploration and preparation, learning, and increased engagement leading to increased retention. The authors make the case that employment can and should be a purposeful and powerful component in any higher education institution’s efforts to support student learning, development, and success.This book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in capitalizing on the developmental and learning potential of student employment on campus.