Resources: Core Practice 5

Strong Partnerships and Networks

Toolbox Resources

ASCD is dedicated to excellence in learning, teaching, and leading so that every child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. One of the ways that ASCD does this is by providing high-quality, research-based resources for educators and school leaders. Visit the website to find articles, books, webinars, videos, and white papers on a range of topics.

Becoming a Learning School

From Amazon.com: From setting the stage to engaging the community in understanding the purpose of collaborative professional learning teams, this volume covers what leaders need to know to implement more effective professional learning. Chapters focus on changing school culture, scheduling time, planning, using data, designs for professional learning, facilitating collaborative professional learning teams, evaluating learning, and more. The roles of central office administrators, the principal, and the coach in creating successful, effective learning teams are outlined. An accompanying CD includes nearly 500 pages of tools. In addition, using the included Innovation Configuration map, teams can assess just where they stand in reaching critical objectives for effective learning.

Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family-School Partnerships

From Amazon.com: Countless studies demonstrate that students with parents actively involved in their education at home and school are more likely to earn higher grades and test scores, enroll in higher-level programs, graduate from high school, and go on to post-secondary education. Beyond the Bake Sale shows how to form these essential partnerships and how to make them work.

Packed with tips from principals and teachers, checklists, and an invaluable resource section, Beyond the Bake Sale reveals how to build strong collaborative relationships and offers practical advice for improving interactions between parents and teachers, from insuring that PTA groups are constructive and inclusive to navigating the complex issues surrounding diversity in the classroom.

Written with candor, clarity, and humor, Beyond the Bake Sale is essential reading for teachers, parents on the front lines in public schools, and administrators and policy makers at all levels.

Building School-Community Partnerships: Collaboration for Student Success

From Amazon.com: This current era of high stakes testing, accountability, and shrinking educational budgets demands that schools seek bold and innovative ways to build strong learning environments for all students. Community involvement is a powerful tool in generating resources that are essential for educational excellence.

Building School-Community Partnerships: Collaboration for Student Success emphasizes the importance of community involvement for effective school functioning, student support and well-being, and community health and development. This sharp, insightful book serves as an excellent resource for educators seeking to establish school-community partnerships to achieve goals for their schools and the students, families, and communities they serve. Schools can collaborate with a wide variety of community partners to obtain the resources they need to achieve important goals for students’ learning. Some of these partners may include:

Businesses and corporations
Universities and other institutions of higher learning
National and local volunteer organizations
Social service agencies and health partners
Faith-based organizations and institutions

Work successfully with community partners to improve school programs and curricula, strengthen families, and expand your students’ learning experiences!

California Education and the Environment Initiative

The California Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) is a statewide effort to make environmental literacy an integral part of K-12 instruction in California. EEI provides educators with professional learning and instructional materials that demonstrate how to blend the environment into the teaching of traditional academic subjects like science, history, and English language arts.

Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council

The Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council believes that everyone, from the kindergartner entering the classroom to the Ph.D. student performing research in a lab, should have the ability to learn in a green school.

Green schools reduce the environmental impact of buildings and grounds, have a positive effect on student and teacher health, and increase environmental literacy among students and graduates. With these three areas of impact as the foundation for their work, the Center connects with schools and campuses to achieve their vision of green schools for all within this generation. Working directly with teachers, students, administrators, elected officials, and communities, they create programs, resources, and partnerships that transform all schools into healthy learning environments. Visit their website to view and download reports, presentations, case studies, and web trainings.

Center for Green Schools School Board Advocacy Toolkit

The School Board Advocacy Toolkit from the Center for Green Schools is a free resource that helps green schools allies address sustainability issues and impact greener policies at the school district level. It is designed to make local green schools advocacy approachable and actionable. The toolkit contains talking points, template letters and presentations, sample policy language, and more for you to use to promote greener policy options related to any school sustainability issue.

Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools

From Amazon.com: The Change Leadership Group at the Harvard School of Education has, through its work with educators, developed a thoughtful approach to the transformation of schools in the face of increasing demands for accountability. This book brings the work of the Change Leadership Group to a broader audience, providing a framework to analyze the work of school change and exercises that guide educators through the development of their practice as agents of change. It exemplifies a new and powerful approach to leadership in schools.

The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education

The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education works with schools and school districts to help them integrate Education for Sustainability (EfS) into their curriculum. Core services include consulting and leadership development (on-site and off-site); professional development and faculty coaching; curriculum design, assessment, mapping, and alignment; and school and community partnerships. The Cloud Institute holds an annual Summer Design Studio that enables educators, administrators, and program designers to learn how to design and embed EfS into curriculum, assessments, and programs.

Community Works Institute

Community Works Institute (CWI) works with school and community educators—across the U.S. and internationally—in support of teaching practices that connect K-16 students and curriculum to their local community and the world. CWI’s work focuses on helping educators integrate place-based, service-learning, and sustainability within the curriculum, with the goal of making that a central part of every student’s K-16 experience. CWI offers a wide variety of professional development opportunities and customized on-site trainings for schools and organizations. Each year, CWI holds two intensive Summer Institutes that offer expert training, powerful collaborative opportunities, and a chance to work with educators who literally come from around the world.

Creating Communities of Courage: Lessons from the Field

This report from the National School Climate Center highlights some of the most effective practices district and school leaders can use to improve school climate and develop social-emotional learning.

Darden/Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education

A joint venture of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and the Curry School of Education, the Darden/Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education (PLE) was established to support the leaders developing our nation’s future. Established in 2003, PLE draws on the most innovative thinking in business and education to address the challenges and needs of education leaders in eliciting system- and school-level improvement, as well as inspiring educators and students to achieve their fullest potential. Visit the website to learn more about PLE programs and access case studies, research, and resources.

Diane Sweeney Consulting: The Place for Student-Centered Coaching

Diane Sweeney Consulting supports the implementation of student-centered coaching in K-12 schools. Their qualified team of K-12 consultants provide the following services:

We partner with coaches, principals, and district leaders to implement a data-driven and student-centered model of instructional coaching and professional development
We provide direct coaching to teachers using a student-centered approach
We provide keynotes and other speaking engagements for educational organizations
We offer institutes, conferences, and workshops for coaches, principals, and district leaders

In addition, the website features a blog and resources, including podcasts, videos, study guides, and a student-centered coaching toolkit.

EcoRise

At EcoRise, we believe in the power of teachers to ignite innovation and the potential of students to design a sustainable future for all. Our school-based program empowers youth to tackle real-world challenges in their schools and communities by teaching sustainability, design innovation, and social entrepreneurship. Over 350 schools have implemented our full program and 1,800 teachers in 26 countries have accessed our educational materials. Our curriculum, classroom grants, ongoing training, and support engages educators and students in meaningful learning experiences. Our program empowers teachers to confidently champion sustainability and innovation in their classroom, while students cultivate 21st century skills and sustainable living practices.

We offer:

Online and in-person professional development, curriculum, and self-paced resources for green industry connections to K–12 educators, STEM educators, and Project-Based Learning teachers.
For U.S.-based schools, we award micro grants to student-designed sustainability projects.
Our committed partnership with like-minded institutions and corporate supporters to expand reach and impact.

Engage Every Family: Five Simple Principles

From Amazon.com: Family engagement increases student achievement but how do schools connect with families who don’t participate yet? Educators can easily become frustrated trying to reach the disconnected and often fall back to engaging the already engaged. Is it possible to win over everyone? Discover how to move beyond theory to change your culture for better family engagement and student achievement. Through practical steps, reflections, and case studies, you will discover and address:

How and where family engagement breaks down, and
How to create a truly inviting culture for successful community and family partnerships

Families in Schools

Created in 2000, Families in Schools is a nonprofit that’s dedicated to involving parents and communities in their children’s education to achieve lifelong success. The organization offers training and professional development programs to help schools foster authentic parent engagement.

Family Engagement: A Guide to Tools, Strategies and Resources

This guide is intended to help school planning teams refine their family engagement strategies and clarify what they are trying to do, why, and how. It includes strategies and tactics that are rooted in the research of what works and a curated collection of tools and resources.

Family Engagement Toolkit: Continuous Improvement through an Equity Lens

This toolkit, developed by the California Department of Education, provides schools and school districts with practical planning and evaluation tools that support efforts to engage all families, particularly those of underrepresented and underserved students. Most of the information and resources in the toolkit are universally applicable to all schools and school districts.

Grades of Green

Grades of Green was founded in 2008 by four California moms who wanted a better world for their children. This nonprofit provides schools with free and easy access to over 40 activities that aim to instill environmental values in students. Activities are broken out into categories, including air, energy, toxins, waste, water, and earth. The organization also has a Youth Corps Eco Leadership Program that mentors 60 selected second- through twelfth-grade students to become eco-leaders. Participation in the program is free, though students must submit an application to be considered.

Handbook on Family and Community Engagement

This handbook contains short articles that cover research and promising practices in family engagement and fictional vignettes of challenging situations involving parents and educators.

Improving Schools through Community Engagement: A Practical Guide for Educators

From Amazon.com: Engage your community and help students achieve their full potential!

Americans see public schools as a critical community resource and rank education as a priority second only to the economy. How can educators harness this public interest in education to bring parents, families, and communities to action for our schools? Improving Schools Through Community Engagement addresses these questions and more in this invaluable source of methods and strategies for educators to initiate action.

Involvement of family and community members has a significant impact on student achievement. This handy resource provides a framework that education leaders can use in designing and implementing initiatives to more effectively engage the public by:

Framing a clear focus for community engagement
Identifying and including representatives from each diverse constituency group
Developing an understanding of the varied perspectives of these groups
Presenting strategies to encourage constituent involvement and action

A more engaged community results in improved teaching and learning. The energy of parents, teachers, and communities working together starts small and spreads over time. If everyone gets involved, the possibilities for action are limitless!

Leadership and Networks: New Ways of Developing Leadership in a Highly Connected World

This report, written by Deborah Meehan and Claire Reinelt of the Leadership Learning Community, provides examples of leadership models, values, skills, and behaviors needed to embrace network strategies, and recommends practical things you can do to develop network capacities and a network mindset.

Leadership for Green Schools

From Routledge: Leadership for Green Schools, provides educational leaders, teachers, facility professionals, and community partners with the tools they need to lead and manage greener, more sustainable schools. Authors Lisa A.W. Kensler and Cynthia L. Uline draw from the fields of sustainability science, built learning environment, and educational leadership to explain what green schools look like, what role school buildings play in advancing sustainable organizational and instructional practices, and why school leaders are “greening” their leadership. Sustainability can often seem like an unreachable, utopian set of goals, but this important resource uses real life examples of successful schools and leaders, demonstrating how green schools advance the work already underway to restore engaged learning within our schools and communities. Leadership for Green Schools is a unique and important resource to help leaders reduce the environmental impact of school buildings and immerse students in purposeful, meaningful learning for a sustainable, just future.

Leading Culture and Systems Change: How to Develop Network Leadership and Support Emerging Networks

Leading Culture and Systems Change: How to Develop Network Leadership and Support Emerging Networks examines why people and organizations working on complex systemic problems (like climate change and structural racism) are using network approaches to make more progress. Network leadership requires a shift away from the dominant thinking that sees leadership as the achievements of exceptional individuals rather than the collective efforts of people working together around commonly held goals and aspirations. This publication is a guide with very practical ideas about how to make network principles a way of working and leading.

The Marshall Memo

The Marshall Memo, published 50 times a year since 2003, is designed to keep principals, teachers, instructional coaches, superintendents, and other Pre-K-12 educators well-informed on current research and best practices. Kim Marshall, drawing on his decades as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, consultant, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.” A one-year subscription costs $50.

Movement Strategy Center

The Movement Strategy Center (MSC) is dedicated to transformative movement building. MSC seeks to create a movement ecosystem of deeply connected groups that share values and rely on each other to respond to the needs of impacted communities, advance policy solutions, and transform the lives of people on the frontlines of change. Their website highlights a number of resources around movement building, including youth development and engagement.

Parents for Healthy Schools

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Parents for Healthy Schools is a compilation of resources and tools to help schools, school groups, and school wellness committees encourage parent engagement in school health. Resources include fact sheets, a guide with training and evaluation materials, and an e-learning course.

Partners in Education: A Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships

This paper presents a framework for designing family engagement initiatives that build capacity among educators and families to partner with one another around student success. Based in existing research and best practices, this framework is designed to act as a compass for the development of family engagement strategies, policies, and programs. Three case studies of duel capacity-building are included.

Powerful Partnerships: A Teacher’s Guide to Engaging Families for Student Success

From Amazon.com: Teachers and administrators will learn how to create the respectful, trusting relationships with families necessary to build the educational partnerships that best support children’s learning. The book will cover the mindset and core beliefs required to bond with families, and will provide guidance on how to plan engagement opportunities and events throughout the school year that undergird effective partnerships between families and schools.

Project XQ: The Super School Project

Project XQ: The Super School Project is an effort to rethink American high school education for the 21^st century. This includes ensuring students are masters of all fundamental literacies; holders of foundational knowledge; original thinkers for an uncertain world; learners for life; and generous collaborators for tough problems. The project offers a series of 13 modules on its website that explore topics such as Students in the 21^st Century; Student Agency and Engagement; and the Science of Adolescent Learning. Check out all 13 modules and learn how to get involved in the project’s work on its website.

Ready or Not: How California School Districts are Reimagining Parent Engagement in the Era of Local Control Funding Formula

This report examines the inner workings of California school districts as they try to meet the parent engagement expectations of the Local Control Funding Formula. Drawing on thirty interviews with district leaders and staff members, the report is an honest and highly specific portrait of the very real challenges of parent engagement.

Resources for Building Community Partnerships from Edutopia

This round-up of Edutopia articles features examples of how schools can benefit from the support and expertise of local businesses and organizations, as well as strategies for fostering successful business and community partnerships.

School-Community Partnerships: Joining Forces to Support the Learning and Development of All Students

The third case study from the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development discusses the role community partners can play in supporting children’s learning in collaboration with schools.

School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action (Fourth Edition)

From Amazon.com: When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, this fourth edition of a bestseller provides tools and guidelines to use to develop more effective and equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, this foundational text demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-oriented programs. Readers will find:

Many examples and vignettes
Rubrics and checklists for implementation of plans
CD-ROM complete with slides and notes for workshop presentations

Schooling by Design: Mission, Action, and Achievement

From Amazon: “Why, despite years of trying, have efforts to achieve lasting, effective school reform fallen short? What curricular and policy elements must be in place to move forward? How should the roles of teachers and education leaders be defined to best support the point of school? Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and other questions in Schooling by Design: Mission, Action, and Achievement. Building on the premise of Understanding by Design, their acclaimed framework for curriculum, instruction, and assessment, the authors present a compelling argument for using the same approach to reach a grand goal: the reform of schooling as a whole. In their view, reform rests on six pillars: (1) a relentless focus on the long-term mission of school: enabling learners to demonstrate understanding and mature habits of mind; (2) a curriculum and assessment framework that honors the mission and ensures that content coverage is no longer the accepted approach to instruction; (3) a set of principles of learning that support all decisions about pedagogy and planning; (4) Structures, policies, job descriptions, practices, and use of resources consistent with mission and learning principles; (5) an overall strategy that includes ongoing feedback and adjustment; and (6) a set of tactics linked to strategy, including a planning process that uses backward design to accomplish the key work of reform. Practical, insightful, and provocative, Schooling by Design elaborates on each of these elements and presents educators with both the rationale and the methodology for closing the gap between what we say we want from school and what school actually delivers–for turning vision into reality.”

Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education

From Amazon.com: A unique collaboration between the celebrated management thinker and Fifth Discipline author Peter Senge and a team of renowned educators and organizational change leaders, Schools that Learn describes how schools can adapt, grow, and change in the face of the demands and challenges of our society, and provides tools, techniques, and references for bringing those aspirations to life.

The new revised and updated edition offers practical advice for overcoming the many challenges that face our communities and educational systems today. It shows teachers, administrators, students, parents, and community members how to successfully use principles of organizational learning, including systems thinking and shared vision, to address the challenges that face our nation’s schools. In a fast-changing world where school populations are increasingly diverse, children live in ever-more-complex social and media environments, standardized tests are applied as overly simplistic “quick fixes,” and advances in science and technology continue to accelerate, the pressures on our educational system are inescapable. Schools That Learn offers a much-needed way to open dialogue about these problems – and provides pragmatic opportunities to transform school systems into learning organizations.

Drawing on observations and advice from more than 70 writers and experts on schools and education, this book features:

Methods for implementing organizational learning and explanations of why they work
Compelling stories and anecdotes from the “field” – classrooms, schools, and communities
Charts, tables, and diagrams to illustrate systems thinking and other practices
Guiding principles for how to apply innovative practices in all types of school systems
Individual exercises useful for both teachers and students
Team exercises to foster communication within the classroom, school, or community group
New essays on topics like educating for sustainability, systems thinking in the classroom, and “the great game of high school.”
New recommendations for related books, articles, videotapes, and web sites
And more

Schools That Learn is the essential guide for anyone who cares about the future of education and keeping our nation’s schools competitive in our fast-changing world.

Seeing is Believing: Promising Practices for How School Districts Promote Family Engagement

This Harvard Family Research Project issue brief describes core district level components necessary for systemic family engagement, policy recommendations, and examples of promising practices and lessons learned in six school districts.

Shelburne Farms

Shelburne Farms is a nonprofit organization educating for a sustainable future. That means learning that links knowledge, inquiry, and action to help students build a healthy future for their communities and the planet. Its home campus is a 1,400-acre working farm, forest, and National Historic Landmark. Shelbourne Farms’ school programs staff support both student learning and professional development for educators. The ideas of place and sustainability are at the heart of its work. Shelbourne Farms offers a variety of experiences that inspire deep connections to community and a commitment to a healthy future.

Society for Organizational Learning, North America

The Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), North America is an intentional learning community devoted to the interdependent development of people and their institutions in service of inspired performance and meaningful results. SoL, North America offers courses and programs led by world renowned authorities on organizational learning, systems thinking, and leadership, as well as coaching and consulting services.

Toolkit of Resources for Engaging Families and the Community as Partners in Education

This four-part toolkit brings together research, promising practices, tools, and other resources to guide educators in strengthening partnerships with families and community members. Topics covered include building an understanding of family and community engagement, building a cultural bridge through cross-cultural communication, building trusting relationships with families and communities, and engaging families and community members in data conversations.