Stephanie L. Brown

Steps to Schoolwide Success makes a powerful case for the implementation of a school reform that bridges academic and social-emotional learning systems in high schools. Based on a multi-year project in Broward County, Florida, the book describes how the biggest difference in academic success from school to school was not in instructional practice but in the systematic attention to personal relationships between adults and students. In the higher performing schools, educators made deliberate efforts to engage with students; established organizational structures to support students; and encouraged a language and culture of personalization. Working with the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, a research-practice partnership that included Vanderbilt University, Florida State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, educators in Broward County identified five core practices and specific implementation strategies to improve student academic, social-emotional, and behavioral outcomes---practices whose efficacy is supported by prior research and theory. This approach, called Personalization for Academic and Social Emotional Learning (PASL), emphasizes systemic personalization where adults intentionally attend to practices in schools that improve relationships between adults and students. Drawing on multiple sources, the book delves into the five components of PASL, providing stories from educators and students to illustrate how they were adapted in different schools through a process of continuous improvement.Steps to Schoolwide Success challenges conventional, fragmented, and top-down efforts at reform, and points the way to a new generation of efforts that emphasize continuous, systematic improvement. Readers will learn how high schools can be made stronger and more responsive places when educators employ strategies that bridge academic and social emotional systems.

Steps to Schoolwide Success makes a powerful case for the implementation of a school reform that bridges academic and social-emotional learning systems in high schools. Based on a multi-year project in Broward County, Florida, the book describes how the biggest difference in academic success from school to school was not in instructional practice but in the systematic attention to personal relationships between adults and students. In the higher performing schools, educators made deliberate efforts to engage with students; established organizational structures to support students; and encouraged a language and culture of personalization. Working with the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, a research-practice partnership that included Vanderbilt University, Florida State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, educators in Broward County identified five core practices and specific implementation strategies to improve student academic, social-emotional, and behavioral outcomes---practices whose efficacy is supported by prior research and theory. This approach, called Personalization for Academic and Social Emotional Learning (PASL), emphasizes systemic personalization where adults intentionally attend to practices in schools that improve relationships between adults and students. Drawing on multiple sources, the book delves into the five components of PASL, providing stories from educators and students to illustrate how they were adapted in different schools through a process of continuous improvement.Steps to Schoolwide Success challenges conventional, fragmented, and top-down efforts at reform, and points the way to a new generation of efforts that emphasize continuous, systematic improvement. Readers will learn how high schools can be made stronger and more responsive places when educators employ strategies that bridge academic and social emotional systems.

Moving Beyond Self-Interest is an interdisciplinary volume that discusses cutting-edge developments in the science of caring for and helping others. In Part I, contributors raise foundational issues related to human caregiving. They present new theories and data to show how natural selection might have shaped a genuinely altruistic drive to benefit others, how this drive intersects with the attachment and caregiving systems, and how it emerges from a broader social engagement system made possible by symbiotic regulation of autonomic physiological states. In Part II, contributors propose a new neurophysiological model of the human caregiving system and present arguments and evidence to show how mammalian neural circuitry that supports parenting might be recruited to direct human cooperation and competition, human empathy, and parental and romantic love. Part III is devoted to the psychology of human caregiving. Some contributors in this section show how an evolutionary perspective helps us better understand parental investment in and empathic concern for children at risk for, or suffering from, various health, behavioral, and cognitive problems. Other contributors identify circumstances that differentially predict caregiver benefits and costs, and raise the question of whether extreme levels of compassion are actually pathological. The section concludes with a discussion of semantic and conceptual obstacles to the scientific investigation of caregiving. Part IV focuses on possible interfaces between new models of caregiving motivation and economics, political science, and social policy development. In this section, contributors show how the new theory and research discussed in this volume can inform our understanding of economic utility, policies for delivering social services (such as health care and education), and hypotheses concerning the origins and development of human society, including some of its more problematic features of nationalism, conflict, and war. The chapters in this volume help readers appreciate the human capacity for engaging in altruistic acts, on both a small and large scale.