A Practical Guide to Service Learning: Strategies for Positive Development in Schools - Hardcover

Wilczenski, Felicia L.; Coomey, Susan M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0387465383 ISBN 13: 9780387465388

Publisher: Springer, 2007

Synopsis

“School is so boring!I hate it!” “Why do I have to learn this stuff? I’ll never use it!” “What does this class have to do with anything?” As school psychologists and school counselors, how often do you hear this? Chances are many of the students referred to you do not have any cognitive impairment or emotional disability. They are bored and disengaged from school. Some students may be struggling with personal and career identity issues. Others come to you when interpersonal concerns or emotional distress interfere with their ability to learn. Still others have learning disabilities, cognitive impairment, or psychological disorders that hinder their academic progress. In this era of standards-based instruction and No Child Left Behind, the bottom line for schools is students’ academic performance. The intense pressure on teachers to close the achievement gap and to produce students who achieve academically also pressures you to find effective interventions to promote school success. Ultimately, the goal of your work is to enable academic learning to take place―for both regular and special education students. The challenge is enormous.

About this title

About the Author

Felicia L. Wilczenski, Ed.D., is an Associate Professor on the faculty of the School Psychology Program and Director of the School Counseling Program in the Department of Counseling and School Psychology in the Graduate College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is author of numerous articles addressing social and emotional interventions in K-12 settings. Dr. Wilczenski is interested in service learning applications in school-based mental health programs and incorporates service learning in her graduate courses. She has conducted research and published articles concerning service learning processes and outcomes.

Susan M. Coomey, M.Ed., is currently employed as a school psychologist in the Shrewsbury MA Public Schools and is a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research interests focus on service learning to promote social, emotional, and academic learning in K-12 settings. She has presented research at national and international service learning conferences.

From the Back Cover

The ultimate goal for school psychologists, teachers, and other allied mental health and educational professionals is to ensure that all children are able to achieve academic success in the classroom. Still, a significant number of schoolchildren feel caught in an academic, social-emotional vortex that can be demoralizing, isolating, and disorienting. Some may be cognitively impaired. Others may simply be bored. Many are well-adjusted but overwhelmed with academic and extracurricular demands.

Ensuring that all students achieve their full academic potential is no small feat. Service learning – an experiential approach to education that involves students in meaningful, real-world activities – can advance social, emotional, and academic curricula goals while simultaneously benefiting the students and their communities. It supports character development by providing situations in the community in which caring, helping, and collaboration as well as sensitivity to culture and social justice issues become integral parts of the educative process.

A Practical Guide to Service Learning: Strategies for Positive Development in Schools is a valuable resource that:

• Describes how service learning – an intervention that can be both remedial or preventive and individual or systemic – can enable school psychologists and other educational and counseling professionals to expand their roles beyond working with special populations to serving students within the academic mainstream.

• Highlights the connections between the positive psychology movement, the nurturing of purpose in youth, and the benefits of service learning.

• Introduces case studies of school-based mental health professionals who have implemented service learning.

• Provides practical materials and forms to guidemental health practitioners in organizing and assessing service learning activities.

School psychologists, counselors, allied educational and mental health practitioners – and anyone who works with children in schools – will find this volume a must-have reference.

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0387465383
• ISBN 13: 9780387465388
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 195