Safe Schools/Healthy Students initiative: Pinellas County,Florida

The Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) Initiative in Pinellas County, FL, emerged as a part of a broader local effort to implement creative educational and mental health programs to support children and families. This initiative focused on capacity building, prevention, and intervention efforts and comprehensive evaluation to address the barriers to learning and enhance healthy development. This article describes Pinellas County's plan, and highlights the instrumental roles played by school psychologists, which included grant writing, program and resource coordination, clinical services, program evaluation, staff training, parent advocacy, and steering committee membership. Promising outcomes and generalization of these findings to other communities is also discussed. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 40: 489–501, 2003.     

Face fidelity: Perspectives from a local evaluation of the Safe Schools/Healthy Students initiative

The creation of a federal Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) Initiative reflects a growing level of concern across the United States that many children do not feel safe at school, and that teachers must receive a new level of training to better equip themselves to manage a diverse student population. PROJECT BLUE was funded during the first phase of this initiative and proposed to provide students in its District with a range of services to improve school safety, decrease school violence, decrease alcohol and drug use, and improve student mental health. The local evaluation team collected information regarding project implementation and its impact on school safety, school climate, and teacher preparedness to manage student misbehavior. Selected results are highlighted in the article. However, the primary purpose of this article is to document lessons learned from the evaluation of this project. Lessons learned are presented in four areas: leadership, communication, system change efforts, and local evaluation of federal initiatives. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 40: 515–529, 2003.     

Lessons learned from a decade implementing Comprehensive Sexuality Education in resource poor settings: The World Starts With Me

Today, more than half of the world population is under the age of 25 years and one in four is under age 18. The urgency of expanding access to Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) notably for children and young people in Africa and Asia is greater than ever before. However, many challenges to the implementation and delivery of CSE in resource poor settings have been identified in the literature. CSE’s effectiveness could be strongly improved if these challenges were better met. This paper aims to contribute to those much-needed improvements by sharing lessons learned from a decade of implementation of one particular CSE programme, The World Starts With Me, among various populations in 11 low income countries in Africa and Asia. The aims, content, reach and effectiveness of the programme are described. Next, the challenges for implementation and delivery at student, teacher, school and context level are discussed with reference to the wider knowledge base in this area. Finally, suggestions are provided for ways forward including the increased sensitivity of programmes for normative and practical barriers to sexual health, further advancement towards gender transformativity, a far-reaching expansion of comprehensive forms of teacher training and coaching, and a serious stepping-up of multilevel ‘whole school’ approaches.     

The potential of Accelerated Learning Programmes (ALPs) for conflict-ridden countries and regions: Lessons learned from an experience in Iraq

International Review of Education - Accelerated learning programmes (ALPs) provide a fast-track second-chance opportunity to complete formal education, enabling disadvantaged children and youth to...     

Fostering uncertainty tolerance in anatomy education: Lessons learned from how humanities,arts and social science (HASS) educators develop learners' uncertainty tolerance

Uncertainty tolerance, individuals' perceptions/responses to uncertain stimuli, is increasingly recognized as critical to effective healthcare practice. While the Covid-19 pandemic generated collective uncertainty, healthcare-related uncertainty is omnipresent. Correspondingly, there is increasing focus on uncertainty tolerance as a health professional graduate “competency,” and a concomitant interest in identifying pedagogy fostering learners' uncertainty tolerance. Despite these calls, practical guidelines for educators are lacking. There is some initial evidence that anatomy education can foster medical students' uncertainty tolerance (e.g., anatomical variation and dissection novelty), however, there remains a knowledge gap regarding robust curriculum-wide uncertainty tolerance teaching strategies. Drawing upon humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) educators' established uncertainty tolerance pedagogies, this study sought to learn from HASS academics' experiences with, and teaching practices related to, uncertainty pedagogy using a qualitative, exploratory study design. Framework analysis was undertaken using an abductive approach, wherein researchers oscillate between inductive and deductive coding (comparing to the uncertainty tolerance conceptual model). During this analysis, the authors analyzed ~386 min of data from purposively sampled HASS academics' (n = 14) discussions to address the following research questions: (1) What teaching practices do HASS academics' perceive as impacting learners' uncertainty tolerance, and (2) How do HASS academics execute these teaching practices? The results extend current understanding of the moderating effects of education on uncertainty tolerance and supports prior findings that the anatomy learning environment is ripe for supporting learner uncertainty tolerance development. This study adds to growing literature on the powerful moderating effect education has on uncertainty tolerance and proposes translation of HASS uncertainty tolerance teaching practices to enhance anatomy education.     

博雅教育的命运及可能的未来:美国大众高等教育的经验

马丁·特罗指出,高等教育的问题——包括提供博雅教育的能力——都内在于经济增长之中。制度的性质随增长而改变,“大众化”意味着对接受高等教育的机会和社会民主化的乐观态度,容易在大学中产生一种结构和文化状况,这与真正严格的、以文本为基础的、以讨论为中心的、写作密集型的博雅教育是对立的。问题的核心在于规模、质量和成本这三者看上去不可调和,也就是如何在规模日益增大的背景下使博雅教育成为可能并具有成本效益。解决当前问题的关键在于有意识的沟通,这种沟通操作性地位于高等教育录取层面。本文提出三种解决方案:对大学的适当信息之制度化,比如大学的目的和功能;在分化的高等教育体系中,将申请人与院校恰当匹配的实践;对在高校中成为一个真正的学生之预期的理解的标准化。     

How transformational learning promotes caring,consultation and creativity,and ultimately contributes to sustainable development: Lessons from the Partnership for Education and Research about Responsible Living (PERL) network

Oases of learning which are transformative and lead to significant behavioural change can be found around the globe. Transformational learning has helped learners not only to understand what they have been taught but also to re-conceptualise and re-apply this understanding to their daily lives. Unfortunately, as many global reports indicate, inspirational transformational learning approaches for sustainable development are rare and have yet to become the norm – despite calls for such approaches by several outstanding educators and organisations. This article examines three learning approaches developed by the network of the Partnership for Education and Research about Responsible Living (PERL). These approaches are structured around core elements of transformative learning for sustainable development, yet focus particularly on the ability to care, consult with others and be creative. They seem to depend on the learners’ ability to articulate their perceptions of sustainable development in relation to their own values and to identify how these are actualised in their daily life. Together with other core elements of transformative learning, an almost magical (not precisely measurable) synergy then emerges. The intensity of this synergy appears to be directly related to the individual learner’s understanding of the contradictions, interlinkages and interdependencies of modern society. The impact of this synergy seems to be concurrent with the extent to which the learner engages in a continual learning process with those with whom he/she has contact. The findings of this study suggest that mainstreaming transformational learning for sustainable development in ways that release the “magic synergy of creative caring” can result in the emergence of individuals who are willing and able to move from “business as usual” towards more socially just, economically equitable, and environmentally sensitive behaviour.     

The longitudinal effect of the Aprender a Convivir (learning to live together) programme in childhood: the development of social competence / Efecto longitudinal del programa Aprender a Convivir en la infancia: desarrollo de la competencia social

Abstract

In the context of a changing society, strategies are required to eradicate the phenomenon of antisocial behaviour. The Aprender a Convivir universal prevention programme tries to provide such a response. This study attempts to test the effectiveness of the programme through a quasi-experimental long-term study carried out over three years in some nursery schools. Of the students who participated in this study (N = 784), those from the experimental group showed significant increases in social competence compared to the control group, and behavioural problems decreased, albeit not in any significant way. To draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the programme, further improvements are proposed to the design of the study.