CFTL releases Ready to Succeed in the Classroom and Grappling with the Gaps
The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning today released two reports: Grappling with the Gaps and Ready to Succeed in the Classroom. The Center’s work in this area is part of the broader Ready to Succeed Initiative funded by the Stuart Foundation, which focuses on improving educational outcomes for children and youth in the foster care system (emphasis DSC).
Grappling with the Gaps identifies current gaps in the research on the education of children and youth in foster care based on interviews with twelve experts in education and child welfare from across the nation.
Ready to Succeed in the Classroom includes a suite of documents that brings forward the voices of classroom teachers. Through a series of discussion groups held by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, experienced teachers shared their ideas, advice, strategies, and recommendations for how to improve the educational outcomes for these students. The publications provide practical advice and ideas for classroom teachers, school and district administrators, and community members.
For example, experienced teachers, who have had children and youth in their classrooms who are in the foster care system, share their beliefs that it is important to keep expectations high and make them absolutely clear and consistent, whether they are about learning, respect, classroom behaviors, effort, or anything else. Although teachers expressed a great deal of compassion and sympathy for their students in the foster care system, they also felt that lowering or altering expectations for these students constituted a profound disservice to them. “I tell them the past doesn’t have to shape the future,” one teacher explained.
Ready to Succeed in the Classroom and Grappling with the Gaps are now available for free download at our Website: http://www.cftl.org/whatsnew.php