Course Objectives

• Describe the adverse effects poverty often has on student learning.
• Distinguish explicit beliefs about poverty and people who live in poverty from tacitly held assumptions.
• Analyze how mental maps affect educators’ behavior and attitudes.
• Investigate your city and state and your school and district free and reduced-price lunch census data.
• Assess your school using suggestions from Gorski (2007) and Landsman (2014) for challenging the status quo in your school.
• Determine whether poverty is a school-based or societal problem and how a both/and solution is needed to address both types.
• Describe the structures and processes that foster healthy, safe, and supportive learning environments.
• Assess the processes and structures already in place to create a healthy, safe, and supportive learning environment in your school or district.
• Design next steps for improving the learning environment in your school.
• Investigate the key factors that improve student learning in high-poverty schools.
• Define the relationship between student learning and professional learning.
• Design actions you could take to ensure the work focuses on improving student, professional, and system learning.
• Identify structures and processes for building leadership capacity (e.g., developing and strategically using the capabilities of educators, students, families, and caregivers) in high-poverty schools.
• Examine the way you currently manage resources (e.g., time, money, people, and data).
• Determine ways to improve how you use resources to build leadership capacity through- out your school.
• Examine practices that encourage partnerships with parents and families or caregivers in supporting their children’s education.
• Design ways to authentically engage parents, families, and the community in your school.
• Analyze your experiences with parent, family, and community engagement.

Syllabus

(ASCD PD Online course, 2016) Self-paced asynchronous online course. Upon completion, learners will be awarded an ASCD Certificate worth up to 20 Clock Hours.