The School Leader's Guide to Student Learning Supports: New Directions for Addressing Barriers to Learning

Everyday, a wide range of learning, behavioural, physical, and emotional problems interfere with the ability of students to participate effectively and fully benefit from the instruction teachers provide. Such barriers to learning encompass both learning disabilities and special needs as well as a wide range of external factors stemming from restricted enrichment opportunities. This guide for school leaders, and its companion volume for site-based staff, emphasizes frameworks and strategies for dealing with the entire range of learning, behaviour, and emotional problems seen in schools within a context that emphasizes student and staff strengths, resilience, assets, and protective factors. The authors provide a four-pronged approach to addressing barriers to learning, emphasizing adopting an intervention framework that is comprehensive, multifaceted and cohesive; rethinking infrastructure and policy; and using a sophisticated approach to facilitating major systemic changes. Built on decades of research, and endorsed by more than 20 professional associations, the authors' approach provides specific tools and strategies for understanding and assessing the gap between what students need and what they are receiving, as well as creating the analyses and implementation frameworks that will lead to new and better directions for addressing barriers to learning. A series of orienting questions at the start of each chapter will help readers visualize how the content applies to their own specific schools and districts and can also be used to guide discussions with colleagues and community, and as a focus for staff development sessions. More than 75 figures, guides, and tools for analysis and capacity building are also included in the book, as are cartoons, quotations, and case studies.