Kinship Care Programs: Effective Marketing and Outreach Build With Care and They Will Come!

A workshop entitled “Marketing Your RAPP to Effectively Reach Relative Caregivers” was developed and offered at the 2019 Brookdale Foundation Training Conference for professionals who work with kinship caregivers, or “Relatives as Parents Programs” (RAPP). The intention of this interactive brainstorming session was to give individual RAPP programs the opportunity to share and adopt proven effective methods to reach, attract, and enhance their own local or statewide caregiver programs. The attending group was comprised of over 50 individuals who operated RAPP programs that spanned the US. The three workshop facilitators (authors of this brief with 70 collective years of experience) were chosen because their programs represented kinship professionals and caregivers from differing localities (urban, suburban, and rural), races, ethnicities, and financial demographics. Since the inception of these programs in the 1990s, and despite their demographic differences, the Grandparent Resource Center (GRC) of the New York City Department for the Aging, the Grandparent Connection of the Jewish Association Serving the Aged (JASA), and the Relatives as Parents Program (RAPP) of Cornell Cooperative Extension—Orange County (CCE-OC), utilized similar strategies that helped grow their programs from serving single digits to hundreds of families per year. The consensus of the authors, supported and added to by workshop participants, is that the shared strategies and methods proposed in this brief could be considered “best practices” and useful for any intergenerational program in the United States with a similarly defined audience

A Five-Dimensional Model of Creativity and its Assessment in Schools.

Creativity is increasingly valued as an important outcome of schooling,\ud frequently as part of so-called “21st century skills.” This article offers a\ud model of creativity based on five Creative Habits of Mind (CHoM) and\ud trialed with teachers in England by the Centre for Real-World Learning\ud (CRL) at the University of Winchester. It explores the defining and tracking\ud of creativity’s development in school students from a perspective of formative\ud assessment. Two benefits are identified: (a) When teachers understand\ud creativity they are, consequently, more effective in cultivating it in\ud learners; (b) When students have a better understanding of what creativity\ud is, they are better able to develop and to track the development of their\ud own CHoM. Consequently, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and\ud Development has initiated a multicountry study stimulated by CRL’s\ud approach. In Australia work to apply CRL’s thinking on the educational\ud assessment of creative and critical thinking is underway

School Effects on the Wellbeing of Children and Adolescents

Well-being is a multidimensional construct, with psychological, physical and social components. As theoretical basis to help understand this concept and how it relates to school, we propose the Self-Determination Theory, which contends that self-determined motivation and personality integration, growth and well-being are dependent on a healthy balance of three innate psychological needs of autonomy, relatedness and competence. Thus, current indicators involve school effects on children’s well-being, in many diverse modalities which have been explored. Some are described in this chapter, mainly: the importance of peer relationships; the benefits of friendship; the effects of schools in conjunction with some forms of family influence; the school climate in terms of safety and physical ecology; the relevance of the teacher input; the school goal structure and the implementation of cooperative learning. All these parameters have an influence in promoting optimal functioning among children and increasing their well-being by meeting the above mentioned needs. The empirical support for the importance of schools indicates significant small effects, which often translate into important real-life effects as it is admitted at present. The conclusion is that schools do make a difference in children’s peer relationships and well-being

Extending sociological theorising on high ability: the significance of values and lived experience

Sociological work on high ability is framed by social constructionist theorising and/or takes a social justice approach, and hence particular analytical intellectual traditions are foregrounded. Whilst these approaches have contributed the main critique of essentialist psychological understandings of high ability, they can eclipse normative discourses and the ethically situated meaning of high ability for individuals. This paper explores why epistemological questions about high ability cannot be separated from values-based ones and assesses where this has happened in relation to sociological approaches to high ability. It suggests that a narrative approach is one way of enriching sociological theories and discourses of high ability and that this can progress not only sociological, but interdisciplinary theorising in the field