Obesity is second only to smoking as the nation's number one preventable cause of death. Fewer than one in four kids gets 20 minutes of physical activity per week and fewer than one in four participate in at least 30 minutes of physical activity a day. In an effort to help students switch to a healthier lifestyle and through a grant from PANA…

Teachers, superintendents, principals, and school board members in a number of Pennsylvania districts have come up with positive solutions to deal with challenges facing public schools. Although the problems they were faced with differed, educators found that by working together for a common goal in school cooperation committees, they could arrive…

The Lancaster (PA) school district is working with the Chamber of Commerce and industry to bring resource persons into classrooms and to provide staff for adult career retraining. Program objectives include identifying areas for school/community interaction and mutual gain. Partnership benefits are shared among business, community and schools: to…

Collaborative teamwork is viewed by many as a characteristic of effective working relationships between adults who provide special education and related services in educational settings. Although a substantial body of research exists on the philosophy and practice of collaborative teamwork, the contributions of veteran team members regarding which…

The Instructional Support Team (IST) process is an intensive building-based pre-referral intervention program using teams of teachers and other school professionals to assist elementary students experiencing difficulty in the classroom. This trainer's manual presents a model workshop for training principals. The workshop's goals are to: (1)…

The goal of this workshop for school psychologists is to provide high quality training in best practices for instructional evaluation. An objective of these trainings is to facilitate the implementation of the instructional evaluation requirement of the Special Education Regulations and Standards for determining eligibility for special education…

The Instructional Support Team (IST) process is mandated in all Pennsylvania schools that include any grade from kindergarten through 6. Middle schools that house grade six or below are required to enroll in IST training and ultimately achieve IST validation. In addition to the IST requirement, all secondary schools are required to have a Student…

The Instructional Support Team (IST) process is an intensive building-based pre-referral intervention program using teams of teachers and other school professionals to assist elementary students experiencing difficulty in the classroom. This trainer's manual outlines a 3-day workshop for team training. The schedule for each day is provided, with a…

This introduction to and overview of the series of training modules was developed to assist school personnel in implementing the Instructional Support Team (IST) process. Although each module covers a specific aspect of training, each is interconnected and dependent upon an understanding of the purposes behind IST and the way the IST process…

This trainer's manual focuses on facilitating collaboration in an educational setting. It begins with tips for trainers to involve training session participants, answer questions and respond to challenges, and evaluate their own performance, along with sample agendas and worksheets used in collaboration training. Each of the next six sections…

Based on research studies of effective staff development and rural education, the Inservice Leadership Team (ILT) was designed to identify key teachers in school buildings, team them with principals and central office staff, and train the team to design, deliver, and evaluate staff development at the school level. Rural Pennsylvania school staff,…