The article examines the conceptual bases for parent advocacy, discusses some potential abuses of parent advocacy, reviews the parental role in advocacy, and offers suggestions for parent advocates. (Author/DLS)

This paper discusses how educators can advance integration of students with disabilities by involving parents in the educational process. The paper suggests courses of action that can be taken to promote home-school collaboration, describing the importance of continuity of values between home and school, models of parent involvement, the…

Describes the "parent panel," an approach to building appropriate communication, resolving conflicts, and creating mutual respect between teachers and parents of children with disabilities. Delineates benefits to parents and teachers, describes how to organize the parent panel, provides content guidelines, and provides an example of a panel…

Successful and meaningful transition services are the result of careful planning. This planning is driven by a young person's dreams, desires, and abilities. It builds a youth's participation in school, home and community living. Transition planning helps to prepare young people for their futures. It helps them to develop skills they need to go on…

Increasing diversity in the student population intensifies the need for and the difficulties of establishing culturally sensitive and meaningful communication between teachers and parents. This study examined the practices of early childhood and elementary teachers concerning culturally sensitive home-school communication. As a second phase of a…

Increasing numbers of young children with disabilities are receiving services in inclusive settings such as Head Start. It is important to note that positive outcomes for young children with disabilities are due in large part to practitioners' understanding and implementation of both recommended practices in both early care and education and early…

This document presents one module in a set of training resources for trainers to use with parents and/or professionals serving children with disabilities; focus is on parent professional collaboration. Each training module takes about 2 hours to deliver. The module guide has eight sections: a publicity flyer, topic narrative, overview, trainer…

Teachers of minority handicapped children can enhance their relationship with parents by understanding that parents cannot be forced to participate and that the teacher cannot expect to have the same authority with parents as with children. It is important for teachers to begin parent training programs with high success activities, focus on…

Parents and educators often differ in the values and priorities they assign services for the young handicapped child. Methods for resolving these differences include collaborative goal setting, viewing families from a systems perspective, using effective listening and interviewing techniques, negotiating values and priorities, and acting as case…

The parent of a blind child urges other parents of handicapped children to realize their value in relationships with professionals by presenting ideas and information and cooperating with teachers and administrators in problem solving. She emphasizes the importance of parents understanding and communicating their own limits. (CL)

The article examines relationships between two clusters of variables and parental-professional congruency scores for the Learning Accomplishment Profile Edition: parent-related variables (age, educational level, income, and number of other children) and handicapped child-related variables (chronological age, length of time enrolled in early…

Despite barriers such as apathy, lack of training, home problems, and demographic and ethnic factors, vocational and special educators need to involve parents in setting goals and determining strategies that will help handicapped adolescents become qualified workers. (SK)

The article describes a joint competency based training program to enhance cooperation between parents and teachers of handicapped children. Evaluation with 143 participants is noted to support the model's feasibility. (SB)

Three teachers describe how parents of deaf, severely disabled, and bilingual children participated in their children's learning. Qualitative research methods were used to help parents share their knowledge with teachers. (SK)

This article argues that if professionals categorize parents as "in denial," unaccepting, or difficult, professionals may lose the chance to understand and learn from the parents. Recommendations are provided for rethinking denial and working with parents, including supporting parents' hopes and dreams for their child, suspending judgment, and…