Transforming Student and Learning Supports: Developing a Unified, Comprehensive, and Equitable System

Transforming student and learning supports is key to school improvement and enhancing equity of opportunity. This work examines the marginalization and fragmentation of student and learning supports, and offers a design, prototypes, guides, and more for system change. It delineates how to develop a unified, comprehensive, and equitable system by reframing and redeploying the ways schools address learning and teaching barriers in the classroom and schoolwide. It draws on years of research and offers examples from work at local and state levels.

The text provides detailed frameworks for expanding school improvement policy to unify student and learning supports, rework operational infrastructures, and make sustainable systemic changes. There are also frameworks and guides for in-classroom supports, supporting transitions, creating home and community engagement, providing crisis assistance and prevention, and personalizing student and family assistance.

Rooted in research, field trials, and common sense and focused on collaborative solutions, Transforming Student and Learning Supports offers a fundamental perspective for any course that addresses school improvement. The book is a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate courses, continuing professional development, policy makers, and a wide variety of stakeholders who are concerned with enhancing equity of opportunity for students.

Howard Adelman earned his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is currently a professor of psychology and co-director of the Center for Mental Health in Schools. He began his career as a classroom teacher and school administrator.

Linda Taylor holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan. Dr. Taylor is co-director of the Center for Mental Health in Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her background includes administering a lab school at UCLA and working as a special project director with the Los Angeles Unified School District.