Building a Culture of Hope: Enriching Schools with Optimism and Opportunity

Research demonstrates that children of poverty need more than just academic instruction to succeed. Discover a school-improvement blueprint for teaching resilience and turning low-performing schools into cultures of hope. The authors draw from their own experiences working with high-poverty, high-achieving schools to illustrate how to support students with an approach that considers social as well as emotional factors in education.

Understand how poverty affects education and how creating a positive school culture can help:

* Understand the relevance of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and positive psychology in K-12 education.
* Discover tested strategies behind the success of high-poverty, high-achieving schools in closing the achievement gap.
* Learn how to create intrinsic motivation for students impacted by adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and support them in overcoming learned helplessness.
* Access surveys that gauge the temperature of your school's culture.
* Integrate the world of jobs and professional careers into academic curriculum.
* Support students with tools to envision and plan for the future.
* Define processes for building consensus and increasing collaboration among teachers and school leadership.

Contents:
Introduction

Part One: An Apartheid of Ignorance
Chapter 1. Poverty Is No Excuse
Chapter 2. The Tragedy of High School Dropouts
Chapter 3. A Culture of Hope

Part Two: The Four Seeds of Hope
Chapter 4. A Sense of Optimism
Chapter 5. A Sense of Belonging
Chapter 6. A Sense of Pride, Self-Esteem, and Self-Confidence
Chapter 7. A Sense of Purpose

Part Three: Implementing a Culture of Hope
Chapter 8. The Power of "We"
Chapter 9. A Culture of Hope at the High School Level
Chapter 10. Hope Fulfilled

Appendix A: Methodologies of the Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report Studies
Appendix B: Surveys of Students and Staff
Glossary
References and Resources
Index