School-Home Notes

Book excerpt: Although communication between parents and teachers has long been considered a key ingredient in children's academic success, few books have addressed actual methods for establishing effective interactions between home and school. This volume fills that void by providing practitioners with a detailed, comprehensive program that enables parents and teachers to work together to remediate children's classroom behavior problems. SCHOOL-HOME NOTES describes common obstacles to parent and teacher communication and clearly explicates how these obstacles can be overcome. It provides a critical appraisal of the relevant literature on parent- and teacher-managed contingency systems and factors influencing the efficacy of the procedure. The book offers a practical, comprehensive guide for assessing children's functioning in both school and home environments; for determining when school-home contingency systems are appropriate; and for ascertaining when they should be used alone or in combination with other interventions. The majority of the volume describes how to design and implement an effective school-home note procedure--from introducing the idea to parents and teachers to evaluating program effectiveness. It describes how to select workable, socially relevant target behaviors and generate performance contracts between parents, teachers, and students. It also gives examples of the specific roles each plays in the program. Each step of the procedure is detailed in an easy-to-read manner. Numerous examples are offered throughout and extensive case illustrations are presented at the end of the volume. In addition to providing narrative information on developing and using school-home notes, a special feature of the book is the inclusion of numerous sample handouts and guides, as well as tables that highlight clinical applications. Offering concrete guidelines, this volume is an invaluable resource for school psychologists and other practitioners working to improve children's academic performance and classroom behavior. Guidance counselors, principals, and special educators will find the book extremely helpful in achieving constructive communication between home and school, and it also offers much of value for clinical psychologists and behavior therapists working with children.