Teaching Strategies that Foster Constructive Behavior: Using Your Head and Heart

Teaching Strategies that Foster Constructive Behavior: Using Your Head and Heartinvites the reader to explore and engage in positive classroom management and behavior-change support. A journey of learning, the book gives pre-service and in-service teachers tools to maximize their students' chances for success.

The first section provides an overview of an ecological approach to supporting constructive behavior and examines the effects of the student's physiological, physical, and psychosocial environment variables on behavior. In the second, readers learn how to establish, maintain, and sustain communities of learners. The third section addresses positive behavior change support, while the final section is an opportunity for readers to summarize, reflect on, and celebrate what they have learned.

Teaching Strategies that Foster Constructive Behavior shares a wealth of information ranging from practical tips on arranging a classroom and its contents, to suggestions for fostering connection through collaboration, to recommended on-the-spot responses to unconstructive behavior. As well-researched and tested as it is generous and nurturing, it is an ideal text for courses in elementary, middle school, and special education undergraduate and graduate programs.

Shari Holmes Stokes earned her Ed.D. in special education and teacher education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Stokes has made education her life's work, beginning in a demonstration teaching site with young children with multiple disabilities, then in elementary and middle school self-contained classes and resource rooms for students with learning and behavioral difficulties. For the past twenty-years she has taught undergraduate and graduate classes at Fitchburg State University and worked as a consultant with teachers throughout New York and New England.