Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success

How can an understanding of adolescent development inform strategies and practices for supporting first-generation college goers? In Ready, Willing, and Able, Mandy Savitz-Romer and Suzanne Bouffard focus on the developmental tasks and competencies that young people need to develop in order to plan for and succeed in higher education. These include identity development, articulating aspirations and expectations, forming and maintaining strong peer and adult relationships, motivation and goal-setting, and self-regulatory skills, such as planning. The authors challenge the predominant approach of giving young people information and leaving it to them to figure out how to apply it. They show how well-intended college-access efforts can miss the mark—for instance, by focusing on students who already see themselves as college material, rather than working to help all students develop a “college-going identity.” In addition, most college-access programs and practices focus almost exclusively on providing academic preparation and financial support. In Ready, Willing, and Able, Savitz-Romer and Bouffard call for a new approach: one that emphasizes the key developmental tasks and processes of adolescence and integrates them into existing college-access practices in meaningful ways. Rather than treating young people as passive recipients of services, they argue, adults can engage them as active agents in the construction of their own futures.

Education & Teaching

Savitz-Romer, Mandy

Bouffard, Suzanne M.

Higher & Continuing Education

Harvard Education Press

Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens: A Framework for Educators and Teacher Educators

Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens goes beyond existing social emotional learning programs to introduce a new framework for integrating the development of key skills needed for academic success into daily classroom practice. The framework spells out the competencies, processes, and strategies that effective P-12 educators need to employ in order to build students' social and emotional learning. The book is based on a decade of pioneering work by the Center for Reaching and Teaching the Whole Child at San JosÉ State University, building on the work of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and on research about effective teaching and learning and culturally responsive practices. Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens serves as a critical roadmap for educators, whether they are university faculty searching for how to bring a social, emotional, and cultural lens into their methods or foundations course and field work experiences, or classroom teachers hoping to infuse critical skill building into the everyday academic learning that is the traditional focus of schools.

Markowitz, Nancy Lourié

Schools & Teaching

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Books by Bouffard, Suzanne M.