Families, Professionals, and Exceptionality: Collaborating for Empowerment (4th Edition)

Written by the best-known authors in the field of family and professional collaboration, this practical book provides instruction on how to empower, collaborate, and advocate for children with special needs. It features family systems perspectives, an emphasis on empowerment through parent/family and professional collaboration, and a multicultural approach. The authors have created a framework that transforms the complex theory of empowerment, and implements techniques into an approach that is easy to understand and to apply. This book does an excellent job of merging research and reality to cover historical and current roles of families and parents; schools as systems; building reliable alliances; family characteristics, interaction, functions, and life cycle; meeting families' basic needs; referring and evaluating for special education; individualizing for appropriate education; extending learning into home and community; attending and volunteering at school; and advocating for systems improvement. This book prepares educators to implement partnerships, not just understand them.