Hal A Lawson

Hal A Lawson
University at Albany, State University of New York | UAlbany · School of Social Welfare

Ph.D.

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231
Publications
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6,151
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Publications

Publications (231)
Article
This qualitative interview study investigated principals’ discursive frames and communications during the COVID-19 pandemic. The six leader interviews that comprise this study’s dataset were drawn from a purposeful sample of schools with variable educator job satisfaction survey results. A combination of deductive and inductive coding of the interv...
Article
Workforce initiatives are timely as physical education confronts multiple challenges, some of which can be reframed as opportunities. The operational research and development approach provided herewith builds on a companion analysis focused on agenda-setting. A systems framework identifies relationships among specialized components such as teacher...
Article
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Schools worldwide are developing innovative models in response to, and in anticipation of, societal changes. Aiming to address non-academic barriers to learning, while capitalizing on out-of-school time, some school and community leaders have prioritized family and community partnerships, especially in the United States (U.S.). The Community Collab...
Article
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As student populations worldwide become more diverse and many are challenged by poverty and social exclusion, educational equity’s importance grows, both as a core value and as a driver for school improvement and redesign. While national and local policies vary, as do resources in support of equity outcomes, it is timely to identify, synthesize, an...
Article
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External developments and intra-professional needs, challenges, and opportunities recommend a workforce research and development agenda. In particular: (a) new models for schools necessitate customized, evidence-based curricula and school/community programs; (b) the effectiveness of every curriculum and program depends on workforce readiness, commi...
Presentation
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Starting in the 1970's Kinesiology, Sport Science, and Physical Education have enjoyed a shared developmental trajectory. Oftentimes they are joined in the same academic department in universities. National and international professional and scientific associations often view them as "the same field". And university degree programs, especially unde...
Article
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Purpose: This multiple comparative case study investigated district and high school leaders’ framing mechanisms and discourses around priorities and challenges to understand their equity aims and their preparation of diverse student popu-lations’ college, career, and civic readiness. Research Methods/Approach: This research used framing theory to e...
Article
This brief analysis is a call for action with fresh opportunities for leadership and innovation. Teachers, teacher educators, and their allies need to take stock of needs and opportunities to serve as program architects and ambassadors. This is a game-changer because, until now, professionals were charged with faithful implementation and advocacy f...
Article
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The pandemic, imperatives for human and civil rights, growing economic challenges, new accountability requirements, and distance-delivered learning technologies are reminders of novel 21st-century needs, problems, challenges, and opportunities. All demand a sense of urgency. Building on selected traditions and achievements, today’s futuristic plann...
Chapter
Social workers are prepared to benefit from and provide cross-boundary leadership for several kinds of collaborative, macro practice, all of which are structured to achieve a collective impact. Examples include teamwork, interorganizational partnerships, and community-wide coalitions. All are needed to respond to complicated practice problems, part...
Article
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What does the future hold for Doctoral Programs for Physical Education Teacher Education (D-PETE) programs, faculty, and doctoral students? What can D-PETE faculty prioritize and do to create a more desirable future for D-PETE, PETE, and school physical education programs? What are the main facilitators, constraints, and barriers? Framed by these t...
Article
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This special issue was designed to facilitate futures-oriented planning, focused on identical, similar, and unique practice and policy priorities. Formal planning aimed at desirable futures is a practical necessity for every helping profession because rapid, sometimes dramatic, societal change continues nonstop. Like all futures-oriented analyses,...
Article
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The physical education teacher education (PETE) faculty charged with oversight and delivery of initial teacher licensure programs confront several challenges. Some necessitate responses to revised and new standards, while others can be reframed as timely opportunities for improvement and innovation, whether in response to or in anticipation of rapi...
Article
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Notwithstanding the contributions of a few policy experts, overall physical education is constrained by policy illiteracy and neglect. A brief historical perspective on physical education policy provides a foundation for “a policy primer” founded on three recurring needs: (a) antecedent and corequisite factors meriting attention in support of polic...
Article
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Manifest challenges to physical education teachers merit identification, analysis, and strategic action. New designs for schools, threats to the well-being of a growing number of children and families, and financial problems confronting school systems are among the external challenges. Meanwhile, too many physical education teachers confront margin...
Article
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In this chapter, we examine the system of physical education with a Janus-like perspective. We focus on examining and learning from the past as we anticipate what society, school systems, and the physical education system might look like in the future. Drawing on futuristic scenarios developed for this special journal issue, we ask a timely, pivota...
Preprint
Full-text available
Analysis of the reproduction, reform, and redesign of the physical education system--a consequential social determinant of well-being.
Article
Background/Context In the field of education, the lens of agency has provided a valuable conceptual alternative to deterministic portrayals of schools as oppressive institutions where teachers and students have little power over the conditions in which they teach and learn. A number of studies have investigated teacher and student agency, but few h...
Article
Full-text available
Isolated teachers in stand-alone American schools are expected to engage diverse students in the quest to facilitate their academic learning and achievement. This strategy assumes that all students will come to school ready and able to learn, and educators in stand-alone schools can meet the needs of all students. Student disengagement gets short s...
Article
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This multiple case study examines practices of educators in high schools called “odds-beaters”. These schools are exemplary in that they consistently achieve better-than-predicted graduation outcomes among economically disadvantaged, African-American/Black, Hispanic/Latino, and English language learners. Findings from this study revealed that these...
Article
The National Association for Kinesiology in Higher Education conference theme – Leading Beyond the Campus: Driving Change as Experts – responds to public policy demands and signals consequential choices. Many choices are illuminated by the prototype for the Neo-liberal university. Essentially, economic development imperatives give rise to accountab...
Chapter
Nations everywhere are experiencing turbulent times. Rapid, dramatic societal changes associated with globalization are implicated. Turbulent times bring formidable challenges and offer timely opportunities. Either way, leaders need to take notice and get ready for a shift from an enduring focus on implementation. A twentieth century management gur...
Article
Twentieth-Century Physical Education gave rise to Kinesiology. Today’s Kinesiology structures and influences Physical Education. Boundary crossing and bridge building facilitate analysis of their relations and have import for investigations of career pathways and outcomes. Decisions regarding boundaries and bridges will impact the futures of Kinesi...
Article
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Several decades of research has generated a near-consensus on the link between positive student outcomes and effective engagement between educators and families. Despite the widespread acknowledgement of this connection, many educators continue to struggle to engage families in ways that are both culturally responsive and sensitive to power dynamic...
Article
In this essay, authors Lawson, Caringi, Gottfried, Bride, and Hydon introduce the concept of trauma literacy, connecting it to students' trauma and educators' secondary traumatic stress (STS). Interactions with traumatized students is one cause of STS; others derive from other traumatic encounters in schools and communities. Undesirable effects of...
Article
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The physical education (PE) system is a consequential social determinant of pediatric health and well-being. Granting selective achievements, sub-optimal PE outcomes for school-aged children as well as teachers necessitate improvement models and redesign initiatives. This agenda depends on knowledge about the malleable social determinants of the PE...
Article
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Employing the ideal type of “The Physical Education System,” in this analysis I explore the import of systems frameworks for new institutional designs which hold promise for better outcomes. The inherited idea of a system is restricted to the relationship between teacher education and school programs. It draws on the developmental trajectory of the...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
High schools that effectively serve culturally and ethnically diverse students are a national priority. This mixed methods case study examines the design and practices of high schools called “odds-beaters” because they have above-average graduate rates for ethnically, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse students. Sample high schools are c...
Article
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A substantial body of research focuses on student achievement and the characteristics of schools that regularly produce it. While academic achievement is an important variable to measure, student engagement serves as a related and highly influential variable that merits more attention, particularly as it relates to preventative interventions. Stude...
Book
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An international comparative analysis of school physical education programs with special attention to educational and participatory equity. A generic framework for analysis and planning, focused on the United States, enables comparisons with nation-specific descriptions from authors in Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, and Aus...
Presentation
This study offers practical lessons learned regarding how and why educators in odds-beating high schools achieve better outcomes than their peers in comparison schools. Special interest resided in structural alignments across these three levels—district office, school, and classroom—and coherence, i.e., educators’ clarity and agreement regarding wh...
Article
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This multiple case study investigated 143 teachers’ responses to focus group questions about their experiences with the simultaneous implementation of three disruptive innovations as part of the U.S. Race-to-the-Top (RTTT) agenda: the Common Core Learning Standards, data-driven instruction, and annual professional performance reviews. We asked: How...
Article
Full-text available
Scaling up innovation in the instructional core remains a vexing proposition. Such disruptive innovations require teachers to engage in performance adaptation. Schools vary in their capacity to support changes in teachers’ day-to-day work. By comparing distributed instructional leadership practices of “odds-beating” schools with those at “typically...
Article
COMPASS-AIM is both a set of processes and tools used by participants in a research-practice partnership (RPP) to improve organizational capacities and individual and team competencies for organizational learning and improvement. The “COMPASS” team includes teams of teachers and school leaders who work with a university researcher and expert profes...
Article
Debates-as-battles have characterized the histories of physical education and kinesiology. This colorful part of the field’s history was characterized by leaders’ narrow, rigid views, and it paved the way for divisiveness, excessive specialization, and fragmentation. Today’s challenge is to seek common purpose via stewardship-oriented dialogue, and...
Book
Full-text available
Three policy innovations at the heart of this book – the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of find...
Article
Full-text available
This mixed-method multiple case study investigated nine elemen­ tary schools. Six " odds-beating schools," which serve relatively high numbers of economically disadvantaged children, achieved higher than predicted performance on state assessments when compared with three typically per­ forming schools. The overarching research question guiding this...
Article
This article offers advice to practice educators about the teaching of reflective and critically reflective practice to social work students on placement. It explains what is meant by critical reflection, it offers different tools and ways of teaching critical reflection to students, and it also strives to problematise the teaching of critical refl...
Chapter
Three policy innovations at the heart of this book – the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of find...
Chapter
Three policy innovations at the heart of this book – the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of find...
Chapter
Three policy innovations at the heart of this book – the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of find...
Chapter
Three policy innovations at the heart of this book – the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of find...
Chapter
Three policy innovations at the heart of this book – the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of find...
Chapter
Three policy innovations at the heart of this book – the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of find...
Chapter
Three policy innovations at the heart of this book – the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of find...
Chapter
Three policy innovations at the heart of this book – the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of find...
Chapter
Three policy innovations at the heart of this book – the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of find...
Chapter
Three policy innovations at the heart of this book – the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of find...
Chapter
To fully appreciate the new policy and practice directions offered by community schools, community learning centers, extended-service schools, and multi-service schools, it is best to view them as complex interventions; or more simply, as multi-faceted solutions for complicated needs and problems, which are rooted in particular places or locales. T...
Chapter
This chapter is like a bookend for Chap. 3 because it provides details about the five core components—health services, social services, extended learning, positive youth development, and parent and family innovations. Each is analyzed in greater detail, and examples of relevant program offerings, possible innovations, and relevant research are prov...
Chapter
Worldwide the idea of “the achievement gap” refers to the academic learning of students and the overall performance of entire schools. A second achievement gap also merit attention: The gap between rich and poor students, one that indicates that, for too many young people in several parts of the world, the circumstances surrounding their births det...
Chapter
Although the idea of replication—a direct, wholesale transfer of community schools, community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended-service schools, was the dominant idea in the twentieth century, today there is just cause for considerable caution and even explicit avoidance of what amounts to “one size fits all thinking,” together...
Article
Full-text available
As unprecedented child and family migration patterns continue, neighborhoods, hamlets, towns, cities, states/provinces, and entire nations are impacted. These impacts are especially profound when migrants’ first language is not the host nation’s dominant one; when they relocate in communities already challenged by poverty, social exclusion, and soc...
Article
Proposals to prepare disciplinary stewards and optimize the conditions for collective stewardship can be framed in two ways. The dominant frame emphasizes disciplinary caretaking and lends comparatively less attention to reform and transformation. A second frame is grounded in the social ecology of particular disciplines, their fast-changing univer...
Chapter
Community schools, community learning centers, extended service schools and multi-service schools are complex designs characterized by multiple, core components. In advanced exemplars, five defining components usually are evident. In no particular order, these components are health services, social services, extended or out-of-school time learning,...
Chapter
The idea of university-assisted community schools (Harkavy and colleagues chapter), together with the other chapters that attest to the importance of higher education institutions in the development of community schools, community learning centers, extended service schools, and multi-service schools, recommend a particular way of thinking and plann...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose: This multiple case study investigated district leaders’ orientations and strategies as their elementary schools proceeded with state-mandated implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). We identified differences between schools achieving above-predicted outcomes on state CCSS assessments (“odds-beaters”) and schools achieving...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Background: Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) has been endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics as an evidence-based strategy addressing risky substance use among adolescents in primary care. However, there is little awareness of SBIRT, and less than half of pediatricians even screen adolescents for substance us...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Background: Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) has been endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics as an evidence-based strategy addressing risky substance use among adolescents in primary care. However, there is little awareness of SBIRT, and less than half of pediatricians even screen adolescents for substance us...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This qualitative multiple case study contributes to the growing body of translational research that seeks to better understand what is needed to develop capacities for evidence-guided continuous improvement in P-12 settings. The study investigated school leadership team participants’ perceptions of an intervention called COMPASS. COMPASS engages te...
Article
Full-text available
Background/Context Prior research has investigated the literacy achievement gap with particular focus on ethnically and linguistically diverse students’ performance. This study extends that research by examining the relationships among classroom instructional practices, school priorities, and district policies in higher performing schools. Purpose...
Article
BACKGROUND: Adolescent substance use is associated with chronic health conditions, accidents, injury, and school-related problems, including dropping out. Schools have the potential to provide students with substance use prevention and intervention services, albeit with confidentiality challenges. School-based health centers (SBHCs) provide confide...
Article
Full-text available
Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) has been endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics as an evidence-based strategy to address risky substance use among adolescents in primary care. However, less than half of pediatricians even screen adolescents for substance use. The purpose of this study was to identify variati...
Book
This book focuses on special organizational configurations for schools in diverse parts of the world. Some of these new organizational and institutional designs are called multi-service schools, others are called extended service schools and still others are called community learning centers. While these schools have different names and notable dif...
Article
Full-text available
The creation of trauma-informed systems that use evidence-based, culturally competent interventions for affected children and families is a priority in Indian Country because mounting evidence from adverse childhood experiences research with American Indians documents the incidence and prevalence of trauma. What is more, an emergent line of researc...
Article
Full-text available
This study focuses on the field test of a design team intervention in two rural and one urban site experiencing high workforce turnover. Hypothesis 1: Job satisfaction is significantly improved among public child welfare workers participating in the Design Team intervention. Hypothesis 2: Job satisfaction is significantly related to lower turnover...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Background: Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) has been endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics as an evidence-based strategy to address risky substance use among adolescents in primary care settings. However, less than half of pediatricians even screen adolescents for substance use. Methods: Between May and J...
Article
Full-text available
This article presents an exploratory study that examined the effects of school climate; students' perceptions of supports; and behavioral norms in their homes, schools, and neighborhoods on student behavior and grades. The authors conducted a multilevel analysis of secondary data collected from 13,068 predominantly low-income middle school students...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Background: Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) has been endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics as an evidence-based strategy to address risky alcohol and drug (AOD) use among adolescents in primary care settings. However, less than half of pediatricians even screen adolescents for AOD use and even fewer provide...
Article
Full-text available
Dramatic changes involving rural parents and family systems are impacting schools, communities, and entire provinces and states. The out-migration of individual parents and entire family systems worldwide is especially noteworthy becaUSeit contributes to incipient urbanization at the same time that it UShers in consequential demographic changes—wit...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This study was designed to identify practices and policies within elementary and middle schools whose students exceeded performance expectations on the 2012-13 New York State assessments, the first to be aligned with and structured by the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS). Additionally, the study was designed to investigate the effects of the n...
Article
Full-text available
Investments in the select few who already are or will become academic leaders are essential but insufficient. Investments also need to be made in collective leadership because leadership is an activity or function, not merely a person. Both good leaders and collective leadership are needed in the never-ending journey toward selective excellence. A...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Foci for, and dynamics of, interprofessional team collaboration--with implications for individual and collective sense-making and sense-giving. Key social-psychological concepts include collaborative cognition, inter-subjective understanding, and collective intelligence. This conceptual framework also paves the way for interprofessional leadership.
Article
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Parents influence children's obesity risk factors but are infrequently targeted for interventions. This study targeting low-income parents integrated a community-based participatory research approach with the Family Ecological Model and Empowerment Theory to develop a childhood obesity intervention. This article (1) examines pre- to postinterventio...
Article
Full-text available
Arrival Cities are special urban places. Amid the largest migration in human history, they provide homes for large numbers of mobile, low-income, immigrant families. These families need new human service and child welfare service models. Collective parent engagement (CPE) is one such model. CPE is designed to build on the strengths and meet the nee...
Data
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Article
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Amid unprecedented novelty, complexity, turbulence, and conflict, it is apparent that a new education system is needed. Focused on a new outcome-postsecondary education completion with advanced competence-heretofore separate systems for early childhood, K-12 schools, and postsecondary education are being joined in P-16 pipelines and Cradle-Through-...
Article
Full-text available
Physical activity (PA) parenting, or strategies parents use to promote PA in children, has been associated with increased PA in children of all ages, including preschool-aged children. However, little is known about the circumstances under which parents adopt such behaviors. This study examined family ecological factors associated with PA parenting...
Article
Full-text available
Student engagement research, policy, and practice are even more important in today’s race-to-the top policy environment. With a priority goal of postsecondary completion with advanced competence, today’s students must be engaged longer and more deeply. This need is especially salient for students attending schools located in segregated, high-povert...
Article
Full-text available
Background Ineffective family interventions for the prevention of childhood obesity have, in part, been attributed to the challenges of reaching and engaging parents. With a particular focus on parent engagement, this study utilized community-based participatory research to develop and pilot test a family-centered intervention for low-income famili...

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