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California students and parents have been at the forefront of a national movement to promote common-sense school discipline policies, and their hard work is paying off. According to data recently released by the California Department of Education , our state is suspending fewer students, promoting alternatives to harsh school discipline and helping more young people stay in school. Many education and health leaders are jubilant. Limiting suspension-first approaches to handling discipline...

A hug may be comforting to many children, but for a child who has experienced trauma it may not feel safe. That’s an example used by Julie Kurtz, co-director of trauma informed practices in early childhood education at the WestEd Center for Child & Family Studies (CCFS), as she begins a trauma training session. Her audience, preschool teachers and staff of the San Francisco-based Wu Yee Children’s Services at San Francisco’s Women’s Building, listen attentively.

The Trauma-informed School movement is at a critical stage where student discipline policies must reflect the educational neuroscience and trauma-informed practices being implemented in our schools. Otherwise, you haven't made it yet to the trauma-informed stage. Use this link as a litmus test: https://medium.com/@drjimwalters/trauma-informed-student-codes-of-conduct-e1ecbb18cb6f I welcome others to share their work in this area.

Having just earned a teaching degree from Pennsylvania’s Millersville University, Rian Reed set out in 2011 to find a position working with special-needs students. Born and raised in a suburb outside of Philadelphia, she had built an enviable academic record, earning induction into the National Honor Society in high school and speaking at her university commencement. She sought to use her leadership skills and creativity in a classroom in her own community. So Reed, a biracial woman who...

A national coalition of researchers, policymakers, and educators has forged a consensus on why schools need to be more responsive to students’ social, emotional, and developmental needs, and it will now finalize recommendations for how to carry out that vision. The Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development has convened working groups and visited schools around the country that are using strategies around social-emotional learning and student...

In my last post , I wrote about why I started teaching my kids to meditate. In this post, I’ll share how I taught them, and what I did when they lost interest. I want to start out by saying that I don’t think formal meditation is the best way to teach mindfulness to young children. Kids often do better with concrete, fun activities, especially when they can move their bodies. (I’ve shared over 100 different ways to teach mindfulness to children in my book, Ready, Set, Breathe: Practicing...

Listening to a FREE Mindfulness and Meditation Summit presented by Sounds True and heard about a FREE curriculum from Richie Davidson, PHD at the Center for HealthyMinds at University of Wisconsin - Madison. Here is a description of the currilum: Various mindfulness programs have been developed for adults, but we and our colleagues at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison wanted to develop a curriculum for kids. Every school teaches math and reading, but what...

Editor’s note: This three-part series of articles and videos about the students and staff at Lakeside School in Horsham is made possible by funding from the Van Ameringen Foundation and the Reentry Project. The Van Ameringen Foundation is supporting two years of Notebook reporting on trauma-informed education. The Notebook is one of 15 news organizations in The Reentry Project, a solutions-oriented project on the issues facing formerly incarcerated Philadelphians. The aim is to produce...

By Special to the DN Anderson >> The entire staff of the Red Bluff Elementary School District , numbering more than 270 employees, received training Monday on the topic of Adverse Childhood Experiences , or ACEs, at the Gaia Hotel in Anderson. …. The presentation was given by Julie Kurtz , the regional director at the Center for Child & Family Studies for WestEd , a nonprofit research, development and service agency that works with education and other communities throughout the...

Be gentle on yourself. Be patient. Show yourself a little grace. There’s a corollary: Be gentle on your students, too. They’re trying hard to be their best selves. Show them the same grace. Here’s what that grace will look like in my classroom from January to May: Look for strengths, not just gaps. Practice patience. Balance goal-setting with celebration. Frame reminders for behavior in a caring way. To read more of Justin Minkel's article, please click here.

The past few years have brought a wealth of evidence for the impact of childhood trauma on lifelong health. The AAP has recognized the importance of childhood trauma with conferences (2015 Violence, Abuse and Toxic Stress: An Update on Trauma-informed Care in Children and Youth) and resources ( AAP Trauma Toolbox for Primary Care .) Like many pediatricians, I have been grateful for the attention to and evidence base for an area of pediatrics I see on a daily basis but for which I have felt...

Administrators at Carver say that students who enter high school overage feel like they’re wearing a scarlet letter, regardless of why they were retained. “There’s so much shame attached to it. Students constantly tell me, ‘I want to be at my right grade,’” said Jerel Bryant, Carver’s principal. “It’s a huge thing.” Those doubts and shame are one of the many reasons that overage students are at significant risk of dropping out of school. But in New Orleans, overage students are incredibly...