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Aprel Phelps Downey What was your ACEs Aha moment? When did you first hear about ACEs and what impact did/does it have on you? How do ACEs impact you as a parent? How is your parenting impacted by past trauma? What’s been most helpful to you as a parent parenting with ACEs? What’s been most challenging for you as a parent parenting with ACEs? What has parenting taught you? What have you learned? How do you manage complex family relationships? What inspires/encourages and helps you? I know...

Join us in Atlanta, GA on Feb 8 & 9th at our teachers conference "Discipline that Works!" Hear Dr. Bettina Love talk about Hip hop, grit, and academic success! Through Hip Hop, students embody the characteristics of grit, social and emotional intelligence, and the act improvisation- all of which are proven to be predictors for academic success! So how do we harness these skills to promote and nurture academic success?

By David Smith / dsmith@siskiyoudaily.com Even though it serves just 98 students in an economically depressed area, Butte Valley High School in Dorris [CA] is offering more opportunities than ever for those students to expand everything from their creativity to their career options. Much like an eight person football team – which BVHS fields each year – teachers at the school take on different roles throughout the day . Instead of the star linebacker also being the team’s kicker, an English...

Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris is a masterful storyteller. I learned in a conversation with her at Wheelock College before her presentation for the Brookline, MA organization Steps to Success , that before she decided to become doctor, Dr. Burke Harris wanted to be an author. Only after the smashing success of her TED talk: How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime , when she was approached by a literary agent, did she find her way to writing. Her newly released book The...

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...