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A new study from the University of Virginia provides strong evidence that mindfulness training for teachers can help them cope better with stress on the job while also making the classroom environment more productive for learning. Two hundred and twenty-four teachers from 36 urban elementary schools in New York City with primarily low-income/high-risk students were randomly assigned to receive instruction via a program called Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education ( CARE ), a...

Fifth grade teacher Emily E. Smith is not your average teacher. She founded The Hive Society — a classroom that's all about inspiring children to learn more about their world ... and themselves — by interacting with literature and current events. Students watch TED talks, read Rolling Stone , and analyze infographics. She even has a long-distance running club to encourage students to take care of their minds and bodies. It had always been her dream to work with children in urban areas, so...

Maine is one of 22 states in the U.S. where corporal punishment is allowed in schools. That would change if LD 527, an act to prohibit corporal punishment , is enacted. Fifteen of the 22 states expressly permit corporal punishment—the other seven (including Maine) do not prohibit it. There are 28 states and the District of Columbia that expressly prohibit corporal punishment. Some of the 110,000 students subjected to corporal punishment are in states where it is prohibited. The Maine bill...

Over the last four calendar school years the number of students being suspended by Battle Ground High School has dropped more than 50 percent. During the 2012-13 school year 387 students were suspended, compared to only 145 during the 2015-16 school year. BGHS Principal Mike Hamilton points at a number of different elements that has led to a more positive culture in the high school. He said it is a product of all the district cogs operating in unison and making student engagement and...

Schools are the best opportunity to address ACEs on a large scale. Other than time at home, school is the place where children spend the majority of their time. And if a child's home life is full of strife, school might be the only place where the child feels safe. ACEs are common, and yet, it can be difficult to know which students need extra support. And rather than create additional programs that single out anyone or any group of students, and potentially having students fall through the...

I am up in New York this week doing trauma informed education training for PESI. If anyone is interested in hanging out and sharing ideas I will be in white plains on wednesday, plainview on thursday and in Manhattan on thursday evening/friday. See attached brochure

In the past four years, the staff at John Wetten Elementary has done pioneering work to build an education model to support students who experienced Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), which include physical, sexual and emotional abuse; household substance abuse; adult mental illness; separated, divorced, or incarcerated parents; and domestic partner violence. To begin the Culture of Care program, CareOregon and MODA provided $80,000 grants in 2014 and '15 to enable Wilson and her team to...

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos U.S. Department of Education 400 Maryland Avenue, SW Washington, D.C. 20202 Governor John Kasich Riffe Center, 30th Floor 77 South High Street Columbus, OH 43215-6117 Superintendent of Public Instruction Paolo DeMaria Ohio Department of Education 25 South Front Street Columbus, OH 43215-4183 Dear Secretary DeVos, Governor Kasich, and Superintendent DeMaria: I write to each of you, in my position as a teacher in the Cincinnati Public Schools, to ask for...

It seems obvious that keeping kids in their home school with their peer group – a concept known as “school stability”– is a key ingredient in the recipe for academic success for students in foster care. Research shows that on average, children lose four to six months of learning each time they change schools. This is especially acute for high school students, who run into issues obtaining the credits they need to graduate or may have to re-take classes due to coursework alignment issues. For...

A New Report—and a Landmark for the SEL Field Working in close collaboration with the faculty of education at the University of British Columbia (UBC), in February 2017 CASEL announced the publication of a new report titled To Reach the Students, Teach the Teachers: A National Scan of Teacher Preparation and Social & Emotional Learning . CASEL funded the research for the report, the first-ever scan of teacher preparation related to SEL, as part of a grant from NoVo Foundation. Retrieved...

Nelba Marquez-Greene believes the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, which killed her 6-year-old daughter, could have been avoided if more had been done years earlier to address the social isolation and mental health problems of the shooter, Adam Lanza. To help other vulnerable youths, Marquez-Greene, a family therapist, is working with a Connecticut school system on a program to help students connect with one another. "I want people to remember that Adam, the person who did this, was...

Education researchers caution that immersive VR, like any technology, may be perfect for some kinds of learning and superfluous, or even counterproductive, for others. Studies of immersive classroom VR are still scarce. But emerging evidence suggests that one of VR’s biggest strengths is its ability to tap student emotions, notably empathy and the can-do confidence known as self-efficacy. The power of VR to stoke empathy is the focus of research at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab,...