Tagged With "conflict of interest"
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10 Ways Parents and Schools Can Prevent School Shootings Now (Op-Ed) (livescience.com)
As a parent, I understand the desire for practical responses to school shootings. I also absolutely believe the government should do more to prevent such incidents. But the gun control debate has proven so divisive and ineffective that I am weary of waiting for politicians to act. I study the kind of aggressive childhood behavior that often predates school shootings. That research suggests what communities and families can start doing today to better protect children. Here are 10 actions we...
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A Chat with Youth Leader Jaidyn Probst [changelabsolutions.org]
By Nessia Berner Wong, ChangeLab Solutions. Jaidyn Probst is a high school senior living in Redwood Falls, Minnesota. Redwood Falls is a small, rural town of about 5,000 people — small enough that, according to Jaidyn, everyone knows everyone, which is probably her favorite part. She enjoys creating art, reading, listening to music, and spending time with friends and family. Also, she really doesn’t like doing the dishes. Jaidyn is Bdewakantunwan (Spirit Lake Dwellers) Dakota and comes from...
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A Chat with Youth Leader Jaidyn Probst [changelabsolutions.org]
By Nessia Berner Wong, ChangeLab Solutions. Jaidyn Probst is a high school senior living in Redwood Falls, Minnesota. Redwood Falls is a small, rural town of about 5,000 people — small enough that, according to Jaidyn, everyone knows everyone, which is probably her favorite part. She enjoys creating art, reading, listening to music, and spending time with friends and family. Also, she really doesn’t like doing the dishes. Jaidyn is Bdewakantunwan (Spirit Lake Dwellers) Dakota and comes from...
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A Growth Mindset Could Buffer Kids From Negative Academic Effects of Poverty (ww2.kqed.org)
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck , along with other education researchers interested in growth mindset, have done numerous studies showing that when students believe their intelligence can grow and change with effort, they perform better on academic tests. These findings have sparked interest and debate about how to encourage a growth mindset in students both at home and at school. Now, a national study of tenth-graders in Chile found student mindsets are correlated to achievement on...
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A school sought 50 men to stand in for absent fathers at ‘Breakfast with Dads’ — nearly 600 showed up [washingtonpost.com]
Something somewhat extraordinary happened last month at Billy Earl Dade Middle School in Dallas. The school — with a student population of nearly 900, about 90 percent from low-income families — planned to host its first “Breakfast with Dads,” according to the Dallas Morning News . About 150 male students, ages 11 to 13, signed up. But event organizers were concerned that some would attend without a male figure at their side, so they put out a call for volunteers who could serve as mentors.
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ACEs & African Americans Community on ACEs Connection
ACEs Connection envisions a resilient world where ALL people thrive. We are an anti-racist organization committed to the pursuit of social justice. In our work to promote resilience and prevent and mitigate ACEs, we intentionally embrace and uplift people who have historically not had a seat at the table. ACEs Connection celebrates the voices and tells the stories of people who have been barred from decision-making and who have shouldered the burden of systemic and economic oppression as the...
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ACES: Educators Present on Child Abuse: South Boston Online
Jeannette Fodness, Meg Rieley and I went to Boston to present at the ASCD conference--a large (@ 7000 I believe) conference for educators and administrators. The conversations were diverse and the interest in ACEs varied as did the knowledge level. Fortunately, a reporter from South Boston Online chose our learning lab to attend and here is what he had to say: http://www.southbostononline.com/aces-educators-present-on-child-abuse-2/ P.S. He got our titles a little mixed up, but the ideas are...
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Advancing Systemic Changes to Promote Healthy School Environments [RWJF.org]
Purpose RWJF seeks to advance systemic changes that embed health in school environments. To help advance these systemic changes, the Foundation will support a collaborative, multipronged strategy with three complementary areas of work related to Research, Policy, and Strategic Action. This Call for Qualifications (CFQ) represents Phase I of a two-phase selection process designed to identify eligible organizations to lead each area of work, which include: Applied Research and Translation (one...
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An imperative for those in "towers" to connect with the realities of trauma in schools
Boosting SEL in K-12's "Ivory Towers" Educational Leadership October 2018 | Volume 76 | Number 2 The Promise of Social-Emotional Learning Those of us in administration must lift our "social awareness" by getting closer to schools and the people inside them. The superintendent's leadership team for the district where I was working had just finished its Monday morning meeting. One member of that team stopped as he passed by my cubicle to view the large poster I'd recently hung up. It displayed...
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An Initiative to Improve Health in Schools Puts Trauma Front and Center [insidephilanthropy.com]
A recent initiative from America’s Promise Alliance—an organization best known for its efforts to boost high school graduation rates—supports work with communities to improve health in schools. Addressing trauma will be a major focus of that work, which is backed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and reflects growing interest among funders and nonprofits in this area. The organization is working on six community-led projects to make schools more healthy. Communities identified their own...
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An Interview with Alfonso Ramirez on Trauma Informed Schools
In 2016, the Oregon School-Based Health Alliance (OSBHA) worked to pass a bill to pilot trauma informed schools and funds were allocated to support two pilot schools, Tigard High School (THS) in Tigard, OR and Central High School (CHS) in Independence, OR. This is the third year of the pilot. OSBHA has been providing technical assistance to the two schools, working closely with the Trauma Informed Schools Coordinators’ hired to transform the schools. Alfonso Ramirez is the coordinator at...
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One Key to Reducing School Suspension: A Little Respect (edweek.org)
A one-time intervention to help teachers and students empathize with each other halved the number of suspensions at five diverse California middle schools, and helped students who had previously been suspended feel more connected at school, according to Stanford University research published in April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Changing the mindset of one teacher can change the social experience of that child’s entire world,” said Jason A. Okonofua, a Stanford...
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Our Students: The Reality
This is an excerpt from Breakaway Learners appearing in Evolllution ,and it deals with ACEs. I think the chapter in particular and the book more generally will be of interest to you all. Comments and thoughts are welcome as always. https://evolllution.com/attracting-students/todays_learner/who-are-our-students-now-and-into-the-future/
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Potential impact of Trauma on special education eligibility
This is a follow up to my previous email concerning the PP v Compton class action lawsuit concerning adverse events and eligibility under the Americans with Disability act. I did a presentation at the Legal Issues in Special Education conference on April 24th. The participants consisted of special education directors, compliance officers and parent advocates The big surprise was that there was huge interest in this issue. It was standing room only in the room. Secondly even though this...
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Program gives Spokane schools resources to help students rise above adversity
By Jim Allen , Thu., Oct. 24, 2019 Think of it as a well-school checkup. On Tuesday morning at Bemiss Elementary School, educators and health professionals spoke enthusiastically about something called Resilience in School Environments, or RISE. A collaboration between Kaiser Permanente and the Spokane and West Valley school districts, the RISE program is expected to lift up teachers and administrators and give them tools to cope with all the challenges of the modern student. The challenges...
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Co-Regulation with Students " At-Risk"-- Calming Together
Co-regulation with Kids "At-Risk"-Calming Together Highlights and thoughts from an article by Howard I. Bath:Calming together: The pathway to self-control Neuroscience shows that humans develop their abilities for emotional self-regulation through connections with reliable caregivers who soothe and model in a process called “co-regulation.” Since many troubled young people have not experienced a reliable, comforting presence, they have difficulty regulating their emotions and impulses.
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Development and Implementation of Standards for Social and Emotional Learning in the 50 States (selpractices.org)
Development and Implementation of Standards for Social and Emotional Learning in the 50 States · SEL Thrive { "@context" : "http://schema.org", "@type" : "Organization", "name" : "SEL Thrive", "url" : "https://www.selpractices.org/", "logo": "https://www.selpractices.org/apple-touch-icon-180x180.png", "sameAs" : [ "https://www.facebook.com/", "https://twitter.com/" ], // "contactPoint" : [{ // "@type" : "ContactPoint", // "telephone" : "+1-555-555-555", // "contactType" : "customer service"...
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Dr. Dipesh Navsaria: Schools as symptoms, not the source [The Cap Times]
There has been a lot of hand-wringing in the local press about the state of the Madison Metropolitan School District, particularly around behavior. In particular, the behavior education plan implemented over the last several years — intended to reduce exclusionary practices and use a more progressive approach to discipline — has come under fire for essentially allowing a permissive, low-consequence environment that affects learning as well as staff morale. I read these with interest — my two...
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Early childhood educators learn new ways to spot trauma triggers, build resilience in preschoolers
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.
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Educators’ “Complex Trauma” Resolution: Will it have an impact?
When I met up with school psychologists Donna Christy and Robert Hull at the Starbucks in Greenbelt, MD, they sparred good-naturedly about each other’s extra-curricular activities outside the school building—he says she is a big honcho with the National Education Association (NEA) and she says he will speak to any audience, anywhere (as long as his expenses are covered) on the subject of trauma and education. Both work for the Prince George’s (P.G.) County School District in nearby...
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From Trauma Informed To Trauma Transformed: Achieving Post-Traumatic GROWTH for the Youths In Our Most Disenfranchised Public Schools and Communities
Roberto Rivera was a troubled, addicted youth engaged in criminal behavior who discovered his path to transformation in the pit of his traumatic pain. He harnessed the fire of early childhood trauma to change himself from being a problem to being a solution, not just in his own life, but also in the lives of many, many other under-privileged and under-performing young people. The name of his solution is Fulfill The Dream (FTD). FTD is a unique, hip-hop(e) based, Social Emotional Learning...
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Going Door to Door: What a Small Band of Caring Adults Can Do for Kids (gradnation.org)
On a hot summer afternoon in Tucson, Arizona, I decided to take a walk, visiting young people I care a lot about but don’t know. I didn’t walk alone, instead joining a group of remarkable community leaders. The heat didn’t bother us, nor did it stop us. We were walking with a purpose. Sheriff Chris Nanos, local pastor Grady Scott, and Tucson Unified School District dropout prevention specialist Lisa Gonzales walked with Abel Morado and me, knocking on the doors of students who have already...
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Graduations, non-linear paths, & the importance of getting started
With graduation season upon us, I have been thinking a lot about one of my favorite graduation speeches. It’s the speech that Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey’s Anatomy, gave in 2014 at Dartmouth College. She references the typical expected advice from a graduation speech: “Follow your dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big." And then she says, "I think that's crap."
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Helping Traumatized Kids Return to The Classroom After a Disaster
This post draws on experiences and lessons learned from working during the recovery phase of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, La 2005. Disasters are calamitous events, traumatic and customarily outside the scope of normal human experiences and likely to involve psychological and physical injury. Disasters uniquely affect children because they are afflicted not only by the trauma of the event but also by their parents' fear and distress. When disasters strike, it disrupts the functioning of...
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How do these pediatricians do ACEs screening? Early adopters tell all.
Last week, three pediatricians — with a combined experience of 15 years integrating ACEs science into their practices — reflected on the urgency they felt several years ago that prompted them to begin screening patients for childhood adversity and resilience when there was practically no guidance at all. Along their journey , they accumulated a list of lessons learned for other pediatricians and family clinics to use. The three pediatricians participated in the ACEs Connection webinar,...
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How I Taught My Kids to Meditate [blogs.psychcentral.com]
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...
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How kids learn resilience [theatlantic.com]
In 2013, for the first time, a majority of public-school students in this country—51 percent, to be precise—fell below the federal government’s low-income cutoff, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch. It was a powerful symbolic moment—an inescapable reminder that the challenge of teaching low-income children has become the central issue in American education. The truth, as many American teachers know firsthand, is that low-income children can be harder to educate...
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Hurtful Words: Association of Exposure to Peer Verbal Abuse With Elevated Psychiatric Symptom Scores and Corpus Callosum Abnormalities Martin H. Teicher, MD et. al.
Objective: Previous studies have shown that exposure to parental verbal abuse in childhood is associated with higher rates of adult psychopathology and alterations in brain structure. In this study the authors sought to examine the symptomatic and...
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p.p et al V compton Unified or the compton trauma lawsuit
lThanks everyone for the high level of interest in this blog post. I thought I would send a follow up. Public Counsel a law firm filed a class action lawsuit alleging that Compton Unified subjected trauma impacted students to punitive and counter productive measures that pushed these students out of school and into the criminal justice system. Read the details on their website. http://www.publiccounsel.org/stories?id=0172 The plaintiffs were requesting that compton unified provide training...
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Incorporating Trauma Informed Practice and ACEs into Professional Curricula - a Toolkit
The toolkit is designed to aid faculty and teachers in a variety of disciplines, specifically social work, medicine, law, education, and counseling, to develop or integrate critical content on adverse childhood experiences and trauma informed care into new or existing curricula of graduate education programs. This toolkit provides an overview of colleges and universities that have courses in trauma-informed practice and ACEs science. Most of the toolkit comprises content for a course on...
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School Walkout: An Adult Ally Guide (youthempowerment.com)
Amplify their voice, not yours. Broadcast your willingness to be a "helper". Assume competence in youth leadership. Don't assume anything else. The moment news spread that the students of Parkland, Florida were using their voices to speak out against school violence, Rep. Shawn Harrison staffer claimed that the students were paid actors. This reaction isn’t uncommon. Some adults in positions of power are hesitant to include youth voice in the public sphere, and some will use any means...
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Some 350 Florida Leaders Expected to Attend Think Tank with Dr. Vincent Felitti, Co-Principal Investigator of the ACE Study; Expert on ACEs Science
Leaders from across the Sunshine State will take part in a “Think Tank” in Naples, FL, on Monday, August 6, to help create a more trauma-informed Florida. The estimated 350 attendees will include policy makers and community teams made up of school superintendents, law enforcement officers, judges, hospital administrators, mayors, PTA presidents, child welfare experts, mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, philanthropists, university researchers, state agency heads, and...
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Teaching students the art of self-reflection by measuring their heart rate under 3 different circumstances
This year I came up with an effective strategy using an app on my iPhone. I have been working with 3-6 graders showing them how their heart rate tells a story about how they are feeling in response to external stimuli. I show them through a series of three experiments which measure their heart rate under three different circumstances.
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The Brain and Troubled Children and Youth
Troubled kids are distinguished by their regrettable ability to elicit from others exactly the opposite of what they really need. ( L. Tobin ) Connecting with troubled students is not easy work. Many of these young people come into our classrooms and schools on a daily bases depressed, hostile, discouraged, unmotivated and angry. Underneath their sometimes outrageous and provocative behaviors these young people's lives come up way short on joy and long on despair and hopelessness. Their...
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Mindfulness, SEL: ‘Something Uniquely Human About That Ability to Connect and to Care’ [YouthToday.org]
Rick Alleva is a field specialist at the University of New Hampshire and co-author of a curriculum called “ Courage to Care ,” which promotes empathy for middle schoolers. He has been researching and promoting positive youth development and the use of mindful learning as well as social and emotional learning (SEML) for many years. After graduating from Tufts University with a degree in psychology, he traveled cross-country, coming across many teenage runaways. That later heightened his...
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New Resource Guide for Child Sexual Abuse/Exploitation Prevention
Greetings, ACN Community! I wanted to share this fantastic new resource guide developed by one of the work groups from the Georgia Statewide Human Trafficking Task Force. This guide provides background on best practice, principles of prevention, identifying resources for the classroom, developing a prevention plan, age appropriate teaching suggestions, analysis of specific programs, and guidelines for implementation and evaluation. It is really quite thorough and is full of excellent ideas...
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Nine Simple Trauma-Informed Gestures for Educators
The promotion of trauma-sensitive and trauma-informed schools has grown tremendously in education. Broadly speaking, trauma-informed schools maintain a framework whereby the entire school staff maintains awareness of the impacts of toxic stress and trauma, and strive to ensure that all students feel safe, supported, and connected. Such awareness and motivation among educators and caregivers to promote such a framework presents multiple opportunities to change the lives of students and help...
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Beyond Paper Tigers is Back!
Back for the second year, Beyond Paper Tigers conference will take place June 28th and 29th in Walla Walla, WA. Featuring Dr. Ken Ginsburg from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia as the keynote speaker, BPT builds on the story of one community and how they've learned that embracing trauma-informed care and implementing ACEs science truly takes a village. Operationalizing the latest in brain science, BPT will provide concrete strategies for intervention with youth, families, and communities...
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Beyond Paper Tigers: The Heart of the Matter
Graphic artist Anne Nelson created this visual roadmap during the partner showcase, capturing the "heart of the matter" for each community member Teri Barila, co-founder and CEO of the Children’s Resilience Initiative and the igniting force that brought change to a quiet corner of southeast Washington, kicked off last month’s Beyond Paper Tigers Conference by sharing one of her “aha” moments. In 2007, she attended a conference in Winthrop, WA, where Dr. Robert Anda spoke about the CDC-Kaiser...
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Brain Development and Academic Achievement
"As much as 20% of the gap in test scores could be explained by maturational lags in the frontal and temporal lobes. ... The influence of poverty on children’s learning and achievement is mediated by structural brain development. To avoid...
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California rural education network launches to help isolated teachers share resources [EdSource.org]
California rural education network launches to help isolated teachers share resources https://edsource.org/2018/cali...are-resources/603083
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‘Change in culture’: New California guidelines aim to help teach social, emotional skills [Press Democrat]
The nation’s schools long ago broadened their missions beyond the teaching of academic subjects and participation in extracurricular activities. Educators have for decades been entrusted to teach students a wider range of life skills, including those that touch on emotions, empathy and relationships with other people. Now, a new state guide , released Wednesday, offers a slew of resources for teachers and administrators seeking to bolster kids’ social and emotional development. “Science...
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journal article: Responding to Students with PTSD in Schools
Child Adolesc Psychiatr Clin N Am . 2012 January Responding to Students with PTSD in Schools Sheryl Kataoka, MD, MSHS, Audra Langley, PhD, Marleen Wong, PhD, Shilpa Baweja, MA, and Bradley Stein, MD, PhD The prevalence of trauma exposure among youth is a major public health concern, with a third of adolescents nationally reporting that they have been in a physical fight in the past twelve months and 9% having been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property. Studies have...
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Knowledge & Awareness of ACE's itself AS the Most Powerful Therapeutic Healing Agent
Thesis; ACE's Knowledge and Awareness is a POWERFUL Therapy that delivers proven effective Therapeutic Healing in and of Itself. Simply knowing of ACE's and of one's own score is healing above any therapeutic intervention currently in use, to the best of my knowledge - odd as this might sound to those whose livings are made providing such therapies - not that these are not also beneficial - but the numbers speak for themselves I think. Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris has published some crude data on...
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Let Her Learn: Stopping School Pushout: Overview and Key Findings (National Women's Law Center)
The National Women’s Law Center’s 2017 Let Her Learn Survey2 of 1,003 girls ages 14-18 shows that being called a racial slur is a common experience shared by all girls of color, with one third to more than two in five of them saying they have had this experience (Asian and Pacific Islander girls reported the highest rates), compared to just over one eighth of white girls.3 The Let Her Learn Survey also reveals that more than 1 in 5 girls (21 percent) have been sexually assaulted,4 with LGBTQ...
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The Girl on the Side (www.beatingtrauma.com)
Elisabeth Corey writes so honestly on her Beating Trauma blog . I'm a huge fan of her writing and advocacy work. This piece, in particular, is amazing. She writes about adult relationships and how they have been impacted deeply and consistently by ACEs in childhood. We know what we have lived. Unlearning and learning new and different things takes time and work. And it helps, that parents like Elisabeth share as they learn. We all benefit from that sharing. Many of us are learning how to...
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The Limitations of Teaching ‘Grit’ in the Classroom [TheAtlantic.com]
The first time I heard a preschooler explaining a classmate’s disruptive behavior, I was surprised at how adult her 4-year-old voice sounded. Her classmate “doesn’t know how to sit still and listen,” she said to me, while I sat at the snack table with them. He couldn’t learn because he couldn’t follow directions, she explained, as if she had recently completed a behavioral assessment on him. Months before either of these children would start kindergarten,...
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The Long-Term Effects of Social-Justice Education on Black Students [TheAtantic.com]
Last summer, the high-school English teacher T.J. Whitaker revised the reading list for his contemporary literature course with the addition of a new title— The Savage City , a gritty nonfiction account of race and murder in New York City in the 1960s. The 24-year teaching veteran said he chose the book to give his students at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, a chance to read “an honest depiction of the Black Panther Party and the corruption that existed in the NYPD during the...
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The silence of school leaders on climate change (hechingerreport.org)
By the time wildfires tore through his home county of Sonoma, California, Park Guthrie was already convinced that the clock on the climate catastrophe was running out. In 2015, Guthrie, a sixth-grade teacher and father of three, had approached the superintendent of the school district where he worked, hopeful she would sign a resolution endorsing action on climate change. He says he got nowhere. But after attending an advocacy event in Washington two years later, and hearing that the U.S.
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This is How Dutch Kids Enjoy and Learn from Keeping Vegetable Gardens (brightvibes.com)
Fruits and vegetables and everything you need can be bought at the supermarket nowadays. Due to this convenience, kids hardly know where their food comes from, much less how to grow it. By teaching them how to grow their own vegetables, their interest in healthy food is sparked. It’s fun, they learn a lot and spend time in nature. Every week the kids from this middle school in the Netherlands go to the vegetable garden with their teacher and a volunteer parent. At the vegetable garden they...