Tagged With "Special Ed"
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10 Simple Steps for Reducing Toxic Stress in the Classroom
As the brain science on adverse childhood experiences evolves, teaching must, too By Jim Hickman & Kathy Higgins We all know that when children aren’t well, they’re less likely to learn. More and more teachers recognize that children who can’t sit still in class, act out, or have asthma may be showing warning signs of a toxic exposure to childhood trauma. More than two decades ago, landmark research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente found that...
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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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COVID19 Re-Imagines School-Home-Ed Disciplinary Practices w/Trauma-aware Zero-Punishment Conscious Discipline to stop Abuse at its source!
ACE's & COVID-19 - Change is coming: Ethos is, as ethos does - Are we all on-board with the following ethos?
ETHOS: If a child commits a criminally-prosecutable act then it is a matter for doctors, not police (for HIPPA, not FERPA)! Well? Onboard?
If one grasps the prior, the following is then readily self-evident: CORPORAL PUNISHMENT lays the foundation for abuse and occurs in 80% of households and 15% of schools. Corporal Punishment implicitly perpetuates, condones and promotes th
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A Landmark Lawsuit Aimed to Fix Special Ed for California's Black Students. It Didn't. [kqed.org]
By Lee Romney, KQED, October 18, 2019 Darryl Lester was at his mom’s place in Tacoma, Washington, when a letter he’d been waiting for arrived in the mail. At 40, he was destitute, in pain and out of work. The letter delivered good news: Lester would be getting disability benefits after blowing out his back in a sheet metal accident. But he crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. Why? Because he couldn’t read it. From first through seventh grades, Lester had attended three public schools in...
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A Root Cause of the Teacher-Diversity Problem [theatlantic.com]
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...
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A Rust Belt City's School Turnaround [TheAtlantic.com]
When 18-year-old Karolina Espinosa looks back to her freshman year at Buffalo’s Hutchinson Central Technical High School, graduation seemed like a long shot. “At the time,” she said, “both of my parents were incarcerated. I had trouble with reading, and I had problems with attendance.” But in May, sitting in the office of her school’s family support specialist, Joell Stubbe, Karolina talked excitedly about going to Buffalo State University, where she’s been accepted into the class of 2021.
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An Alternative to Suspension with Trauma-Informed Dynamic Mindfulness: Building Stress Resilience, Emotion Regulation and Empathy
At the November 2019 Northern California Safe and Healthy Schools Conference at UC Berkeley, Niroga Program Managers Sam Weiss and Fatima Ahmed facilitated a session incorporating the theory and practice of Dynamic Mindfulness (DMind) to a standing room only crowd.
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An Unusual Idea for Fixing School Segregation [theatlantic.com]
Many proposals for addressing school segregation seem pretty small, especially when compared to the scale and severity of the problem. Without the power of a court-ordered desegregation mandate, progress can feel extremely far off, if not altogether impossible. Some even believe—understandably though mistakenly —that no meaningful steps can be taken to integrate schools unless housing segregation is resolved. But a new theory from Thomas Scott-Railton, a recent graduate of Yale Law School,...
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Arizona Educators Share What's Working to Create Trauma-Sensitive Schools (azednews.com)
Creating a supportive environment is helping reduce student behavior issues in Arizona schools and empowering students to pause before they respond instead of reacting to adverse events. Research shows experiencing six or more adverse childhood experiences increases risk factors for chronic diseases, which can reduce a person’s life by up to 20 years, said Marcia Stanton, coordinator of the Adverse Childhood Experience Initiative at Phoenix Children’s Hospital . Adverse childhood experiences...
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Arne Duncan: ‘Everyone Says They Value Education, but Their Actions Don’t Follow’ [theatlantic.com]
Arne Duncan, the former education secretary under President Barack Obama, has always been more candid than others who’ve served in that role. He’s often used his platform to talk about what he sees as the persistent socioeconomic and racial disparities in access to quality schools. His new book, How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success From One of the Nation’s Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education, further cements that reputation. How Schools Work’s first chapter is...
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Op-Ed in Ed Source Outlines Steps to Increase Mental Health Access in CA Schools
Statewide policy steps that could facilitate partnership between county mental health and school districts.
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Op-ed: Philly schools must prioritize trauma-informed learning [NewsWorks.org]
Powerful and surprisingly prevalent horrors are blocking access to education and ravaging children’s lives. Sadly, they remain the elephant in the classroom: adverse childhood experiences . Adverse childhood experiences include physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, including bullying; physical and emotional neglect; a missing parent, due to separation, divorce, incarceration, or death; witnessing household substance abuse, violence, or mental illness; and witnessing environmental violence.
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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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Could Parkland Shooting Be Prevented? Yes, and Runcie Knew How
School safety, negligence documentation, and a need for a school reform My name is Natalia Garceau. For nine years, I’ve been working at a center similar to the one where Nikolas Cruz was sent to after his expulsion from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. You won’t hear anything from the teachers who work at such centers because they are afraid to lose their jobs and to be taken to court. They have families to feed. By contract, we are not allowed to speak with media about anything...
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Could the #MeToo Movement Change Sex Ed.? (edweek.org)
Twice a month, 8th grade English teacher Stephany Copeland hosts what she calls a “gender assembly” for the 55 girls she teaches at the KIPP Rise Academy in Newark, N.J. They’re usually oriented around things that the girls want to talk about, and given their age, that often means the power dynamics between boys and girls. Copeland’s work predates the #MeToo movement, but her focus on relationships and consent, many advocates say, is uncommon: Both topics are frequently missing from whatever...
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Do Conversations About Race Belong in the Classroom? [TheAtlantic.com]
In 1997, Beverly Daniel Tatum, one of the country’s foremost authorities on the psychology of racism, answered a recurring question that surfaced in her work with teachers, administrators, and parent groups: Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? The result was a critically acclaimed book of the same name that gave readers—numbering in the hundreds of thousands—a starting point to demystify conversations about race, better understand the concept of racial identity, and...
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Education Summit
The Attachment & Trauma Network’s 2017 Educating Traumatized Children Summit will feature 18 audio interviews (available as mp3 recordings) exploring the Trauma-Sensitive Schools movement and the latest in understanding the impact of trauma on learning. Teachers, therapists, administrators and parents will all find this series helpful in working with children of trauma. Topics include: Re-Thinking Children’s Behavior...the Seismic Shift
The Importance of Top Administrators’...
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Educators in Charlottesville Mix Coursework with Civic Engagement to Confront Recent Violence [PSMag.com]
Rosa Atkins grew up in a small town in southern Virginia during the civil rights era. She recalls being a young student during those years, and how important her teachers' composure was. "When I think about the horrors of that time," says Atkins, now the superintendent of Charlottesville City Schools, "I remember the smiles of my teachers, their kind words, and how much that reassured me." Atkins has had to call on those memories to prepare for the new school year, which began on Wednesday...
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Gov. Kate Brown is doing plenty to boost graduation rates [OregonLive.com]
...in a matter of days, House Bill 4002, will be signed into law here in Oregon. The bill resulted from 18 months of conferences, study and research with over 500 participants. National experts from the University of Chicago and Washington State University provided important input to the process. This bill represents action-oriented legislation on absenteeism — community-driven, evidence-based and forward thinking. ...HB4002 sets an action-based approach in motion. It asks school districts...
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Guide - Creating Trauma-Informed Policies: A Practice Guide for School and Mental Health Leadership
Author, Leora Wolf-Prusan, EdD, School Mental Health lead for SAMHSA's Mental Health Technology Center Pacific Southwest http://mhttcnetwork.org/mhttc/mhttc-psw.html Creating compassionate policies is a cornerstone strategy of educational leadership. This guide provides a deep dive into developing, implementing, and evaluating trauma-informed and compassionate school policies. It highlights four "choice points" for education and mental health leadership: Choice Point 1: Names &...
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Hearing to be held this week on education and trauma in House of Representatives Ed and Labor subcommittee
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, California Surgeon General, will be the lead witness in a hearing on trauma-informed practices in education on Wednesday, Sept. 11 in the House of Representatives Education and Labor Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education. The hearing is titled "The Importance of Trauma-Informed Practices in Education to Assist Students Impacted by Gun Violence and Other Adversities." Other witnesses include I ngrida Barker, Ed.D. , Associate...
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Here’s how Beach High in Long Beach has reduced suspensions by 71% [PressTelegram.com]
Some kids just need a break. And they get two in Britt Sexton’s art classes at Beach High School. “I have an alarm that goes off twice a period,” Sexton said. “This Beyonce song comes on. And the kids stop what they’re doing.” Then she and the students do squats. Twenty of them. “It gives them a chance to get up,” Sexton said. “Some of them will dance while they’re squatting.” It’s her way of implementing one of the principles of a pilot program at the Long Beach Unified School District...
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How California’s Rural Education Network Is Creating an Online Hub to Better Connect Remote Schools and Empower Teachers to Share Experiences, Strategies & Classroom Materials (the74million.org)
Educators in rural communities face unique challenges, but they also have special strengths that aren’t always found in urban and suburban schools. In California,where 60 percent of districts are in towns or rural areas, a new project is leveraging those strengths to help educators connect with one another and get the support they need. The California Rural Ed Network started in 2017 but recently launched an online resource bank that offers free informational and professional development...
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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 Mass Incarceration Pushes Black Children Further Behind in School [TheAtlantic.com]
In the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the closing remarks at the March on Washington. More than 200,000 people gathered to cast a national spotlight on and mobilize resistance to Jim Crow, racist laws and policies that disenfranchised black Americans and mandated segregated housing, schools, and employment. Today, more than 50 years later, remnants of Jim Crow segregation persist in the form of mass incarceration —the imprisonment of millions of Americans, overwhelmingly...
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How Teachers And Schools Can Help When Bad Stuff Happens (npr.org)
Lately, there's been a surfeit of scary news: Charlottesville, Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and now Las Vegas. At NPR Ed we've covered many of the ways that teachers can be helpers, whether the disaster of the day is affecting your students directly or not: trauma-informed education, mindfulness, and yoga to name a few. While the young brain is impressionable to trauma, it can also be resilient , says Pamela Cantor, the founder of a nonprofit called Turnaround for Children. Trauma-informed...
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How to Teach Teens About Love, Consent and Emotional Intelligence (ww2.kqed.org)
Navigating love and relationships can be difficult at any age, but especially so in the angsty teenage years. Budding romances can be fun and exhilarating but also confusing and uncomfortable. In these moments of confusion, teens often turn to friends or the internet for advice. But what if teens were trained with other options? What if lessons in love and romance were taught more explicitly in schools and at home? It turns out that teens are yearning for these lessons. They’re looking for...
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Improve Classroom Climate with Dynamic Mindfulness
Improve Classroom Climate with Dynamic Mindfulness January 2020 We know that challenges with toxic stress and trauma amongst our educators and the youth they serve affect learning readiness, school classroom climate, and teacher burnout. What can we do about it? Many educators are struggling with this question and searching for answers. Niroga Institute's Dynamic Mindfulness (DMind) programs should be considered as a comprehensive solution. Dynamic Mindfulness is a combination of movement,...
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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 Segregation Is Not a Myth [theatlantic.com]
Is school segregation getting worse? Plenty of people say yes, including scholars , journalists , and civil-rights advocates . For the first time in years, there’s something approximating a consensus: Racially divided schools are a major and intensifying problem for American education—maybe even a crisis . There’s seemingly compelling numerical evidence, too. According to my analysis of data from the National Center on Education Statistics, the number of segregated schools (defined in this...
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Screening Mental Health In Kindergarten Is Way Too Late, Experts Say [NPR.org]
When it comes to children's brains, Rahil Briggs describes them as ... sticky. "Whatever we throw, [it] sticks. That's why they can learn Spanish in six months when it takes us six years," says the New York City based child psychologist, "but also why if they're exposed to community violence, or domestic violence, it really sticks." Briggs works at the Healthy Steps program at the Montefiore Comprehensive Health Care Center in the South Bronx, screening children as young as 6 months for...
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So We Know Students Are Stressed Out ... Now Let's Talk About It [NPR.org]
Gaby Rabinovich remembers the first time she threw up while taking a test. It was a few months ago, early on in her freshman year at Marblehead High School in Massachusetts. She was sitting in biology class when, she recalls, she got so anxious that she excused herself to the bathroom. Rabinovich typically starts her day at 6 a.m. and gets to school at 7:15. On Mondays she runs a government club called Junior State of America. She's also running for class president, sits on the women's...
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Social-Emotional Life Skills Wrapped Up in Fun
This past school year Every Neighborhood Partnership (ENP) had a great opportunity to collaborate with two Fresno Unified Elementary schools, Fresno State, Fresno City College and Alliant International University to pilot two unique programs that help to build resiliency and social-emotional life skills. Through this collaborative partnership, ENP was able to facilitate two evidence-based programs that help students to build and develop social and emotional life skills through yoga and...
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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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Speaking Up Without Tearing Down (tolerance.org)
A veteran human rights ed ucator explains the value of teaching students to call each other in rather than out. Most teachers look for opportunities to build a human rights culture and to counter hatred, bigotry, fear-mongering and intolerance. One way to do this, when students make a mistake, is to call them in rather than calling them out . Doing so prepares them for civic engagement by encouraging a sense of hope and possibility. In conversations and debates about social justice issues,...
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Start Talking with All Students About Consent (acsd.org)
Sex education is about so much more than just sex. A 4-year-old can learn that he has the right to control who touches him. A 6-year-old can learn the correct names of her body parts, so she is able to more accurately report abuse . We can teach 9-year-olds to understand that they can like a toy regardless of whether it's a "girl's" or "boy's" color. At Advocates for Youth , where I lead creative programs to educate and mobilize youth, we believe sex ed should start early in a child's life...
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Taking ACEs to School: Trauma-Informed Approaches in Higher Education
“What happened to you?” isn’t just a question for therapists to ask their troubled clients. It’s a question that should inform the work of physicians, nurses, lawyers, educators, social workers and public health advocates from the time they are learning their professions to each real-world encounter. That’s the hope of the Philadelphia ACE Task Force (PATF) , whose workforce development group released a toolkit to help faculty across a range of disciplines weave content on adverse childhood...
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Teachers Share Resources for Addressing Charlottesville Hate Rally in the Classroom [Blogs.EdWeek.org]
For many teachers, a pall has been cast over the first few days of school. This weekend, a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., turned deadly when a 20-year-old man drove his car into counter-protesters, fatally injuring one woman and hurting 19 others. The Associated Press reported that the high school teacher of the man accused of the incident said he had been fascinated with Nazism in school, and had "deeply held, radical" convictions on race in the 9th grade. Even before the...
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The Educators Helping Students Through Trauma
A comic strip depicts how one New Orleans school’s emphasis on student safety and emotional well-being has helped a 13-year-old navigate a family crisis. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/10/the-educators-helping-students-through-trauma/544188/
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The Educators Helping Students Through Trauma [theatlantic.com]
This story is part of a project The Hechinger Report did in collaboration with the local public radio station WWNO in New Orleans. The project reported on the traumatic experiences many young children in New Orleans are dealing with at home, and how some schools are turning to trauma-informed teaching to better serve these students. One of the students interviewed for the project was Sherlae, a 13-year-old student at Lawrence D. Crocker College Prep coping with a family mental-health crisis.
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Michigan Trauma Informed Education
We are working with PESI, a leader in professional development, to offer a full day training in trauma informed education. This content follows the content of our book on Supporting and Educating Traumatized Students. We will be in Michigan April 19, (Sterling Heights) 20, (LIvonia) and 21 (Ann Arbor) See the attached brochure If this goes well they will continue to offer this next year. Hope to see you there
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Miscounting Poor Students [usnews.com]
THE NUMBER OF POOR students enrolled in a particular school or living in a certain school district is one of the most important education data points that exists, and the stakes are high for getting the count right. The figures are used to direct billions of dollars in federal and state aid, and they're a pillar of K-12 accountability systems that ensure disadvantaged students are keeping up with their wealthier peers. But the method that's traditionally used to track them – how many...
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New Guidance on Trauma Screening in Schools
In partnership with the Defending Childhood State Policy Initiative and the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice, new guidance has been released on trauma screening in schools. Importantly, this document lays out a series of important considerations when determining whether trauma screening is indicated in each context, and how to go about collecting and utilizing the data generated from the process. Please feel free to share input.
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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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New Resources from the National Traumatic Stress Network
Last week, the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) hosted a webinar geared for educators. The expert panel spoke about what schools and communities can do when there are allegations of sexual misconduct by an educator towards a student. This webinar was a follow up to a fact sheet that was developed by the Child Sexual Abuse subcommittee of the NCTSN in response to a request from educators on how to handle sensitive situations in which a student(s) alleges sexual abuse by an...
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New Study on Child Welfare-Involved Youth in Special Education
Dear Colleagues, Wanted to share my new study out in Exceptional Children . I look at maltreatment patterns & their consequences for child welfare-involved children in special education. Findings can inform how educators support these youth, who are often overlooked. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0014402919870830?journalCode=ecxc If you don't have journal access, feel free to email me for a copy of the study: kagee@ucdavis.edu . Regards, Kevin Kevin A. Gee, Ed.D. Associate...
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No More 'At-Risk' Students in California [insidehighered.com]
By Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, November 5, 2019 A decades-long effort to change how educators talk about students facing economic or social challenges has been backed by California lawmakers. A bill to remove references to “at-risk youth” and replace the term with “at-promise youth” in California’s Education Code and Penal Code was approved by California governor Gavin Newsom in mid-October. The California Education Code is a collection of laws primarily applying to public K-12...
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Not All Fun And Games: New Guidelines Urge Schools To Rethink Recess [NPR.org]
What's the best time for students to have recess? Before lunch, or after? What happens if it rains? If students are misbehaving, is it a good idea to punish them by making them sit out recess? Those are just a few of the issues addressed in new guidelines designed to help schools have good recess. The recommendations come from a group called SHAPE (Society of Health and Physical Educators) America and from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Recess might seem simple — just open...
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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