Tagged With "Professional Development"
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Six Ways for Educators to Avoid Compassion Fatigue (lesley.edu)
Over 34 million children in the United States under the age of 18 have experienced at least one type of serious childhood trauma, according to the National Survey for Children's Health—and the numbers may be even higher, due to category omissions such as poverty and racism. These stunning statistics are a heartbreaking reality for our children and a daily struggle for teachers. With nearly half of the children in our nation's classrooms experiencing adverse childhood events, trauma, or...
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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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The Focus Room: A Calming, Welcoming Space to Restore Receptivity and Readiness to Learn
As part of the Trauma Informed approach to instruction, the staff at Learn4Life Innovation High School recently created a Focus Room at the National City resource center. The Focus Room provides a space to facilitate restorative processes for students who need a break to refocus or who are not meeting school expectations. In this space, staff assist students and guide them to redirect, recover, and/or return to an internal state conducive to learning. Students can request to use the room or...
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Tips for Creating an Inclusive Virtual Space (aspeninstitute.org)
The COVID-19 global pandemic has forced many organizations to adapt their content and services for virtual spaces. Unfortunately, much work still needs to be done to mend the digital divide that leaves many people without internet access. However, we can all ensure that diversity, equity, and inclusion are centered in our digital engagements—our webinars, podcasts, and other digital meetings and convenings. As you develop digital content for your programs, consider the following reminders...
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Why Schools Should Be Organized To Prioritize Relationships (kqed.org)
Over many years researchers in the learning sciences, psychology, anthropology and neuroscience have learned a lot about how humans learn. One of the key properties is malleability. The brain changes in response to relationships and experiences, continuing to develop through young adulthood. And while the children in any class will develop differently based on their experiences, the brain will grow and change with the right inputs. "What's most interesting is a child can become a productive...
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Why We Can't Afford Whitewashed Social-Emotional Learning (ascd.org)
Social-emotional learning (SEL) skills can help us build communities that foster courageous conversations across difference so that our students can confront injustice, hate, and inequity. SEL refers to the life skills that support people in experiencing, managing, and expressing emotions, making sound decisions, and fostering interpersonal relationships. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) defines five core SEL competencies , including self-awareness,...
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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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How Self-Compassion Supports Academic Motivation and Emotional Wellness (kqed.org)
If teachers and parents want children to develop resilience and strength, a better approach is to teach them self-compassion, said Dr. Kristin Neff, a psychology professor at the University of Texas and author of Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself . How Self-Compassion Supports Academic Motivation When a student develops self-compassion, the seat of motivation shifts . Neff said that there is an empirical link between self-compassion and growth mindset (the belief...
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Indigenous educators fight for an accurate history of California (High Country News)
In the 1950s, after renovations were complete, visitors could wander into the chapel and see statues of saints and pictures of the Virgen de Guadalupe on the stucco walls. They could see the simple wooden pews that still filled the church and, outside, the stones once used to grind grain, and then wander through the Spanish-style garden with its large gray fountain, rose bushes and lemon trees that glowed in the California sun. Tour guides typically avoided the darker details of its history,...
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Learn4Life Conducts Level 1 Trauma-Informed Training to “Train-the-Trainers”
Learn4Life is taking an organization-wide approach to educational service delivery grounded in understanding trauma, its consequences and promoting healing and resilience. To help staff better understand the approach, training was recently conducted for Learn4Life leaders including teachers, counselors, and administrative staff. The training is designed to increase understanding of proactive, practical, trauma-informed approaches to create cultures of inclusivity. The goal is the have all...
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Learn4Life Staff Learns De-Escalation Techniques
At a recent Professional Development (PD), staff and teachers at Learn4Life resource centers throughout the San Fernando Valley and Northern Los Angeles County, learned about de-escalation techniques. The PD provided the staff with resources designed to equip them to organize their thinking and calmly respond to and effectively de-escalate situations to avoid a potential crisis. The techniques they learned included: Defining the behavior and how to approach a situation QTIP! (Quit Taking It...
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Making SEL More Relevant to Teens (edutopia.org)
Three social and emotional learning activities that are designed to address high school students’ need for status and respect. According to a 2018 survey , current and recent high school students don’t believe their schools have done enough to help them develop socially and emotionally, and most graduates don’t feel prepared for life after high school. Researcher David Yeager and his colleagues argue that it’s important to address teens’ need for status (“How do others treat me?”) and...
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ACEs Connection launches Cooperative of Communities
The ACEs Connection Cooperative of Communities launches today. We want to continue to contribute to the ACEs movement for as long as it takes to create a worldwide healing-centered culture based on ACEs science. We want that to take hold in this world in the same way electricity has — we only notice it if it isn’t there.
First, a clarification: Nothing on ACEsConnection.com changes! Membership remains free! Everything our current 300+ communities use stays free, and remains free for new ones.
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Trauma Resilient Educational Communities (TREC) Model
Learn4Life quickly realized that in order to reach students’ heads, we needed to reach their hearts. So, we designed the Trauma-Resilient Educational Communities (TREC ) Model which is based on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) science and protocols. TREC is an active approach to understanding trauma. We do more than explain the effects of trauma and encourage understanding amongst our teachers, counselors and staff. All our employees are trained and receive credentials in the foundations...
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California reaches milestone with ACEs initiatives pulsing in all 58 counties. Next: All CA cities.
Karen Clemmer, the Northwest community facilitator with ACEs Connection, was already deeply interested in the CDC/Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study when she and a colleague from the Child Parent Institute were invited to lunch by ACEs Connection founder and publisher Jane Stevens in 2012. But that lunch meeting changed everything. Karen Clemmer “Jane helped us see a bigger world,” says Clemmer. “She came with a much wider lens. She didn’t look only at Sonoma County, she...
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Why We Need to Pay More Attention to the Youngest Children and Their Parents (kqed.org)
Throughout the coronavirus outbreak, nearly everyone connected to children has raised the alarm about pandemic learning loss . Parents, educators, physicians and politicians — they might disagree on solutions, but they’re all concerned about how the current educational upheaval will affect K-12 students. By contrast, little attention has been paid to the pandemic’s effects on even younger learners. “There aren’t a lot of people out there screaming ‘what about the infants?’” said Jack...
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Five Things We Get Wrong (D'OH) with SEL
SEL. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). My lil’ ole school counselor heart should be beaming with joy. SEL is FINALLY receiving the limelight it has long deserved in education. Most everyone everywhere is proclaiming the importance of SEL! So why do I want to smack myself upside the head (Homer Simpson style – D’OH) most every time I read about, hear about, or see an SEL effort in a school. Because we keep getting it WRONG! So before I start in with all the ways in which we are screwing it up,...
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Developing Human Capital: Moving from Extraction to Reciprocity in Our Organizational Relationships (nonprofitquarterly.org)
This ecological framework should give us pause as we consider notions of “human resource” and “human capital” in nonprofit organizations. In traditional business terms, a “resource” may be fully extractable, as Berry described, and “capital” may be under the full control of the corporation to expand its resource extraction as much as possible. These terms and their underlying belief systems, if left unchallenged, can lead us into dangerous waters if we are committed to the social sector...
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We’ve changed our name to PACEs Connection!
We have some very exciting news! As of today, ACEs Connection is now PACEs Connection. PACEs stands for Positive and Adverse Childhood Experiences.
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New Resource: Strategies for Trauma-Informed School Communities
The California Essentials for Childhood Initiative is excited to share a newly developed attached, “Strategies for Trauma-Informed School Communities: Practices to Improve Resiliency in School-Aged Children and Address Adverse Childhood Experiences”. This new resource is intended to assist state and local public health programs, child-serving systems, non-profits, and philanthropic organizations in their efforts to educate about the need for trauma-informed school policies and practices that...
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Strategies for Building More Equitable Schools When Returning to the Classroom (childtrends.org)
Students have faced isolation, loss, and trauma during the pandemic, all of which have impacted their home and school lives. Resources and plans to address these challenges vary across school districts, and many are ill-equipped to do so . For instance, prior to the pandemic, research found that 60 percent of schools lacked mental health services , and that mental health services for children of color were less accessible and of lower quality than services available to non-Latino White...
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Newsom signs bill to boost Native American curriculum (enewspapers.dailybulletin.com)
The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians annually hosts thousands of fourth graders at a California Indian Cultural Awareness conference commemorating California Native American Day in September. COURTESY PHOTO Author: Beau Yarbrough's article, please click here. California educators will be working more closely with Native American tribes under a new law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday. Assembly Bill 1703, the California Indian Education Act, encourages school districts, county offices...
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Career Technical Education Gives High School Entrepreneurs a Jump Start on Success (Learn4Life)
Learn4Life helped Hector D. transform an idea into a business plan LOS ANGELES (February 21, 2023) – While occasionally working for his father’s landscaping business, high school student Hector D. realized that protection against sharp tools, thorny shrubs, biting insects and brutal heat could be improved with better gear. He had the idea for a technical vest that would protect workers that he is calling Arbolero – combining the Spanish word for tree and a bolero vest. Now his teachers in...
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Native Ways of Knowing Book List: Decolonizing and Indigenizing Classrooms and Libraries (SCOE)
SDCOE and CIEFA's Native Ways of Knowing Book List: Decolonizing and Indigenizing Classrooms and Libraries To help educators and parents choose high-quality Indigenous authored books, the San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) and California Indian Education (CIEFA) have designed this Native Ways of Knowing Book List: Decolonizing and Indigenizing Classrooms and Libraries. These books have been vetted by Native American scholars, CIEFA, and SDCOE staff. Please consider adding these...
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The 2023 Creating Resilient Communities Summer Curriculum is Now Open for Registration
PACEs Connection is excited to roll out our summer 2023 *CRC* curriculum dates. Members who complete the CRC will qualify for a fall 2023 fellowship program.
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Free, Trauma-Resilient Parent Certification through Trauma-Resilient Educational Communities (TREC)
Please click here, Trauma-Resilient Parent Certification | Trauma-Resilient Educational Communities (TREC) , for the free certification. As a public service, TREC is sharing this opportunity for any parent/guardian globally. With Our vision is to cultivate a more compassionate world comprised of resilient people and their communities where equitable and sustainable practices are commonplace within all public and private institutions and systems, we invite you to join our TREC ecosystem.
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Drive Impactful Change in Your Work Environment through Trauma-Resilient Professional Certification!
Drive Impactful Change in Your Work Environment The Trauma-Resilient Professional Certification is designed for educators, social workers, mental health providers, and community leaders who want to develop an understanding on the impact of trauma, build resilience, and foster trusted relationships with those they serve. Please click here Trauma-Resilient Professional Certification | Trauma Resilient Educational Communities (TREC) to learn more. Attached, please find attached a 3-page overview.
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Drive Impactful Change in Your Healthcare Environment through Trauma-Resilient Healthcare Certification!
The Trauma-Resilient Healthcare Professional Certification is designed for healthcare professionals, social workers, and mental health providers who want to develop an understanding on the impact of trauma, build resilience, and foster trusted relationships with those they serve. Please click here, Trauma-Resilient Healthcare Professionals Certification | Trauma-Resilient Educational Communities (TREC) to learn more. TREC's Individual Trauma-Resilient Healthcare Professional Certification is...