Featured Presenter- Jim Sporleder Thursday, April 19th, 3:15-8:30 p.m. Willmar High School Jim Sporleder retired in 2014 as Principal of Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA. Under Jim's leadership, Lincoln High School became a "Trauma Informed" school, gaining national attention due to a dramatic drop in out of school suspensions, increased graduation rates and the number of students going on to post-secondary education. These dramatic changes at Lincoln caught the attention of Jamie...

The 2018 Building Strong Brains Tennessee ACEs Summit took place last week in Nashville, TN. The theme of this year’s summit was “Celebrating Successes and Imagining Possibilities” and there is plenty to celebrate. Tennessee is one of the most innovative states when it comes to ACEs awareness. Tennessee understands that childhood trauma is the root cause of its poor health outcomes, high rates of addiction and other ailments. And Tennessee is doing something about it. Tennessee’s leadership...

“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James asserted in his revolutionary 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings . Two generations later, Rilke wrote in a beautiful letter of advice to a young woman : “I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion.” And yet in the century since, we’ve made little progress on making sense — much less...

Neuroscience isn't on many elementary school lesson plans. But this spring, a second grade class at Fairmont Neighborhood School in the South Bronx is plunging in. Sarah Wechsler, an instructional coach with wide eyes and a marathoner's energy, asks the students to think about the development and progress that they've made already in their lives. "You probably don't remember, but there was a time when you didn't know how to speak and you were just like 'Wah wah wah blah blah blah, mama,...

I liked his book, though I think Levine's were just a tad better in the neuroscience of it all, as well as the innate release mechanism. This really started a while back. Keleman in the 70s, Louwen before him even, Hanna and Berceli in the 80s, and then it turned into something. There has been good writing about trauma for a while, but too much has relied on the old paradigm of treatment, which even van der Kolk says has not been very successful. The reason the body keeps the score is...