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As a veteran educator, I have encountered my share of “troublemaker” students—those who talk when they should be quiet, stand up when they should sit down, and generally find endless ways to turn the order of the classroom upside down. For Carla Shalaby, a former elementary-school teacher who has studied at the Rutgers and Harvard graduate schools of education and directed elementary-education programs at Brown University and Wellesley College, the social order of a classroom and the...

This past Halloween, a dozen or so lifers, myself included, sat in a conference room in Attica State Prison in western upstate New York. A man named Anthony Haynes was making his pitch: He wanted each of us, and whoever else we could convince back in the prison population, to consider giving money to his cause. Sure, he was asking only the price of a candy bar each month. But Haynes had been a jailer for more than 33 years, a warden of several different federal prisons — all of which made...

A remarkable milestone occurs in children around their fourth birthdays: They learn that other people can have different thoughts than they do. A recent study is the first to examine the specific brain changes associated with this developmental breakthrough. The new study specifically explored the brain changes that occur when a child is able to recognize that another person believes something that the child knows is false. Once children gain this ability, they can better predict other...

A new animation has been launched to raise awareness of how certain traumatic childhood events can have an impact on a person throughout their entire life. Adverse Childhood Experiences (Welsh) from www.substance.org.uk on Vimeo . Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are those that directly harm a child; such as physical, verbal and sexual abuse or physical or emotional neglect – as well as those that affect the environment where they grow up; including parental separation, domestic...

Note: This excellent article by Kate Masters in the daily Frederick, MD newspaper led me to talk to two of the people interviewed in the story and learn just how much is going on right in my neck of the woods in Frederick County (where I live in Washington, DC is in the same Metro Statistical Area). Anne Soule, Director of Family Support Services, Mental Health Association of Frederick County, and Lynn Davis, Director, Child Advocacy Center of Frederick County, have been working together...

Here's a second post from my recent visit to Walla Walla to learn all I could from them about how they've developed a trauma-informed community. ( ICYMI: here's my first post mapping out Walla Walla's step-by-step approach to building a trauma-informed community ) Integrating the knowledge about ACEs, brain science, and resilience into practice has been a cornerstone of Walla Walla's trauma-informed community initiative. At every monthly meeting of their Community Resilience Initiative (CRI)...

I just wanted to take a moment to tell the community how excited I, and the rest of our staff at LaSalle School , are about our upcoming Fourth Annual Capital District ACEs Symposium happening tomorrow, May 5. I posted the event in the calendar some weeks back, and I am proud to say that we successfully filled the room and had to close registration two weeks ago. This means that more than 900 people from a wide range of sectors including health care, education, juvenile justice, police,...

Five decades ago, in an essay in The New York Review of Books, Hannah Arendt described an exchange she had had with a “Roman chambermaid” about Pope John XXIII. The beloved pontiff had died, of stomach cancer, two years earlier, not long before the Second Vatican Council, which he convened, transformed the liturgy and the spirit of the Catholic Church. “How could it happen that a true Christian would sit on St. Peter’s chair?” the chambermaid asked, apparently referring to the succession of...

Our childhood stays with us throughout our lives. We know this intuitively, from the shiver that can accompany memories of an upsetting event from our early years even into adulthood. But it is also true in a much deeper way. The Adverse Childhood Experience (Ace) study , carried out in the US in the 1990s, found that children exposed to serious neglect, abuse or household dysfunction were at significantly greater risk of a litany of poor health and social outcomes, ranging from heart...

[For more of this story go to http://www.rwjf.org/en/culture-of-health/2017/04/boosting-a-babys-brain-power-by-supporting-parents.html]

As a teenager, Rocsana Enriquez ran away from home frequently to escape fights with her mother and sexual abuse from her stepfather. She got involved with street gangs and cycled in and out of juvenile detention. While she was incarcerated in Central California, she started to learn yoga. It became an outlet for her anger and an antidote to the deep insecurity she felt. Before she got into a fight, she reminded herself to take a deep breath. And she loved the way she felt when she stretched...

Some of the nation's top researchers who've spent their careers studying early childhood education recently got together in Washington with one goal in mind: to cut through the fog of studies and the endless debates over the benefits of preschool. They came away with one clear, strong message: Kids who attend public preschool programs are better prepared for kindergarten than kids who don't. The findings come in a report " The Current State of Scientific Knowledge on Pre-Kindergarten Effects...