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Schools are the best opportunity to address ACEs on a large scale. Other than time at home, school is the place where children spend the majority of their time. And if a child's home life is full of strife, school might be the only place where the child feels safe. ACEs are common, and yet, it can be difficult to know which students need extra support. And rather than create additional programs that single out anyone or any group of students, and potentially having students fall through the...

I am up in New York this week doing trauma informed education training for PESI. If anyone is interested in hanging out and sharing ideas I will be in white plains on wednesday, plainview on thursday and in Manhattan on thursday evening/friday. See attached brochure

In the past four years, the staff at John Wetten Elementary has done pioneering work to build an education model to support students who experienced Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), which include physical, sexual and emotional abuse; household substance abuse; adult mental illness; separated, divorced, or incarcerated parents; and domestic partner violence. To begin the Culture of Care program, CareOregon and MODA provided $80,000 grants in 2014 and '15 to enable Wilson and her team to...

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos U.S. Department of Education 400 Maryland Avenue, SW Washington, D.C. 20202 Governor John Kasich Riffe Center, 30th Floor 77 South High Street Columbus, OH 43215-6117 Superintendent of Public Instruction Paolo DeMaria Ohio Department of Education 25 South Front Street Columbus, OH 43215-4183 Dear Secretary DeVos, Governor Kasich, and Superintendent DeMaria: I write to each of you, in my position as a teacher in the Cincinnati Public Schools, to ask for...

It seems obvious that keeping kids in their home school with their peer group – a concept known as “school stability”– is a key ingredient in the recipe for academic success for students in foster care. Research shows that on average, children lose four to six months of learning each time they change schools. This is especially acute for high school students, who run into issues obtaining the credits they need to graduate or may have to re-take classes due to coursework alignment issues. For...

A New Report—and a Landmark for the SEL Field Working in close collaboration with the faculty of education at the University of British Columbia (UBC), in February 2017 CASEL announced the publication of a new report titled To Reach the Students, Teach the Teachers: A National Scan of Teacher Preparation and Social & Emotional Learning . CASEL funded the research for the report, the first-ever scan of teacher preparation related to SEL, as part of a grant from NoVo Foundation. Retrieved...

Nelba Marquez-Greene believes the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, which killed her 6-year-old daughter, could have been avoided if more had been done years earlier to address the social isolation and mental health problems of the shooter, Adam Lanza. To help other vulnerable youths, Marquez-Greene, a family therapist, is working with a Connecticut school system on a program to help students connect with one another. "I want people to remember that Adam, the person who did this, was...

Education researchers caution that immersive VR, like any technology, may be perfect for some kinds of learning and superfluous, or even counterproductive, for others. Studies of immersive classroom VR are still scarce. But emerging evidence suggests that one of VR’s biggest strengths is its ability to tap student emotions, notably empathy and the can-do confidence known as self-efficacy. The power of VR to stoke empathy is the focus of research at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab,...

Before Hurricane Katrina I knew a perpetually sad-faced third-grader at Lawrence D. Crocker Elementary School. There was no apparent neglect. His clothes were always clean. He was always perfectly groomed. And even if you gave him a book many years above his grade level, he could handle every word flawlessly. Some may have considered him the ideal student. But he never, ever smiled. His teacher wondered if the school's social worker might investigate why a child so young never expressed...

Research tells us there are three domains of learning: cognitive (thinking), motor (physical), and affective (emotional/feeling). And as the Greek philosopher Aristotle supposedly said, “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” According to the research of Adena Klem and James Connell , students who perceive a teacher as caring have higher attendance and better grades and are more engaged in the classroom and at school. Think about this research. If we grow...

Bryan Clement, Dovetail Learning, gave a compelling presentation to the ACEs Connection community coalition in late January. He began with a video showing how kids are putting social and emotional skills into action in their school settings: TOOLBOX clearly offers great tools for strengthening relationships between folks of all ages. It also provides the language and framework creating a strong relationship-based foundation for schools seeking to become Trauma Informed. Bryan shared the...

WEBINAR: Using a Mindfulness-based Social Emotional Learning Program with K-2 Students, Teachers, and Parents in Chicago Public Schools Tuesday, February 28 1:30pm-2:30pm The Illinois ACEs Response Collaborative is pleased to present this exciting webinar illustrating ways to build resiliency within the educational system. Dr. Amanda Moreno and Erikson Institute doctoral student Kandace Thomas will present features of the Calm Classroom K-2 project, a large randomized controlled trial of...