Greetings - I am grateful to Jane for sharing this information. I will share a little bit here about what my original intent was in creating the course (Creating Compassionate Schools), how it was designed, and "what's next" or pending in terms of professional development.
First, as we all know, we are all taking a "it takes a village" approach. This applies to all professional fields, not only to traditionally defined K-12 education. That said, it was about 5 years ago that I learned about WA State's "Compassionate Schools Initiative" and from within my role as a central office administrator started digging for money to send staff to a couple regional trainings.
In my job role, I was responsible for overseeing Special Education/504/Title 1/Title III/ELL/Nursing/Safe and Drug Free Schools/Regional Mental Health Grants, etc. It wasn't until I connected on the ACE Study information and the WA OSPI Compassionate Schools Initiative that I realized I was sitting in the chair of "ACE's Central (Office)." I had both the ACE-epiphany followed by the "this changes everything" moment so many are able to relate to. I decided that I would read/research/dig as deeply as I could into "the work" from a trauma-informed lens and in my role as a central office admin. On my journey, I read as much as I could get my hands/eyes on, and went to speaking engagements where prominent experts shared information I had honestly never heard of. Thinking I was perhaps "playing catchup" with all of my other admin colleagues, I started asking around who had heard of the ACE Study or knew what an ACE was? Crickets. Zilch. Notta. I then went to my regional area education meetings and asked Sped Director colleagues whether they had heard of ACE's or the ACE Study (or even the Compassionate Schools Initiative in our OWN STATE). Again, crickets, notta, zilch.
I decided to take action from within my own role.
Fast forward a few years (c. 2013) - I looked on the web for the kinds of online courses I believed should exist for ANY K-12 educator (teacher, admin, counselor, etc) to take in a job-embedded, asynchronous way. There were none that I could readily identify that would allow me to scaffold an entire staff/district as they entered the trauma-informed professional world.
So, like any admin/father of 4/spouse with tons of "spare time" (aka, NOT) - I decided to design a course in my spare time. Thankful that there was a company in Washington State, CE Credits Online, who would pick up my course once I wrote it, I set off to design the course. What I quickly learned on a personal level is that (a) there is a ton of information to distill for a K-12 primer course on "compassionate schooling" and (b) writing in my "spare time" was a great challenge of my own resiliency and ACE-management. Short story made longer, it took me nearly a year to complete my writing of the course, Creating Compassionate Schools. It was made available nationally in most states and through regionally accredited universities.
Jane Stevens has shared one such link (to Humboldt State University) but it can be accessed from virtually anywhere by accessing it at CE Credits Online's website at:
http://www.cecreditsonline.org/
It was at some point during the 2013-2014 schoolyear that I recognized that in a metaphorical way I wanted to "train lifeguards" more than I had capacity to "be a lifeguard" (so to speak). I was thrilled when presented the opportunity to step out of my public sector role of administration and start a journey of working directly for CE Credits Online (started July 1, 2014) to continue the work of designing job-embedded, asynchronous and evidence-based professional development for educators nationwide. I have already made several key connections which should result in an expansion of courses on the topics associated with the trauma-informed movement, compassionate schooling, and what I call "taking compassion to scale." Taking compassion to scale means:
everyone gets what everyone needs whether it is 1, 1:1, 1:100, or 1:1000.
I am very interested in what specific topics professional care providers would like to see being developed for them, and colleagues, to access. Because of my own background in special education and administration (10 years in central office), I am particularly interested in adding a course which provides practical tools for leaders (both formal and informal) within K-12 schools. I hope to begin work with a key/prominent individual to design another course to add "Tools for Creating Compassionate Schools" before the end of the 2014-15 school year is over.
I'd be very interested in hearing what general or specific topics others would rank as the most urgent/important for their PreK-12 colleagues to be engaging around so that as I design this next course I can help to advance collective understanding, calibrate terminology, and most importantly - improve the learning conditions for all learners who cross the schoolhouse threshold each day in hopes of experience care in concert with content!
Steve Dahl