Tagged With "standardized testing"
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Re: Could Parkland Shooting Be Prevented? Yes, and Runcie Knew How
Please see the attached report that demonstrates the effectiveness of the interventions - seen in the Paper Tigers movie: Higher Resilience and School Performance Among Students with Disproportionately High Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) at Lincoln High, in Walla Walla, Washington, 2009 to 2013 Research Report, February 2015 Conclusions This s tudy provides empirical support for the thesis that systemic changes in school practices, ones developed with the support of the community to be...
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Re: Against the Tide
Emily, I am an elementary school teacher in a district that is embracing trauma informed practices. Please, please, please keep speaking up for students, teachers and schools. We need your voice. Until school districts are released from the test and punish education policies, they will never truly be able to change their cultures. We need professionals like you explaining that to administrators and policymakers. Thank you for doing what you do.
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Re: Against the Tide
Maureen, thank you so much for your comment and your wonderful email! I love the small world connections that we encounter when we do this work. I am NOT GIVING UP (too damn stubborn for that - lol). I hope someday we get to have coffee together and envision a trauma-informed PA!!! BEST, Emily
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Re: Peek Inside a Classroom
Thanks for this post Sandy and Daun! To say it is urgent we transform our schools and communities is by far the key priority facing educators and public health officials today! There remains minimal benefit from common core and standardized testing if we cannot help children (and staff) learn emotion regulation and so so post haste! I couldn't agree more with your post. As a team member who has co-authored and worked with Sandy Bloom, Sarah Yanosy and a few others on some of Sanctuary's most...
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Re: Peek Inside a Classroom
Considering the recent suicide by hanging of a 13 year old boy in Staten Island, Danny Fitzpatrick, I believe we must intensify the above. We must discuss that sometimes teachers, coaches, school administrators are the ones causing trauma in children and they are not remotely safe people to "listen" to or protect a child. We have to take a hard, honest look at Bullying in schools, which continues to rise, and ask the question: hate is a learned behaviour...so who is teaching bullying? We...
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Re: Peek Inside a Classroom
Jennifer, the issue needs to be explicitly, directly addressed. I agree. I'm not sure if "carrot" or "stick" is best, maybe combination... Thanks for sharing, and for your passion!
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Re: Peek Inside a Classroom
Hi Daun, I think combo of carrot and stick, but as we've discovered, carrot won't work until stick is brandished. As soon as we attach serious consequences to emotional abuse, adults who bully kids, then everyone will get educated fast. When we wanted to stop people smoking and harming others with second hand smoke, we quickly implemented laws that fined people and threatened jail. Everyone is now well educated about the harms of smoking and second-hand smoke. If suicide was the second...
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Re: Peek Inside a Classroom
Hey Jennifer, I have the same request for advice with politicians. In the case of developmental trauma at our city and our state levels, the first goal is simply "awareness". Even with me as an example, I had to dig around and dig around to eventually put pieces together to begin to grasp the portion of the concept that I know have. Maybe I should expand that slightly to be "accurate" awareness. At any rate, folks should not have to dig around that hard to get informed. After "awareness"...
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Re: Pilot Program... Can a Picture Book Promote Mindfulness?
Here is an attachment a teacher made to show other teachers the success of our program. I would be happy to talk to you on the phone if you like.
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Re: Does Betsy DeVos Understand the Impact of Poverty and Trauma on Children’s Learning? [commondream.org]
Leslie, Thank you for posting this blog! Just wanted to draw your attention to the toxic stress, abuse, and harm students are subjected to everyday in the name of education. "Poisonous Pedagogy" is a term Alice Miller coined to describe the negative practices adults impose on kids in the name of education. Students experience a range of stressors in the name of learning: test anxiety; curricula and standards that are developmentally inappropriate; bullying by staff, administrators, parents,...
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Why Equity Matters in Trauma Sensitive School Work
Trauma Sensitive School practice has gained momentum in the last several years, inspiring changes in educator perspective, administrative policy, and classroom practice. I am often inspired by efforts to understand student challenges in new ways and use innovative strategies. What can give me pause is when this work is applied to institutions or systems where structural bias and inequity are not acknowledged or confronted. In this case, sometimes labels like “trauma kids” or “high-trauma...
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Back-to-School in a Pandemic? Questions, Concerns, and Discussion with School Nurse, Robin Cogan
Robin is a brilliant, passionate, and vocal school nurse with almost two decades of experience as a New Jersey school nurse in the Camden City School District. She is the Legislative Co-Chair for the New Jersey State School Nurses Association and she joined us last week for A Better Normal community discussion about back-to-school (or not) plans families are facing this school year. Robin serves as faculty in the School Nurse Certificate Program at Rutgers University-Camden School of Nursing...
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Practical Applications for Schools - They're Begging for It
Educators at all levels are asking for practical applications of what they've heard their students need due to ACEs, Trauma and brain research. Here are a few strategies from my upcoming book "The Whole Child School."
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The Power of Virtue in Trauma-Informed Education
Though we cannot fix or heal them, we likely do not even know who many of them are, we can empower them emotionally towards the possibility of their own potential.
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How Historically Responsive Literacy Can Make Learning More Relevant to Students (kqed.org)
Today’s education system resembles much of what you’d see in the early 1900s: rote memorization, a teacher speaking to dozens of pupils who must remain silent unless called upon, curriculum at scale. Coronavirus-related distance learning pushed that same operation online, and because of the severity of the crisis, educators and parents understandably yearn for getting back to normal. But for educator Gholdy Muhammad, normal hasn’t served all students well, especially in literacy education,...
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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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Speakers at children & youth conference call for systems change based in love, liberation
California can support children and youth by tackling the state’s — and the country’s — legacy of White supremacy and replacing it with a trauma-informed approach of love, empathy, and support.
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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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Building a Restorative Restart to School in the Fall
As we look towards the reopening of in-person instruction in the fall, planning and reimagining for a restorative restart to our school systems that emphasizes student and educator mental health is a priority. In addition, there is a windfall of one-time funding coming to districts from federal and local funds for just this purpose. Recently a wise educator said to me, ‘you know, if you want to get to the hearts and minds of school leaders to make changes for the fall you need to do so by...
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Re: Webinar: School Mental Health - From Implementing ➜ Funding (Moved to Jul 7th)!
The school district of Broward County, Florida has 250k kids & 250 schools - we have contracted for "suicide evaluations" of "selected" students. This is preposterous. Can and WILL PACEs please offer to provide the PACE tests and to provide a post-test evaluation and follow-up to my school district of 250K students and 15k teachers as part of a "suicide evaluation?" Consider it, please? Let me explain... Truthfully, it is the district's double-speak way of saying it wants to sick the...
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Re: Webinar: School Mental Health - From Implementing ➜ Funding (Moved to Jul 7th)!
Hello All, We've (school district of Broward County, FL) approved & contracted for "suicide evaluations" of "selected" students. Is this correct? I have not seen the suicide-evaluations but I have sat through the full yearly psychology presentation and the PD, professional development so teachers can better identify (target) children at risk (of being a problem in the future). I came away from these experiences convinced that district "solutions" like these are a big part of the problem.
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Developing Relationship Based School Support Services
The most power is in the conversations and daily practices that occur each day. Each person’s self awareness and developing awareness of how trauma impacts behavior and relationships can provide an opportunity for healing and breaking the cycle of creating more trauma.
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When 'making the grade' takes on new meaning [edsource.org]
By Anne Vasquez, Photo: Allison Shelley/All4Ed, EdSource, December 13, 2021 After 18 months of distance learning, I took a breath before the start of this school year. What would the new normal look like? I feel like I’m still holding my breath, waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop that comes in the form of an end-of-semester report card. As the mother of a newly minted middle school student and a high school junior, I knew this year would test my personal code of ethics about grades:...
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What if Covid’s silver lining could be what we learn from the kids? [edsource.org]
By Thomas Courtney, Photo: Thomas Courtney, EdSource, April 5, 2022 T he unanimous conclusion in educational literature has been that 2020 and 2021 will be a generational burden on kids. And it’s true. This pandemic has hit us all hard: educators, parents, and most powerfully, kids. We need to talk about ways to address it, correct it, and be mindful of how our tax dollars can address it. Yet, there’s something quite special happening in my classroom right now. It’s something that has been...
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How Does Past Redlining Affect Present-Day Disparities in Educational Outcomes? [housingmatters.urban.org]
By Dylan Lukes and Christopher Cleveland, Photo: Wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock, Housing Matters, November 9, 2022 Starting in 1935, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) began ranking neighborhoods around the US based on a calculation of loan risk that explicitly associated white populations with low risk and Black populations with high risk. HOLC graded areas from A (minimal risk) to D (hazardous). They color-coded these grades onto maps that banks and lenders used to inform their...
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How much would the NAS poverty reduction packages reduce referrals to CPS and foster care placements? Would they reduce racial disproportionality in child welfare? (nasonline.org).
Because of a collaboration with Columbia University and UW-Madison, we have answers to these questions. By Peter Peter Pecora, Casey Family Programs, March 17, 2023 - Overview The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently released a “ roadmap ” to reduce child poverty by as much as half through the implementation of a series of social policy packages. The aim of this study was to simulate the reductions in Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement and foster care placements that are...
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Re: A Memo to Susan Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Gates Foundation [HuffingtonPost.com]
Many college graduates who agreed to take the CCS-aligned Pearson GED test have failed. The complexity of research demonstrating how early trauma and toxic family situations affect brain development has not been acknowledged by the Gates Foundation. They accuse the educators of having low standards and promoting the Common Core without any research to back it up as the solution to our educational problems. slope game
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Jenna Quinn (test)
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What Children Really Need Is Adults That Understand Development
The brain doesn’t fully develop until about the age of 25. This fact is sometimes quite surprising and eye opening to most adults. It can also be somewhat overwhelming for new parents and professionals who are interacting with babies and young children every day, to contemplate. It is essential to realize however, that the greatest time of development occurs in the years prior to kindergarten. And even more critical to understand is that by age three 85 percent of the core structures of the...