Tagged With "bilingual special education students"
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Here are three questions that USC Rossier...
Here are three questions that USC Rossier professor, Ron Avi Astor, suggest schools ask themselves about student safety. Secondly, this educator guide, created by USC Rossier's ME in school counseling online program, discusses how school staff can balance school security and school climate. These were created in a response to the Parkland shooting to spark conversations around school safety and gun violence prevention in schools. You can read more HERE .
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10 Simple Steps for Reducing Toxic Stress in the Classroom
As the brain science on adverse childhood experiences evolves, teaching must, too By Jim Hickman & Kathy Higgins We all know that when children aren’t well, they’re less likely to learn. More and more teachers recognize that children who can’t sit still in class, act out, or have asthma may be showing warning signs of a toxic exposure to childhood trauma. More than two decades ago, landmark research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente found that...
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10 Ways Parents and Schools Can Prevent School Shootings Now (Op-Ed) (livescience.com)
As a parent, I understand the desire for practical responses to school shootings. I also absolutely believe the government should do more to prevent such incidents. But the gun control debate has proven so divisive and ineffective that I am weary of waiting for politicians to act. I study the kind of aggressive childhood behavior that often predates school shootings. That research suggests what communities and families can start doing today to better protect children. Here are 10 actions we...
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1st Annual Nat'l Conference for Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools: Call for Workshop Proposals
Deadline: Nov. 1, 2017 The Attachment & Trauma Network, Inc. (ATN) is hosting this National Conference for Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools at the Washington Hilton Washington, DC, February 19-20, 2018, to give all educators — teachers, administrators and school personnel — as well as other child-serving professionals, community leaders and parents an opportunity to explore the importance of trauma-informed care for in schools and other child-serving environments. Through the ACE...
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1st Annual Trauma-Responsive Schools Conference
HERE this NOW is thrilled to announce its first annual Trauma-Responsive Schools Conference. The event will take place May 9th-May 11th at The Woodbound Inn in Rindge, NH. The event locale was selected for its central location in New England (2-hours from Boston, 3-hours from Portland, 4-hours from Albany). This conference experience will be unlike other conference formats. Registration is limited to 40 participants to maximize psychological safety, depth of learning, and individualized...
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2017 Spring Webinar Series: Trauma-Informed Approaches in Minnesota Schools
April 12, noon-1:30: Trauma-Informed Approaches in Minnesota Schools Dr. Mark Sander, Hennepin County; Stacy Bender-Fayette and Sharleen Zeman-Sperle, Peacemaker Resources Many Minnesota schools are trying innovative approaches to promote social emotional learning and to make the classroom a safe learning environment for children who have experienced trauma. This webinar is a chance to hear from three such innovators: Dr. Mark Sander, a psychologist working in the Minneapolis Public Schools...
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2019 School Mental Health Webinar Series
Join the Pacific Southwest MHTTC for upcoming distance learning opportunities on key school mental health topics. Together we will advance our understanding of how to build wellness, resilience, and success for the whole school community. Upcoming Webinar: Mental Health and Student Learning Outcomes: An Introduction Mental Health & Student Learning Outcomes Series - Webinar 1 Thursday, March 21 6-7 p.m. ET / 3-4 p.m. PT / 1-2 p.m. HT / 9-10 a.m. ChT Register Are you a school...
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2nd Annual Trauma Responsive Schools Conference - Virtual
Pre-pandemic, educators said we were facing challenges not experienced by older generations. This pandemic makes that notion truer than ever. This pandemic is a rapidly emerging collective stress that is reshaping the structure and fabric of experience in most every facet of life, but especially in education. It pushes us to adapt creatively and to think outside our typical “box.” And yet, in every crisis opportunity lurks. Three nationally recognized trauma-informed consultants have...
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3 tips to close the poverty gap (smartbrief.com)
In US public schools, 51% of students in public schools come from low-income families. Decades of research show that children from low-income homes start kindergarten trailing one to three years behind their more economically advantaged peers. More recently, researchers have demonstrated the relationship between family income and brain structures, with the largest influence observed among the most disadvantaged children. Yet, many schools succeed with students from poverty. Here are three...
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9 Key Resources on Trauma-Informed Schools [schoolleadersnow.weareteachers.com]
Becoming a trauma-informed school helps ensure your students feel safe. Many students who have experienced trauma have challenges with self-regulation and with learning. But, it’s not always easy to recognize a student who may be suffering. Frustration can mask symptoms, causing those students to act out and make that behavior easy to misrecognize. So, it’s imperative your staff know how to recognize the signs. Not sure where to start? Here are nine resources so you can start educating your...
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COVID19 Re-Imagines School-Home-Ed Disciplinary Practices w/Trauma-aware Zero-Punishment Conscious Discipline to stop Abuse at its source!
ACE's & COVID-19 - Change is coming: Ethos is, as ethos does - Are we all on-board with the following ethos?
ETHOS: If a child commits a criminally-prosecutable act then it is a matter for doctors, not police (for HIPPA, not FERPA)! Well? Onboard?
If one grasps the prior, the following is then readily self-evident: CORPORAL PUNISHMENT lays the foundation for abuse and occurs in 80% of households and 15% of schools. Corporal Punishment implicitly perpetuates, condones and promotes th
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A Better Normal- Education Upended, continued
Thursday, May 21, 2020 Education Upended, continued. New time this week only, 10-11am PST Please join us for the ongoing community discussion of "A Better Normal — Education Upended". We bring bring our focus back to the future. Using our breakout session format, we will identify the strategies and lessons learned that we want to bring into the future of school, and ways in which we might do that. How do we create physical and psychological safety, especially in the face of so much...
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A Classroom Strategy for Improving Student Mental Health [Blogs.EdWeek.org]
Earlier this month, my 11th grade students hosted a storytelling showcase in conjunction with Story District , a local non-profit that "turns good stories into great performances." As we molded our personal stories into shape and rehearsed them in front of each other for the umpteenth time, my students started noticing something disturbing. Many of the stories my students chose to tell about themselves were about misbehavior...and the subsequent consequences which invariably involved...
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A Community Approach to Trauma Sensitivity / Making a Difference Conference in MA in November
The 6th Annual Making a Difference Conference for SESPs, Foster/Adoptive and Kinship Caregivers and their Professional Partners will be held in Marlborough, MA on November 14, 2017. The theme is A Community Approach to Trauma Sensitivity. There will be at least two talks will be about ACEs! Speakers/Topics: Keynote: Managing the Hearts and Souls of Many, Dana Royster-Buefort, M.Ed., C.A.G.S. Workshops Tackling ACEs by Building Resilient Communities , Renee D Boynton-Jarrett, MD, ScD . Note:...
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A Growth Mindset Could Buffer Kids From Negative Academic Effects of Poverty (ww2.kqed.org)
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck , along with other education researchers interested in growth mindset, have done numerous studies showing that when students believe their intelligence can grow and change with effort, they perform better on academic tests. These findings have sparked interest and debate about how to encourage a growth mindset in students both at home and at school. Now, a national study of tenth-graders in Chile found student mindsets are correlated to achievement on...
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A Landmark Lawsuit Aimed to Fix Special Ed for California's Black Students. It Didn't. [kqed.org]
By Lee Romney, KQED, October 18, 2019 Darryl Lester was at his mom’s place in Tacoma, Washington, when a letter he’d been waiting for arrived in the mail. At 40, he was destitute, in pain and out of work. The letter delivered good news: Lester would be getting disability benefits after blowing out his back in a sheet metal accident. But he crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. Why? Because he couldn’t read it. From first through seventh grades, Lester had attended three public schools in...
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A Little-Known Program Has Lifted Ninth Grade in Virtually Every Type of School (psmag.org)
The unique teaching model, piloted in Minneapolis, focuses on students' strengths and teachers' relationship with the classroom. The Building Assets, Reducing Risks program, known as BARR, was started by a Minneapolis school counselor in 1999, and remained in relative obscurity for a decade. Since 2010, its creator, Angela Jerabek, has sought research support to test the BARR program in other schools. The BARR mantra—"Same Students. Same Teachers. Better Results"—has led Jerabek to...
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A Massive Rollout of 'Community Schools' Show Signs of Paying Off, Report Finds [blogs.edweek.org]
By Megan Ruge, Education Week, January 29, 2020 In 2014, New York City launched a $52 million effort to launch 45 "community schools," part of a nationwide movement to transform schools into neighborhood hubs offering a range of social and health services to students and their families. That investment, which eventually grew to more than 200 schools, is starting to be paying off, according to an independent evaluation of the schools released this week by the RAND Corporation. The evaluation...
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Middle school tackles everybody's trauma; result is calmer, happier kids, teachers and big drop in suspensions
6 th grader Cayla White (right) helps lead class meditation with Niroga Institute’s Lauren Banister/ photos by Laurie Udesky During the 2014/2015 school year, things were looking grim at Park Middle School in Antioch, CA. At the time, staff couldn’t corral student disruptions. Teacher morale was plummeting. By the end of February 2015, 192 kids of the 997 students had been suspended -- 19.2 percent of the student population. “I was watching really good people burning out from the [teaching]...
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A Mindset Shift to Continue Supporting the Most Frustrating Kids (ww2.kqed.org)
Challenging students aren’t that way because they are inherently bad kids or intentionally creating difficulties in the classroom. To borrow a phrase from Ross Greene, “kids do well if they can,” and if they aren’t doing well, it’s because there’s something getting in the way. When I step back and consider the obstacles in my students’ lives — poverty, trauma, chronic stress — it makes total sense that they are struggling to communicate, regulate their emotions and make progress on learning.
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A Primary-School Classroom for a New Public-School Majority [TheAtlantic.com]
AS OF 2014, U.S. PUBLIC SCHOOLS REACHED A MAJOR MILESTONE: More than half (51%) of public school students were children of color and/or came from low-income families (qualify for a reduced or free school lunch). That shift represented a clear turning point toward greater diversity in America’s public schools and the need for a corresponding diversity of approaches in the nation’s classrooms. What is at stake if that need is left unmet? For one, resources: Students of color are more likely to...
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A Root Cause of the Teacher-Diversity Problem [theatlantic.com]
Having just earned a teaching degree from Pennsylvania’s Millersville University, Rian Reed set out in 2011 to find a position working with special-needs students. Born and raised in a suburb outside of Philadelphia, she had built an enviable academic record, earning induction into the National Honor Society in high school and speaking at her university commencement. She sought to use her leadership skills and creativity in a classroom in her own community. So Reed, a biracial woman who...
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A school sought 50 men to stand in for absent fathers at ‘Breakfast with Dads’ — nearly 600 showed up [washingtonpost.com]
Something somewhat extraordinary happened last month at Billy Earl Dade Middle School in Dallas. The school — with a student population of nearly 900, about 90 percent from low-income families — planned to host its first “Breakfast with Dads,” according to the Dallas Morning News . About 150 male students, ages 11 to 13, signed up. But event organizers were concerned that some would attend without a male figure at their side, so they put out a call for volunteers who could serve as mentors.
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A Systems Approach to Integrating Health in Education [RWJF.org]
A systems approach is needed to better align the health and education sectors in order to address the needs of the whole child. The Issue Students who are healthy, present, and engaged learn better. At the same time, those with more education tend to live longer, healthier, and more productive lives. In short, the relationship between health and education is reciprocal: higher education has been found to improve health, and better health supports learning. But despite these connections the...
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A Town Helps Transform Its School (edutopia.org)
For years, residents in the small, rural community of Pittsfield, New Hampshire, fretted over the state of Pittsfield Middle High School, their only middle and high school. Ranked the fifth-lowest-performing high school in New Hampshire, the 300-student school struggled with attendance, discipline, and general student disengagement. Problems deepened when the neighboring town of Barnstead stopped sending kids to the school, resulting in a 40 percent drop in enrollment and a funding cut from...
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A Traumatic Failure: DC public schools neglect mental health [centerforhealthjournalism.org]
This series was produced as part of the University of Southern California Center for Health Journalism Fellowship with a grant from the Fund for Journalism on Child Well-Being. Other stories in this series include: The Cost of Juvenile Trauma HillRag Wednesday, January 9, 2019 “I have to meet this guy and have sex with him. If I don’t, then he and his friends are going to rape my little sister,” a student at Frank Ballou High School in Ward 8’s Congress Heights told her teacher. The teacher...
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A Week in the Life of a School Social Worker [psychotherapynetworker.org]
Public School 48, where I’m on staff as a social worker, sits on a block between a juvenile detention center and a strip club. The school serves around 900 mostly Hispanic and African American children in prekindergarten through fifth grade, with a large percentage of those kids living in shelter apartments. Of course, PS 48 has an educational mission, not a clinical one, but I’m part of a service staff that includes speech, occupational, and physical therapists. I’ve been a school social...
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A "When the Nickel Dropped" Story - Sometimes It's Something So Small
My daughter, Candace, taught 5th then 3rd grade at an inner city Baltimore elementary school through Teach For America. It was trial by fire her first year, as this was a struggling school and many students had a trauma history. It is Teach For America’s mission to place teachers in the most needy schools. Candace was very enthusiastic, but didn’t know much about trauma and its effects, other than what she intuitively felt - which was impressively a lot. So it was very timely that I was...
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AB-2691 Pupil health: pupil and school staff trauma: Trauma-Informed Schools Initiative
Being a proponent of trauma-informed care and incorporating ACEs science, I was so excited to learn today that there is an assembly bill in California (AB-2691) addressing both of these! "This bill would establish within the State Department of Education the Trauma-Informed Schools Initiative to address the impact of adverse childhood experiences on the educational outcomes of California pupils. The bill would require the department to take specified actions, on or before December 31, 2019,...
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Access Denied: The Fight for Public Education [revealnews.org]
The idea behind public education is simple: A community pays into a system that aims to create a bright future for the next generation. Years pass, and those kids grow up. They pay into the same system, yielding the same dividends. Repeat. But things aren’t always that simple. As this week’s episode explains, the policies that shape public education can be subject to influences – ideological and financial. We begin with a profile of President Donald Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos.
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ACE'ing Your Parent-Student-Teacher Conference
Sharing a resource to support school/educator efforts. https://mytraumainformedschool.com/aceing-your-parent-student-teacher-conference/
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ACEs Science Champions Series: Eulanda Thorne Applies ACEs Science Awareness at School and at Home
Eulanda Thorne and her children (L to R) Sarah, Joshua, Leah, Emmanuel When school counselor Eulanda Thorne discovered the science of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in 2018, she felt as if she were on fire. “I felt that I had missed a vital part of my education. Anyone who is in college for social work or teaching, a class on ACEs and trauma should be a required course.” Without an understanding of ACEs, she says, “I would think the students who are sent to me are being defiant or...
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ACEs/toxic stress color wheel for schools!
If you've seen the documentary Paper Tigers , you may remember the stress target -- or color wheel -- in Lincoln High School Principal Jim Sporleder's office. Now you can have one, too! The steering group members of the Yolo Resilience Network in Yolo County, CA, (you can find them on the Yolo County ACEs Connection group) realized the needed to have some tools that they could give to local educators for whom they did presentations about ACEs and trauma-informed practices. "We'd see people...
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ACEs Webinar: Jim Sporleder on Trauma-informed Schools
To join this webinar, register here . Trauma-informed schools: a conversation with Jim Sporleder, former principal of Lincoln High School, featured in the documentary Paper Tigers Date: Monday, November 19, 2018 Time: 3:00-4:00 pm PDT /6:00-7:00 pm EDT Jim will answer some prepared questions followed by an open question and answer period with participants. Topics that Jim will discuss include: How do you increase staff and community buy in for a trauma-informed school? How do you determine...
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Articles about trauma-informed schools
Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline—suspensions drop 85% 2012 http://acestoohigh.com/2012/04...-expulsions-drop-85/ Massachusetts, Washington lead U.S. trauma-sensitive school movement 2012...
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African-American students with disabilities suspended at disproportionately high rates [edsource.org]
African-American special education students nationwide lose substantially more instruction time due to discipline than their white counterparts, according to a report by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard University. The report , “Disabling Punishment: The Need for Remedies to the Disparate Loss of Instruction Experienced by Black Students with Disabilities,” extrapolated its findings from federal data from 2014-15 and...
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After Fatal School Shootings, Antidepressant Use Surges Among Student Survivors [latimes.com]
By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2019 The children who experience a school shooting but live to see their parents and friends again are often called survivors. But by at least one measure of mental health, they too are among a gunman’s victims, new research finds. In the two years after a fatal school shooting, the rate at which antidepressants were prescribed to children and teens rose by 21% within a tight ring around the affected school. The increase in antidepressants...
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Aiming for Discipline Instead of Punishment (edutopia.org)
There are many perspectives on the topic of discipline in our classrooms and schools, and I’d like to explore the idea of using brain-aligned discipline with students who have adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Discipline, unlike punishment, is proactive and begins before there are problems. It means seeing conflict as an opportunity to problem solve. Discipline provides guidance, focuses on prevention, enhances communication, models respect, and embraces natural consequences. It teaches...
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Amplifying empathy in teachers can help prevent student suspensions, researchers find
School suspension rates have risen in recent years. And since the punishment is linked to more severe problems later in life, such as dropping out of school or ending up in prison, researchers at Stanford University have been looking for ways to prevent it. Researchers asked one group of math teachers to complete a 45-minute online activity about how important it is to respect and humanize students. Meanwhile, another group of math teachers read about how to use technology in the classroom.
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An Alternative to Suspension with Trauma-Informed Dynamic Mindfulness: Building Stress Resilience, Emotion Regulation and Empathy
At the November 2019 Northern California Safe and Healthy Schools Conference at UC Berkeley, Niroga Program Managers Sam Weiss and Fatima Ahmed facilitated a session incorporating the theory and practice of Dynamic Mindfulness (DMind) to a standing room only crowd.
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An imperative for those in "towers" to connect with the realities of trauma in schools
Boosting SEL in K-12's "Ivory Towers" Educational Leadership October 2018 | Volume 76 | Number 2 The Promise of Social-Emotional Learning Those of us in administration must lift our "social awareness" by getting closer to schools and the people inside them. The superintendent's leadership team for the district where I was working had just finished its Monday morning meeting. One member of that team stopped as he passed by my cubicle to view the large poster I'd recently hung up. It displayed...
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An Important Event for Anyone in Higher Education in the Philadelphia Region
The Need for Trauma-Informed Curricula at Institutions of Higher Learning: A Call to Action On October 20th, Children's Crisis Treatment Center , The Philadelphia University Community and Trauma Counseling Program and the United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey are hosting a very special and important conversation for any one who is involved in training the next generation of service professionals - nurses, doctors, social workers, teachers, lawyers, community health...
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An Interview with Alfonso Ramirez on Trauma Informed Schools
In 2016, the Oregon School-Based Health Alliance (OSBHA) worked to pass a bill to pilot trauma informed schools and funds were allocated to support two pilot schools, Tigard High School (THS) in Tigard, OR and Central High School (CHS) in Independence, OR. This is the third year of the pilot. OSBHA has been providing technical assistance to the two schools, working closely with the Trauma Informed Schools Coordinators’ hired to transform the schools. Alfonso Ramirez is the coordinator at...
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An Invitation to Co-Create Change and Shift Your Mindset
We are not born “normal” or “disordered” or with a “disability” we “are born” and “we develop” in many different ways. Along our path of development we will encounter various influences and each individual will respond to those experiences differently. The brain actually continues to develop well into adulthood!
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An Underappreciated Key to College Success: Sleep [nytimes.com]
Attention all you happy high school graduates about to go off to college, as well as the many others returning for another year of higher education. Grandsons Stefan and Tomas, that includes you. Whatever you may think can get in the way of a successful college experience, chances are you won’t think of one of the most important factors: how long and how well you sleep. And not just on weekends, but every day, Monday through Sunday. Studies have shown that sleep quantity and sleep quality...
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An Unusual Idea for Fixing School Segregation [theatlantic.com]
Many proposals for addressing school segregation seem pretty small, especially when compared to the scale and severity of the problem. Without the power of a court-ordered desegregation mandate, progress can feel extremely far off, if not altogether impossible. Some even believe—understandably though mistakenly —that no meaningful steps can be taken to integrate schools unless housing segregation is resolved. But a new theory from Thomas Scott-Railton, a recent graduate of Yale Law School,...
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Announcing: New Trauma-Sensitive Schools Book
I’m delighted to share that my new book Building Trauma-Sensitive Schools: Your Guide to Creating Safe, Supportive Learning Environments for All Students will be released in early 2019 and is now available for pre-order from Brookes Publishing. This book is really about one word — hope. It’s about cultivating hope for all students, including the many who have been affected by childhood trauma. And, it’s also about kindling hope for educators who want to make a positive difference but may...
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Another tool to improve student mental health? Kids talking to kids [hechingerreport.org]
TAOS, N.M. — Standing in front of 240 freshmen and 80 fellow seniors in her school’s gymnasium, a slight 17-year-old with her hair in pigtail braids took a long shuddering breath. Her audience was still. The girl had just revealed that she’d spent most of her middle-school years feeling suicidal, had been hospitalized for her own protection and spent two years in therapy before finally telling her mother the cause of her deep depression and thoughts of self harm: She’d been raped by a man...
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Are you a Resilience Champion in your school?
Spring is the time for rebirth and new beginnings! After some much needed rest, we go back to the classroom for the last few months with our students. At Origins, we have been lucky enough to host a number of teachers (and their teams) just like you who want the best for the students and for the school. Their success starts with you! After completing the first round of The Resilience Champion Certificate of 2018, we have 23 graduates putting their action plans to work. Some settings that...
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Arizona Educators Share What's Working to Create Trauma-Sensitive Schools (azednews.com)
Creating a supportive environment is helping reduce student behavior issues in Arizona schools and empowering students to pause before they respond instead of reacting to adverse events. Research shows experiencing six or more adverse childhood experiences increases risk factors for chronic diseases, which can reduce a person’s life by up to 20 years, said Marcia Stanton, coordinator of the Adverse Childhood Experience Initiative at Phoenix Children’s Hospital . Adverse childhood experiences...