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Planning and Diversity Application Activity #1

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Planning and Diversity Application Activity #1

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Behaviorism and Motivation Application Activity #2

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Behaviorism and Motivation Application Activity #2

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Constructivism and Creativity Application Activity #3

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Constructivism and Creativity Application Activity #3

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Baret ALTERNATIVE APPLICATION ACTIVITY- Motivation Breakthrough video

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THE FIRST TIME THAT principal Jim Sporleder tried the New Approach to Student Discipline at Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, he was blown away. Because it worked.

In fact, it worked so well that he never went back to the Old Approach to Student Discipline.

This is how it went down: A student blows up at a teacher, drops the F-bomb. The usual approach at Lincoln - and, safe to say, at most high schools in this country - is automatic suspension.

Instead, Sporleder sits the kid down and says quietly: "Wow. Are you OK? This doesn't sound like you. What's going on?" He gets even more specific: "You really looked stressed. On a scale of 1-10, where are you with your anger?"

The kid was ready. Ready, man! For an anger blast to his face...."How could you do that?" "What's wrong with you?"...and for the big boot out of school. But he was NOT ready for kindness. The armor-plated defenses melt like ice under a blowtorch and the words pour out: "My dad's an alcoholic. He's promised me things my whole life and never keeps those promises." The waterfall of words that go deep into his home life, which is no piece of breeze, end with this sentence: "I shouldn't have blown up at the teacher."

Whoa.

And then he goes back to the teacher and apologizes. Without prompting from Sporleder.

"The kid still got a consequence," explains Sporleder - but he wasn't sent home, a place where there wasn't anyone who cares much about what he does or doesn't do. He went to ISS - in-school suspension, a quiet, comforting room where he can talk about anything with the attending teacher, catch up on his homework, or just sit and think about how maybe he could do things differently next time.

Before the words "namby-pamby", "weenie", or "not the way they did things in my day" start flowing across your lips, take a look at these numbers: 2009-2010 (Before new approach)

798 suspensions (days students were out of school)

50 expulsions

600 written referrals

2010-2011 (After new approach)

135 suspensions (days students were out of school)

30 expulsions

320 written referrals

"It sounds simple," says Sporleder about the new approach. "Just by asking kids what's going on with them, they just started talking. It made a believer out of me right away."

________________

The dark underbelly of school discipline

Take a short walk on the dark side of our public education system, and you learn some disturbing lessons about school punishment.

First. U.S. schools suspend millions of kids - 3,328,750, to be exact. Since the 1970s, says a National Education Policy Center report published in October 2011, the suspension rate's nearly doubled for white kids, to 6%. It's more than doubled for Hispanics to 7%, and to a stunning 15% for blacks. For Native Americans, it's almost tripled, from 3% to 8%.

Second. If you think all these suspensions are for weapons and drugs, recalibrate. There's been a kind of "zero-tolerance creep" since schools adopted "zero-tolerance" policies. Only 5% of all out-of-school suspensions were for weapons or drugs, said the NEPC report, citing a 2006 study. The other 95% were categorized as "disruptive behavior" and "other", which includes cell phone use, violation of dress code, being "defiant", display of affection, and, in at least one case, farting.

Third. These suspensions don't work for schools. Get rid of the "bad" students, and the "good" students can learn, get high scores, live good lives. That's the myth. The reality? It's just the opposite. Says the NEPC report: "...research on the frequent use of school suspension has indicated that, after race and poverty are controlled for, higher rates of out-of-school suspension correlate with lower achievement scores."

Fourth. They don't work for the kids who get kicked out. In fact, these "throw-away" kids get shunted off a possible track to college and onto the dead-end spur of juvenile hall and prison.

"Studies show that one suspension triples the likelihood of a juvenile justice contact within that year," California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye told the California Legislature last month. "And that one suspension doubles the likelihood of repeating the grade."

Fifth. All these suspensions have led many communities to create "alternative" schools, where they dump the "bad" kids who can't make it in regular public school. Lincoln High School was set up as one of those alternative schools.
How Mr. Sporleder stumbled across an epiphany in Spokane
It's the Spring of 2010, and Jim Sporleder's mind more or less silently exploded.

This is the guy with 25 years experience as a principal. In Walla Walla, he's got a rep for really connecting with kids. He preaches "discipline with dignity".

John Medina - a developmental molecular biologist who's an improbable cross between an old-time rip-snortin' preacher and Jon Stewart - just drilled a hole in Sporleder's brain and dropped this in:

Severe and chronic trauma (such as living with an alcoholic parent, or watching in terror as your mom gets beat up) causes toxic stress in kids. Toxic stress damages kid's brains. When trauma launches kids into flight, fight or fright mode, they cannot learn. It is physiologically impossible.

Sporleder was three years into an exhausting stint as principal of the Lincoln Alternative School. He'd asked for the position after reading a report about the troubled school. The report quoted a couple of Lincoln High's kids: "We're the dumping ground," one said. "Who cares about us," another said. It wasn't a question.

"That report riveted me," says Sporleder. "I'm a person of faith. I felt called to come over here."

Gangs controlled the school. It had only 50 students, but they were the toughest in the school system - the kids who'd been kicked out of other schools. Lincoln was their last chance.

"I didn't know if I was going to make it," recalls Sporleder. "We had some pretty rough kids. It took me quite a while to get on top of that."

____________________________________________________________

Read about how other schools are also implementing trauma-informed practices: There's no such thing as a bad kid in these Spokane, WA, elementary schools , and At Cherokee Point Elementary kid's don't conform to school; school conforms to kids .

And then, at the behest of Teri Barila, co-founder of the Children's Resilience Initiative in Walla Walla, he goes to this meeting where this guy who's part comedian, part evangelist, part scientist (and best-selling author of Brain Rules) more or less tells him that this "discipline with dignity" stuff is, well, useless. Punishing misbehavior just doesn't work. You're simply adding trauma to an already traumatized kid.

"He explained it in lay terms," says Sporleder. "I got it."

Now, some people who are well into their careers can't handle a paradigm shift. It's overwhelming. That's mostly because it's just too much trouble to change the way you do...everything.

Spoiler alert: Sporleder isn't one of those people. He returned from Spokane to light a fire under his teachers. He felt compelled to figure out a way to do something different to reach his kids, but wasn't sure exactly how. Teri Barila was in a perfect position to assist.
This is your (damaged) brain on ACEs
Really good ideas that help people solve problems often take such a long time to move from research to implementation that it can cost a community millions of dollars. Twenty years ago, Washington State created a state network - the Family Policy Council and 42 community public health and safety networks - to share good information FAST to tackle a big, expensive problem: the high rates of child abuse and youth drug and alcohol abuse in the state.

Teri Barila, a former fish biologist, leads the network in Walla Walla, a city of about 30,000 people in southeastern Washington.

About 10 years ago, the council caught wind of two major game-changing discoveries. One was the CDC's Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study). It showed a stunning link between childhood toxic stress and the chronic diseases people developed as adults. This includes heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes, some breast cancer, and many autoimmune diseases, as well as depression, violence, being a victim of violence, and suicide.

The ACE Study measured 10 common types of childhood trauma. Five were the usual suspects: emotional, sexual and physical abuse, and emotional and physical neglect. Five were family problems: a parent addicted to alcohol or other drugs, seeing a mother being abused, a family member in prison, a family member diagnosed with a mental illness, and a parent who's disappeared through abandoning the family or divorce. (Although the word "trauma" is more commonly used to describe physical injury, in this milieu, it refers to any experience that causes toxic stress.)

The study's researchers came up with an ACE score to explain a person's risk for chronic disease. Think of it as a cholesterol score for childhood toxic stress. You get one point for each type of trauma. The higher your ACE score, the higher your risk of health and social problems.

A whopping 70 percent of the 17,000 people in the study had an ACE score of at least one; 87 percent of those had more than one.

With an ACE score of 4 or more, things start getting serious. The likelihood of chronic pulmonary lung disease increases 390 percent; hepatitis, 240 percent; depression 460 percent; suicide, 1,220 percent.

The percentages climb to grim and astounding levels as the ACE score climbs - people with an ACE score of 6, for example, have a 4,600 percent increase in the risk of becoming an IV drug user. Grow up with an ACE score of 10, and you're likely to find yourself homeless, in prison for life, or end up dead by your own hand. People with high ACE scores die, on average, 20 years earlier than those with low ACE scores.

By the way, lest you think that the ACE Study was yet another involving inner-city poor people of color, take note: The study's participants were 17,000 mostly white, middle and upper-middle class college-educated San Diegans with good jobs and great health care - they all belonged to Kaiser Permanente, a health maintenance organization. As Dr. Robert Anda, one of the co-founders of the ACE Study says, "It's not them. It's us."

The second game-changing discovery explained why childhood trauma had such tragic long-term consequences: T oxic stress physically damages a child's developing brain. This was determined by a group of researchers, including neurobiologist Martin Teicher and pediatrician Jack Shonkoff, both at Harvard University, and neuroscientist Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller University.

In a nutshell, toxic overdoses of stress hormones stunt the growth of some parts of the brain, and fry the circuits in others. Children with toxic stress live their lives in fight, flight or fright (freeze) mode. They respond to the world as a place of constant danger. They can fall behind in school, fail to develop healthy relationships with peers, or develop problems with authority because they are unable to trust adults. With failure, despair, and frustration pecking away at their psyche, they find solace in food, alcohol, tobacco, methamphetamines, inappropriate sex, high-risk sports, and/or work.

They don't regard these coping methods as problems. They see them as solutions to escape from depression, anxiety, anger, fear and shame.

When Barila learned all this at a meeting that the Family Policy Council organized, it chilled and angered her. Determined to do something about it, she co-founded the Children's Resilience Initiative to educate the Walla Walla community about ACEs and to build resilience to combat ACEs. Barila brought Natalie Turner, an expert in creating trauma-free schools, to town to help Sporleder and his teachers.
Natalie Turner's two simple rules for dealing with troubled students
When she met with the Lincoln High staff, Natalie Turner, from Washington State University's Area Health Education Center, picked up right where John Medina, who lit up Sporleder's brain, left off.

Toxic stress comes from complex trauma, she said. Complex trauma ain't pretty. It's when your dad's in prison AND your mom's a meth addict AND she's too drugged out to move in the mornings, so you've got to take care of your little brother, get him fed and off to school, AND you're despairing about being evicted for the third time because she hasn't paid the rent and the landlord's screaming at you to do something.

Or your dad's a raging alcoholic AND he beat the crap out of your mom again last night AND the cops came and took him away at 2 a.m. AND the EMTs took your mom to the hospital and you hardly slept a wink and you're frantic with worry because you don't know what's going to happen, but you've got to stay cool or otherwise you'll have a complete meltdown.

Or your fat step-dad's sneaking into your bed in the middle of the night AND you're too terrified to move because he says if you say anything he'll kill you and your sister and your mom, who's depressed AND doesn't talk much anyway.

Teens who live with complex trauma are walking post-traumatic stress time bombs, says Turner. They teeter through their days. The smallest incident can push them into a full-blown meltdown. Some kids run away. Some explode in rage. Some just mentally check out.

"In flight, fight or freeze mode," Turner explains, "survival trumps everything else."

So when a kid who's got complex trauma feels threatened or overwhelmed, exploding in rage at something that most people wouldn't even shrug over is a perfectly normal response.

That's worth repeating: exploding in rage, getting pissed off, stomping, hitting....it's all normal. Until a school helps kids learn how to control their emotions, they'll just keep losing it. For some kids, erupting is a stress reflex response.

"That's the hardest pill to swallow," says Erik Gordon, a science teacher at Lincoln High. "Trying to figure out how much of their behavior is from a choice and how much is outside their control. It's a drag when you believe it's outside their control, because all of the easy disciplinary action doesn't work."

There are just two simple rules, says Turner. Rule No. 1: Take nothing a raging kid says personally. Really. Act like a duck: let the words roll off your back like drops of water. Rule No. 2: Don't mirror the kid's behavior. Take a deep breath. Wait for the storm to pass, and then ask something along the lines of: "Are you okay? Did something happen to you that's bothering you? Do you want to talk about it?"

It's not that a kid gets off the hook for bad behavior.

"There have to be consequences," explains Turner.

Replace punishment, which doesn't work, with a system to give kids tools so that they can learn how to recognize their reaction to stress and to control it.

"We need to teach the kids how to do something differently if we want to see a different response," she says. Kids need adults they can count on, who they know will not hurt them, and who are there to help them learn these new skills, Turner tells the Lincoln High staff. If it's not happening at home, it had better happen at school. Otherwise that teen doesn't have much of a chance at life.

(For those of you who are interested in the underlying model that guides Turner's teaching, it's the ARC model developed at the Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute. Turner and her co-workers were also influenced by the trauma-sensitive classroom movement, for which more information can be found in Helping Traumatized Children Learn (also known as the purple book), published by Massachusetts Advocates for Children.)
The red zones of Lincoln High
The Lincoln High staff took Turner's information and flipped its system of school discipline like a pancake. The changes began in the classroom.

"Teachers started becoming detectives," says Gordon. "We began focusing our concern on what we know that's going on that might be causing behavior in a kid," versus what type of punishment to mete out.

When a kid erupts in class, teachers intervene quickly.

"A kid that I have a really great relationship with might blow up," says Gordon. "So, I step out of the classroom with that kid and ask: 'What's going on? Because that was really intense.' I know that something is bumming this kid out, because normally, we really enjoy each other."

Other responses include:

"Class isn't working today, how about taking a time out with Shelly (in the ISS Room) so that you can get yourself calmed down?"

"I feel that I really blew it and I feel like I have set you off. I want to apologize and see if there is anything that I can do to help you."

"You seem really upset, would you like to speak to someone in the Health Center?"

If it escalates to principal level, Jim Sporleder uses his infamous zone system: red, yellow and green.

Here's how that works: Three boys don't respond to their teacher, who asks them politely, but firmly to leave class and talk with the principal. Although three fuming teens sit down in front of Sporleder, he sees three brains under extreme stress, unable to take in anything useful or to solve a problem.

"You're in the red zone," he tells them succinctly. He doesn't yell. He doesn't roll his eyes. There's no body language that says "I can't stand you kids," because he actually thinks the world of them.

"Let's meet tomorrow morning. You're going to take the rest of the day and night to process this." (Sometimes Sporleder has found himself in the red zone, and tells the kids: "I'm in the red. I don't want to make any decisions that could come from my own anger or stress. Let's take a break and meet later.")

The next morning, Sporleder says, all three approach him and say they've talked over the problem with the teacher, have apologized and figured out a solution. "We've got it all worked out," they explain.

"That's more common than not these days," says Sporleder. But if they had refused to apologize to the teacher and refused to solve the problem, or their infraction was more serious, they would have gone to ISS - in-school suspension.

"I don't have kids arguing about the consequences," says Sporleder. Well...mostly he doesn't. Sometimes he still gets kids asking to be suspended to home instead of in school, which tells him that ISS may be more uncomfortable, but it's more effective.

In that quiet room, they can't distract themselves with TV, video games or drugs. A staff member offers conversation - about how the teen is dealing with the incident, or other issues in her or his life. Other teachers stop by to make sure the teen is caught up on homework.

"At home, there's no accountability," he explains. During in-school suspension, the teens can't escape their issues. It's not fun to have to give up old beliefs and habits. But they all get lots of support to get into the green zone.

"We tell our kids we love them," says Sporleder. "They're important to us."

The third big change occurs in the school's monthly staff meetings. Instead of talking about disciplining problem kids, they focus on why that teen's having problems, develop a plan to help the teen, and make sure to follow up.

In the last two years, the Lincoln High staff has noticed that the kids' ability to regulate their own emotions has dramatically improved.

"There's not near the number of huge emotional explosions that there used to be," says Gordon. "Even the way the kids interact with each other is more subdued."

The way the kids see it is that the teachers have chilled out.
What else do the kids say?
At Lincoln High, the kids not only live ACEs, but they talk them. As senior Heidi Schoessler, 18, explains it: Students have ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). Those are the bad things going on in their lives.

Resilience factors - such as asking for help, helping a friend, experiencing success, having hope - trumps those ACEs. They're beginning to learn about those resilience factors in school and in the school's health clinic. When Schoessler showed up at Lincoln, she couldn't be in a classroom with more than two or three people at a time, says Sporleder. She'd been bullied and harassed so much in elementary and middle school, that being around too many students caused a stress response that made her sick.

Sixteen-year-old Aron Wulf was so withdrawn, he hardly talked.

Jordan Massey, 17, had anger issues.

Brendon Gilman, 15, who was removed from a family of meth addicts and has lived in several foster homes, says in this video about The Health Center at Lincoln High he was so angry with life that he didn't care about the future because he was so mad about the present.

Today, all four chat easily about the school and its changes. Gilman went from failing grades to A's. Schoessler's taking college classes. Wulf is active in the production of the school play. All four do presentations for the community about the changes in the school.

"I got here, and my whole high school experience flat-out changed," says Massey, a junior who transferred in halfway through his freshman year. "People came up to me and greeted me. It felt like I had real friends here. I loved it. I call it my home away from home. It really feels like a family here. The teachers are amazing. That's how a high school should be."

Here's how Wulf describes the changes in his life: Shortly after he was born, his parents divorced. He's been living with his mother. When he was younger, he spent every other weekend with his father.

"My dad's verbally abusive. He has a really bad temper," Wulf says quietly. "My mom has always been sick in bed pretty much. The people who should have been around were never around, basically. She has problems with depression and what not. She might commit suicide. There are financial issues."

When he talks about Lincoln, his voice gets strong, and hopeful.

"Lincoln's the first school I've been to that I actually loved," he explains. "It was the first time I ever felt that somebody actually cared to hear my story to know how I was feeling. My own teachers understand me better than my mom does."

Wulf is an example of the type of quiet, isolated student that Dr. Vincent Felitti, co-founder of the CDC's ACE Study, advises educators to "make sure you always connect with," says Sporleder. The quiet students - the ones who respond to toxic stress with "fright" or "flight" - sit quietly in the back of the room with their heads down. They're often labeled as "lazy" or "unmotivated". They might not be as loud or belligerent as those who drop into "fight" mode, but they're hurting just as much.

"I'm always looking for kids who are isolated," says Sporleder.

"What is happening at Lincoln is completely different," says Schoessler. "There's so much more of a caring atmosphere. Students will come to the teachers when they need help. It's something I have never seen in any other school."

Even in-school suspension is useful, says Gilman, who spent time in ISS for getting in a dust-up with his ex-girlfriend at school.

"I couldn't handle being around her," he says. "It kind of helped, even for just the day, to be away from everyone and everything, including her. It helped me reflect why I was there and why I had acted the way I did - without someone telling me how I'm wrong for what I did. It helped me look at the situation and what I can do to prevent it from happening again."
School's ACE survey helps kids, teachers understand each other
The kids talk ACEs because, as part of a science class on data and analysis, they developed a survey of 96 questions that include the shortened version of the ACE survey.

"It is so invasive," says Sporleder, barely suppressing a shudder. "If an outsider developed it, it would never have been used."

Since the original research in San Diego, 18 states have done ACE surveys, including Washington. If not the first high school in the U.S., Lincoln is certainly among the first in the U.S. to do its own ACE survey. The survey's anonymous, and students can skip questions if they want to. Some examples:

"Has there ever been an adult in your household that has hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured?" One-quarter of the kids said yes.

"How many sexual partners have you had? Ten percent said 4 to 6.

"Have you ever been forced to do something sexual that you didn't want to do?" Almost 20 percent said yes.

The results show that these kids are grappling with way more than any kid - or adult, for that matter - should:

25% of the students are homeless.

84% have lost a loved one.

66% feel abandoned by their parents.

65% have an immediate family member in jail.

80% have suffered serious depression

50% live with someone who abuses alcohol or other drugs.

The survey's useful, says Gilman, because "it gives you this feeling that 'I'm not the only person who's gone through that'. It's easier to interact with people and to understand the way some people act.

The staff uses the survey to help understand the level and intensity of the teens' stress. They also use it to teach the students that they cannot control and are not accountable for the trauma they have endured.

"When students understand they're not responsible for the family they were born into, but they are responsible for who they will become as adults, and when they can see the power in that, it's just amazing what happens," Barila says in the Health Center video.

The grim reality is that the average ACE score for the teens at Lincoln High is 4.5. These kids are at high risk for developing chronic diseases when they're older, becoming violent or being a victim of violence, suffering from depression or committing suicide.

ACE Study co-founder Dr. Robert Anda says that the study exposed "a chronic public health disaster". So if a teen's bad behavior or isolation or lack of motivation is a normal response to complex trauma, then that behavior is also a health issue. That's what pediatrician Alison Kirby says.
The Health Clinic at Lincoln High
Four years ago, says Sporleder, "we needed a doctor to provide physicals for our first boys basketball team. Dr. Alison Kirby, a local pediatrician, volunteered to do all the exams for free.

"When's the last time you had a physical?" she blithely asked the first boy. Ten years ago, he answered, before he started first grade. Her eyebrows shot up. She asked another. Never, he said.

Kirby was appalled. She didn't realize that there were children in Walla Walla who hadn't seen a doctor in 10 years.

"In my regular clinic, I see with kids with insurance," says Kirby. "The students at Lincoln are a different group of kids. They are invisible. It doesn't really connect with most people in this community that these kids are the future of our small town. Once you do see it, it's unethical to look away."

In all communities, kids are the future - a costly future or a beneficial future. They grow up to live out their lives in healthy or unhealthy ways, in ways that contribute to the growth and health of their community or to the economic and emotional afflictions. And how they live their childhood determines their future. If a large number have high ACE scores, then the community ends up spending more money for cops, courts, prisons, welfare, social services, medical and mental health than for schools, playgrounds, community pools, and libraries.

People working in education, prisons, child welfare agencies and juvenile justice have known this intuitively for a long time. Now the research proves it.

Kirby didn't look away. She cajoled, rounded up, lobbied, wheedled, coaxed, prevailed upon, inveigled and persuaded the community to step up, fund and volunteer at a health clinic that's right next to the school. Open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., five days a week, it's the only school health center in eastern Washington.

Kirby expected 90 percent of the clinic work to be "treating asthma, infections, stitches." It turns out that 90 percent of the work focuses on the kids' mental health.

"What we were finding is that there are not enough psychologists and counselors to go around," she says. Given the toxic stresses that the kids are dealing with, she says, it's no surprise.

"If your brain isn't healthy and you're not doing well, your body physically isn't going to do well, either," says Katherine Boehm, clinic coordinator in the health center video. "If you are struggling with depression or anxiety, you're going to have a much harder time concentrating in school and being able to complete your work." The staff at the health center uses the student ACE survey to develop programs and services that help the kids learn skills to build resilience, specifically to:

create social connectedness

provide concrete support in times of need

teach social and emotional competence

Last year, 175 of the school's 200 students made 1,500 visits to the clinic. Still, nearly 20 percent of the students "still don't trust us," says Kirby. "They're so beat up emotionally that they have huge vulnerability issues. They'll come in with a friend for 6 months to a year before they come on their own."

Part of that reticence comes from their treatment at other clinics. They have homemade tattoos and shaved eyebrows. They might smell bad because they're homeless and haven't been able to take a shower for three days.

"At a big clinic, if they're judged on appearance or smell," says Kirby, "they get treated badly and the kids won't go back. We accept them for who they are. Their future is more important than their past."

Some have lived in dysfunctional families for so long that they don't know what healthy is, so they're vulnerable to abusive relationships, says Kirby. One 15-year-old girl, desperate for interaction with a loving adult, went online and found a "foster-daddy".

"She got a ride 50 miles to a bigger city, where he was," says Kirby. "She had severe depression, was "cutting". His solution was to beat her."

The clinic treated her festering wounds and talked with her about healthy relationships.

"Many of these kids don't have a parent who says 'I love you' and means it," says Kirby. "Instead it's 'I love you, so now go score some dope for me'.

Kirby and the staff want to provide the support for the students to heal and to develop enough self-confidence to live healthy lives. For some, that means living different lives than their families are living.

Many education experts say that kids wouldn't have problems if their parents would just get involved. But the parents of most of the students at Lincoln HIgh are themselves are struggling with the effects of their own childhood trauma, and many are passing the trauma on to their children.

As Kirby puts it: "Their family is in a plane that's going to crash. We tell them: 'You're going to parachute out. You're going to college.' Their family is likely to say to them: 'Hey you in the parachute - get back in this plane. We need you to go to work and support us.' The people in the plane give lots of pushback: 'What? You're too good to be with our family now?' Sometimes kids change back. Sometimes kids get healthy and say: 'I don't want to live like that anymore.'"
Lincoln High's metamorphosis is just beginning
Natalie Turner says that of all the schools she and her co-workers at the Area Health Education Center work with, "Lincoln's at the top of the list."

One of the keys has been a staff that embraces two basic concepts: toxic stress prevents kids from learning, and moving from a punitive approach to a supportive, educational approach changes behavior. Gordon says it's also the unconditional love that the teachers at Lincoln High show the kids on a regular basis.

"Watching Jim Sporleder's paradigm shift over the last five years has been just awesome," says Gordon. "I've seen that guy cry talking about our kids. Lincoln is just a collection of staff that unconditionally love these kids. The rest is just mental hoo-ha."

The mental hoo-ha has allowed and encouraged that kind of overt love, caring and support that's characteristic of Lincoln and that inspires many people to go into the teaching profession.

Turner has worked with educators who just won't budge from clinging to a system that clearly shows no progress in helping the "troublemakers" and "unmotivated" students.

"If the staff aren't ready, there's no point in going in and trying to move a system," she says. "There have been a couple of schools where they've had a very resistant staff, and we've decided to leave and try again another time."

Although it's made significant changes, Lincoln's not finished, says Sporleder.

"Part of what we've done is the relationship piece," he explains. "That's the powerful piece - we've built strong relationships with our kids. Now I want to move forward to help kids understand how resilience trumps ACEs."

Since he's found no guidelines for this part, he's trying this approach: He's put together a chart that hangs on a wall in his office. It shows ACEs and, on red cards, the qualities of resilience that can overcome those ACEs. He's asked some students to read the ten ACEs and tell him how many they have, says Sporleder.

"I never ask them which ones," he says. "And then we start talking about resilience. I share with them qualities that I have seen them demonstrate that build that resilience."

One student told him: "I get it - the more red cards you have the greater the chance it trumps your ACEs." Sporleder emphasizes how important it is for them to connect with positive caring adults to help them to continue to build their character and to build their resilience.

The changes at Lincoln have not eliminated expulsions. And the school hasn't done the analysis to know for certain if the changes have resulted in better grades and attendance. Nevertheless, Lincoln's results are showing the community that change is possible. If suspensions can be reduced by 85 percent among teens whom most of the community had given up on, if they can blossom into happy kids who suddenly see themselves as having a future, perhaps the same changes can occur in other settings.

"We intentionally focused on Lincoln as a pilot of sorts," says Barila, "with the full support of the assistant superintendent, so we could learn what strategies work and how, so we could then 'pass it on' throughout the school district."

The next chapter, she says, is to see if the rest of the schools in the district can accomplish similar results. That includes Walla Walla High School, with its 2,000 students and larger class sizes, as well as six elementary schools, two middle schools, a Catholic school system and a Seventh Day Adventist school. There's little doubt that many of the 6,000 other kids in Walla Walla's school district have adverse childhood experiences, too. Perhaps they don't have ACE scores as high as Lincoln students, but ACE scores are more common than not. According to Washington State's 2009 ACE survey, 62 percent of the state's population has at least one ACE, and 27 percent have an ACE score of 3 or more.

But Lincoln alone can't make enough changes to help every child, says Barila.

"That social-emotional competency has to be built in soooo much sooner than Lincoln," she notes. The goal of the Children's Resilience Initiative is to educate the entire community about adverse childhood experiences, the effect of toxic stress on kids' brains, and to encourage all organizations, agencies, clinics and youth groups to build and increase resilience factors. That's why she named the organization the Children's Resilience Initiative and not the ACEs Education Initiative, she says.

Still, if other schools adopt this approach, it won't be easy, says Sporleder. He knows that his peers discipline "like I used to discipline. I think our educational system reacts to the action. We need to respond to what is causing the action.

"This is such a paradigm shift, you have to believe in it to make change happen," Sporleder says. "The administration has to show support. That's what I've seen. You've just gotta believe in it. You've gotta know that it's true."

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Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline - suspensions drop 85%

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THE FIRST TIME THAT principal Jim Sporleder tried the New Approach to Student Discipline at Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, he was blown away. Because it worked. In fact, it worked so well that he never went back to the Old Approach to Student Discipline.

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Secure .gov websites use HTTPS

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Many factors can increase or decrease the likelihood of someone experiencing or perpetrating violence.

Risk factors can increase the risk of experiencing or perpetrating violence and protective factors can reduce the risk.

Preventing adverse childhood experiences requires understanding and addressing risk and protective factors.

What are risk and protective factors?

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are not often caused by a single factor. Instead, a combination of factors at the individual, relationship, community, and societal levels can increase or decrease the risk of violence.

Although some risk and protective factors are at the individual and family level, no child or individual is at fault for the ACEs they experience.

Risk factors are characteristics that may increase the likelihood of experiencing adverse childhood experiences. However, they may or may not be direct causes.

Protective factors are characteristics that may decrease the likelihood of experiencing adverse childhood experiences.

Please note the term "caregiver" will be used throughout to refer to parents and those who care for children but may not be biological parents.

Watch the Moving Forward video to learn more about how increasing what protects people from violence and reducing what puts people at risk for it benefits everyone.

Risk factors
Individual and family risk factors Community risk factors

Protective factors
Individual and family protective factors

Children who do well in school.26 27 28 25

Families with strong social support networks and positive relationships with the people around them.24 27 23 32 25

Families where caregivers engage in parental monitoring, supervision, and consistent enforcement of rules.24 27 32 28

Community protective factors

Communities where families have access to economic and financial help.33 34 35 36

References

1. Calvano, C., Engelke, L., Di Bella, J. et al. Families in the COVID-19 pandemic: parental stress, parent mental health and the occurrence of adverse childhood experiences-results of a representative survey in Germany. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-021-01739-0

2. Khanijahani, A., Sualp, K. Adverse Childhood Experiences, Neighborhood Support, and Internalizing and Externalizing Mental Disorders among 6-17 years old US Children: Evidence from a Population-Based Study. Community Ment Health J 58, 166-178 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-021-00808-7

3. Asmundson. (2019). ACEs : Using Evidence to Advance Research, Practice, Policy, and Intervention.

4. Luther. (2019). Developing a More Culturally Appropriate Approach to Surveying Adverse Childhood Experiences Among Indigenous Peoples in Canada

5. Guo, S., O'Connor, M., Mensah, F., Olsson, C. A., Goldfeld, S., Lacey, R. E., Slopen, N., Thurber, K. A., & Priest, N. (2021). Measuring Positive Childhood Experiences: Testing the structural and predictive validity of the Health Outcomes from Positive Experiences (HOPE) framework. Acad Pediatr. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acap.2021.11.003

6. Goetschius, L. G., McLoyd, V. C., Hein, T. C., Mitchell, C., Hyde, L. W., & Monk, C. S. (2021). School connectedness as a protective factor against childhood exposure to violence and social deprivation: A longitudinal study of adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. Dev Psychopathol, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579421001140

7. Bethell, C. D., Garner, A. S., Gombojav, N., Blackwell, C., Heller, L., & Mendelson, T. (2022). Social and Relational Health Risks and Common Mental Health Problems Among US Children: The Mitigating Role of Family Resilience and Connection to Promote Positive Socioemotional and School-Related Outcomes. Child Adolesc Psychiatr Clin N Am, 31(1), 45-70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chc.2021.08.001

8. Bellis, M. A., Hughes, K., Ford, K., Madden, H. C. E., Glendinning, F., & Wood, S. (2022). Associations between adverse childhood experiences, attitudes towards COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine hesitancy: a cross-sectional study. BMJ Open, 12(2), e053915. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2021-053915

9. Dietz, E. (2017). A New Framework for Addressing Adverse Childhood and Community Experiences: The Building Community Resilience Model.

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This page outlines the risk and protective factors for adverse childhood experiences.

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Special Education and Inclusive Learning

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Daniel Goleman’s Theory of Emotional Intelligence and Teaching

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Emotional Intelligence: What Teachers Need to Know Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to perceive, understand, and manage one’s own emotions and relationships. It involves being aware of emotions in oneself and others and using

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In the 5 E model of instruction, students construct knowledge and meaning from their experiences. This model was developed as part of a BSCS (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study) to improve the science and health curriculum for elementary schools. The 5 E method is an example of inquiry-based learning, in which students ask questions, decide what information enhances their understanding, and then self-assess.

Fast Facts: 5 E Instructional Model

The research showed positive results when the 5 E model was adopted by schools. Standardized tests scores showed that those students in classrooms using the BSCS science program for two years were four months ahead of students in other classrooms. According to the published report, "the sustained use of an effective, research-based instructional model can help students learn fundamental concepts in science and other domains."

In this constructivist model of learning, there are five stages in learning, and each stage begins with the letter E: engage, explore, explain, extend, and evaluate.

Engage Stage

To engage students, teachers should connect the topic or concept at hand with prior understanding. Students are encouraged to ask questions or draw on experiences. The teacher does not correct any misconceptions about the topic or concept but does make notes about revisiting these misconceptions. The purpose of the engagement stage is to get students excited and ready to explore the topic or concept.

Explore Stage

Once students are interested, they can begin to investigate the problems associated with the topic or concept. Students pose real questions and develop hypotheses. The key concepts in the topic are identified while teachers provide hands-on activities. Students develop the skills that are needed to test their ideas. The teacher does not provide direct instruction at this time. Instead, the teacher leads students through inquiry-based questions as students work cooperatively in groups. During this stage, time is given to students to refine their hypotheses as they begin to reflect on the results of their investigations.

Explain Stage

Students develop explanations for what they have already observed. They define the necessary vocabulary and connect their findings to prior knowledge. The teacher should support student discussion and answer student questions. While this stage is a direct instruction phase, the discussions mean that this new information is shared collaboratively.

During this stage, students understand this information through a single example. For example, they may understand the life cycle of one species or a particular form of government. They will need the time, which is provided in the next stage, to internalize their understanding before comparing and contrasting.

Extend Stage

Research shows that students need to solidify their understanding by connecting what they have learned to something real. They need to move from a single example in the Explain stage to a generalization that can be applied in other examples. In applying this information, students may formulate new hypotheses. The new hypotheses can be tested in new investigations. In practicing new skills, students may take data and make new conclusions. In the investigations during the extend phase, students use the vocabulary and concepts in their discussions and their writing.

Evaluate Stage

In the final stage, students return to the engage phase to compare their earlier understanding of what they know now. They address any misconceptions they held, and the teacher makes sure these misconceptions are corrected. They reflect on what they know, and how they are now able to prove what they know in writing, discussion, and demonstration.

Research shows that the evaluate stage should not be skipped. A unit test is not a part of this stage since the teacher can complete a formal evaluation after the evaluation stage. Instead, teachers can evaluate the learning that has taken place through a problem scenario where students should apply their new knowledge. Other evidence of understanding can be done through formative, informal performance, or summative assessments.

Planning the 5E Model

Teachers who plan to use the 5 E model should be aware that they should use this design for units of two to three weeks. Each stage should be planned to include one or more lessons.

The co-creator of the 5 E model, Rodger W. Bybee, explained,

"Using the 5Es model as the basis for a single lesson decreases the effectiveness of the individual phases due to shortening the time and opportunities for challenging and restructuring of concepts and abilities-for learning,"

The 5E Model helps students to use inquiry to connect new information with prior knowledge through practice and reflection. The teacher becomes a facilitator or guide who builds inquiry, exploration, and assessment into daily instruction approach.

5E Example: Math

In a 5 E model for math, for example, a unit on rational numbers coming from mathematical and real-world situations could include converting between standard decimal notation and scientific notation.

Engage: Students are given cards with rational numbers and asked:

Where do you think that number should go on a number line?

Do you think it could be placed in more than one place?

Explore: Students use cards to order, match, and compare the rational numbers.

Explain: The teacher provides examples of times people may use Scientific Notation; students practice organizing cards using what they know about Scientific Notation.

Extend: Students try out their new understanding of rational numbers.

Evaluate: Students create a visual representation to organize and display the relationship between sets and subsets of numbers.

Teachers can use the evaluate stage to determine how well students can use scientific notation and convert numbers in scientific notation to standard decimal notation.

5 E Model for Social Studies

In social studies, the 5E method can be used in a unit that addresses forms of representative government.

Engage: Students take a poll that asks what criteria they would like in a representative government

Explore: Students explore different forms of representative governments including direct democracy, representative democracy, presidential democracy, parliamentary democracy, authoritarian democracy, participatory democracy, Islamic democracy, and social democracy.

Explain: Students define terms and determine which representative government best fits the criteria from the poll.

Extend: Students apply what they have learned about representative government to real-world examples.

Evaluate: Students return to the information from the poll, adjust their criteria and then fashion a new form of representative government.

5 E English Example

In ELA, the 5 E model can be used in a unit designed to help students better understand transition words through visual and kinesthetic activities.

Engage: Students are handed transition words cards that they can act out (first, second, after, later).

Explore: Students organize lists of transition words (by time, to compare, to contrast, to contradict) and discuss how transition words change understanding when applied to different passages.

Explain: The teacher corrects any misconceptions while students define terms, determine what would be an excellent visual representation of a transition word and what body action best represents that transition word.

Extend: In groups, students visually represent the transition word through visual or kinesthetic means in new passages provided by the teacher.

Evaluate: Students share their representations and act them out.

Science example

The 5E Model was initially developed for science Instruction. This model is embedded in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) as the best way for students to think scientifically. In one 5 E instructional model, using software, students design and then build an amusement park ride.

Engage: Show video clips of different roller coaster rides and the riders' reactions. Students can describe personal experiences riding roller coasters and brainstorm the reasons that roller coaster rides are thrilling.

Explore: Students construct an accelerometer and then test it by having a student sit on a swivel chair and spin while holding the accelerometer. They will use data to calculate the g-force and the independent variable (mass of each student).

Explain: Students access different amusement park websites to review the specifications in workbooks that detail the roller coasters in the park.

Extend: Students use roller coaster software to aid them in a roller coaster design using free software on these sites: No-limits Coaster software, Learner.org, Real Rollercoaster Simulator. Students will consider the question, How do the rules of mathematics and the laws of physics govern the designs of engineers?

Evaluate: Students show their understanding of roller coaster science by calculating the velocity, g-force, and centripetal force. Students also write about them turning their calculations into narrative descriptions (commercials) to explain how their design is calculated for thrills.

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Use the 5 E Instructional Model for Student Inquiry-Based Learning

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In the 5 E model of instruction, students construct knowledge and meaning from their experiences. This model was developed as part of a BSCS (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study) to improve the science and health curriculum for elementary schools. The 5 E method is an example of inquiry-based learning, in which students ask questions, decide what information enhances their understanding, and then self-assess.

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Constructivism Learning Theory & Philosophy of Education

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Constructivism Learning Theory & Philosophy of Education

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Constructivism as a Theory for Teaching and Learning

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Constructivism is both a learning theory and a philosophy of education that suggests learners actively build their knowledge through experiences and interactions. According to this theory, education should focus on problem-solving and critical thinking, encouraging learners to connect new information with prior knowledge. It emphasizes student-centered learning, where teachers guide rather than direct, fostering deep understanding and application.

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Piaget's 4 Stages of Cognitive Development Explained

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Piaget's 4 Stages of Cognitive Development Explained

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Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of learning. His theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence. Piaget's stages are:

Sensorimotor stage: Birth to 2 years

Preoperational stage: Ages 2 to 7

Concrete operational stage: Ages 7 to 11

Formal operational stage: Ages 12 and up

Piaget believed that children take an active role in the learning process, acting much like little scientists as they perform experiments, make observations, and learn about the world. As kids interact with the world around them, they continually add new knowledge, build upon existing knowledge, and adapt previously held ideas to accommodate new information.

History of Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Piaget was born in Switzerland in the late 1800s and was a precocious student, publishing his first scientific paper when he was just 11 years old. His early exposure to the intellectual development of children came when he worked as an assistant to Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon as they worked to standardize their famous IQ test.

Piaget vs. Vygotsky

Piaget's theory differs in important ways from those of Lev Vygotsky, another influential figure in the field of child development. Vygotsky acknowledged the roles that curiosity and active involvement play in learning, but placed greater emphasis on society and culture.

Piaget felt that development is largely fueled from within, while Vygotsky believed that external factors (such as culture) and people (such as parents, caregivers, and peers) play a more significant role.

Much of Piaget's interest in the cognitive development of children was inspired by his observations of his own nephew and daughter. These observations reinforced his budding hypothesis that children's minds were not merely smaller versions of adult minds.

Until this point in history, children were largely treated simply as smaller versions of adults. Piaget was one of the first to identify that the way that children think is different from the way adults think.

Piaget proposed that intelligence grows and develops through a series of stages. Older children do not just think more quickly than younger children. Instead, there are both qualitative and quantitative differences between the thinking of young children versus older children.

Based on his observations, he concluded that children were not less intelligent than adults-they simply think differently. Albert Einstein called Piaget's discovery "so simple only a genius could have thought of it."

Piaget's stage theory describes the cognitive development of children. Cognitive development involves changes in cognitive process and abilities. In Piaget's view, early cognitive development involves processes based upon actions and later progresses to changes in mental operations.

The Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development

During this earliest stage of cognitive development, infants and toddlers acquire knowledge through sensory experiences and manipulating objects. A child's entire experience at the earliest period of this stage occurs through basic reflexes, senses, and motor responses.
Birth to 2 Years
Major characteristics and developmental changes during this stage:

Know the world through movements and sensations

Learn about the world through basic actions such as sucking, grasping, looking, and listening

Learn that things continue to exist even when they cannot be seen (object permanence)

Realize that they are separate beings from the people and objects around them

Realize that their actions can cause things to happen in the world around them

During the sensorimotor stage, children go through a period of dramatic growth and learning. As kids interact with their environment, they continually make new discoveries about how the world works.

The cognitive development that occurs during this period takes place over a relatively short time and involves a great deal of growth. Children not only learn how to perform physical actions such as crawling and walking; they also learn a great deal about language from the people with whom they interact. Piaget also broke this stage down into substages. Early representational thought emerges during the final part of the sensorimotor stage.

Piaget believed that developing object permanence or object constancy, the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, was an important element at this point of development.

By learning that objects are separate and distinct entities and that they have an existence of their own outside of individual perception, children are then able to begin to attach names and words to objects.

The Preoperational Stage of Cognitive Development

The foundations of language development may have been laid during the previous stage, but the emergence of language is one of the major hallmarks of the preoperational stage of development.
2 to 7 Years
Major characteristics and developmental changes during this stage:

Begin to think symbolically and learn to use words and pictures to represent objects

Tend to be egocentric and struggle to see things from the perspective of others

Getting better with language and thinking, but still tend to think in very concrete terms

At this stage, kids learn through pretend play but still struggle with logic and taking the point of view of other people. They also often struggle with understanding the idea of constancy.

Children become much more skilled at pretend play during this stage of development, yet they continue to think very concretely about the world around them.

For example, a researcher might take a lump of clay, divide it into two equal pieces, and then give a child the choice between two pieces of clay to play with. One piece of clay is rolled into a compact ball while the other is smashed into a flat pancake shape. Because the flat shape looks larger, the preoperational child will likely choose that piece, even though the two pieces are exactly the same size.

The Concrete Operational Stage of Cognitive Development

While children are still very concrete and literal in their thinking at this point in development, they become much more adept at using logic.﻿﻿ The egocentrism of the previous stage begins to disappear as kids become better at thinking about how other people might view a situation.
7 to 11 Years
Major characteristics and developmental changes during this stage:

Begin to think logically about concrete events

Begin to understand the concept of conservation; that the amount of liquid in a short, wide cup is equal to that in a tall, skinny glass, for example

Thinking becomes more logical and organized, but still very concrete

Begin using inductive logic, or reasoning from specific information to a general principle

While thinking becomes much more logical during the concrete operational state, it can also be very rigid. Kids at this point in development tend to struggle with abstract and hypothetical concepts.

During this stage, children also become less egocentric and begin to think about how other people might think and feel. Kids in the concrete operational stage also begin to understand that their thoughts are unique to them and that not everyone else necessarily shares their thoughts, feelings, and opinions.

The Formal Operational Stage of Cognitive Development

The final stage of Piaget's theory involves an increase in logic, the ability to use deductive reasoning, and an understanding of abstract ideas. At this point, adolescents and young adults become capable of seeing multiple potential solutions to problems and think more scientifically about the world around them.
Age 12 and Up
Major characteristics and developmental changes during this time:

Begins to think abstractly and reason about hypothetical problems

Begins to think more about moral, philosophical, ethical, social, and political issues that require theoretical and abstract reasoning

Begins to use deductive logic, or reasoning from a general principle to specific information

The ability to thinking about abstract ideas and situations is the key hallmark of the formal operational stage of cognitive development. The ability to systematically plan for the future and reason about hypothetical situations are also critical abilities that emerge during this stage.

Important Cognitive Development Concepts

It is important to note that Piaget did not view children's intellectual development as a quantitative process. That is, kids do not just add more information and knowledge to their existing knowledge as they get older.

Instead, Piaget suggested that there is a qualitative change in how children think as they gradually process through these four stages. At age 7, children don't just have more information about the world than they did at age 2; there is a fundamental change in how they think about the world.

Piaget suggested several factors that influence how children learn and grow.

A schema describes both the mental and physical actions involved in understanding and knowing. Schemas are categories of knowledge that help us to interpret and understand the world.

In Piaget's view, a schema includes both a category of knowledge and the process of obtaining that knowledge. As experiences happen, this new information is used to modify, add to, or change previously existing schemas.

For example, a child may have a schema about a type of animal, such as a dog. If the child's sole experience has been with small dogs, a child might believe that all dogs are small, furry, and have four legs. Suppose then that the child encounters an enormous dog. The child will take in this new information, modifying the previously existing schema to include these new observations.

Assimilation

The process of taking in new information into our already existing schemas is known as assimilation. The process is somewhat subjective because we tend to modify experiences and information slightly to fit in with our preexisting beliefs. In the example above, seeing a dog and labeling it "dog" is a case of assimilating the animal into the child's dog schema.

Accommodation

Another part of adaptation is the ability to change existing schemas in light of new information; this process is known as accommodation. New schemas may also be developed during this process.

Equilibration

As children progress through the stages of cognitive development, it is important to maintain a balance between applying previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing behavior to account for new knowledge (accommodation).

Piaget believed that all children try to strike a balance between assimilation and accommodation using a mechanism he called equilibration. Equilibration helps explain how children can move from one stage of thought to the next.

One of the main points of Piaget's theory is that creating knowledge and intelligence is an inherently active process.

"I find myself opposed to the view of knowledge as a passive copy of reality," Piaget wrote. "I believe that knowing an object means acting upon it, constructing systems of transformations that can be carried out on or with this object. Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality."

Piaget's theory of cognitive development helped add to our understanding of children's intellectual growth. It also stressed that children were not merely passive recipients of knowledge. Instead, kids are constantly investigating and experimenting as they build their understanding of how the world works.

Additional Reading

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What Is Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development?

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Psychologist Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development has 4 stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

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Behavioral, cognitive, Developmental, Social Cognitive and Constructivist Perspectives

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Behavioral, cognitive, Developmental, Social Cognitive and Constructivist Perspectives

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Vygotsky's Theory of Cognitive Development in Social Relationships

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Effective Nonverbal Communication in the Classroom: Examples And Strategies

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Effective Nonverbal Communication in the Classroom: Examples And Strategies

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Effective Nonverbal Communication in the Classroom: Examples And Strategies

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Comparing Piaget and Vygotsky

Methods and approaches to teaching have been greatly influenced by the research of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Both have contributed to the field of education by offering explanations for children's cognitive learning styles and abilities. While Piaget and Vygotsky may differ on how they view cognitive development in children, both offer educators good suggestions on how teach certain material in a developmentally appropriate manner.

Piaget proposed that cognitive development from infant to young adult occurs in four universal and consecutive stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations (Woolfolk, A., 2004). Between the ages of zero and two years of age, the child is in the sensorimotor stage. It is during this stage the child experiences his or her own world through the senses and through movement. During the latter part of the sensorimotor stage, the child develops object permanence, which is an understanding that an object exists even if it is not within the field of vision (Woolfolk, A., 2004). The child also begins to understand that his or her actions could cause another action, for example, kicking a mobile to make the mobile move. This is an example of goal-directed behavior. Children in the sensorimotor stage can reverse actions, but cannot yet reverse thinking (Woolfolk, A., 2004).

During a child's second and seventh year, he or she is considered to be in the preoperational stage. Piaget stated that during this stage, the child has not yet mastered the ability of mental operations. The child in the preoperational stage still does not have the ability to think through actions (Woolfolk, A., 2004). Children in this stage are considered to be egocentric, meaning they assume others share their points of view (Woolfolk, A. 2004). Because of egocentricism, children in this stage engage in collective monologues, in which each child is talking, but not interacting with the other children (Woolfolk, A. 2004). Another important aspect of the preoperational stage is the acquisition of the skill of conservation. Children understand that the amount of something remains the same even if its appearance changes (Woolfolk, A., 2004). A child in the preoperational stage would not be able to perform the famous Piagetian conservation problem of liquid and volume, because he or she has not yet developed reversible thinking – "thinking backward, from the end to the beginning" (Woolfolk, A., 33).

Concrete operations occurs between the ages of seven to eleven years. Students in the later elementary years, according to Piaget, learn best through hands-on discovery learning, while working with tangible objects. Reasoning processes also begin to take shape in this stage. Piaget stated that the three basic reasoning skills acquired during this stage were identity, compensation, and reversibility (Woolfolk, A., 2004). By this time, the child learns that a "person or object remains the same over time" (identity) and one action can cause changes in another (compensation) (Woolfolk, A., 2004). This child has an understanding of the concept of seriation – ordering objects by certain physical aspects. The child is also able to classify items by focusing on a certain aspect and grouping them accordingly (Woolfolk, A., 2004).

Piaget's final stage of cognitive development is formal operations, occurring from age eleven years to adulthood. People who reach this stage (and not everyone does, according to Piaget) are able to think abstractly. They have achieved skills such as inductive and deductive reasoning abilities. People in the formal operations stage utilize many strategies and resources for problem solving. They have developed complex thinking and hypothetical thinking skills. Through hypothetico-deductive reasoning, one is able to identify the factors of a problem, and deduce solutions (Woolfolk, A., 2004). People in this stage also imagine the best possible solutions or principles, often through the ability to think ideally (Woolfolk, A., 2004). The acquisition of meta-cognition (thinking about thinking) is also a defining factor of those people in formal operations.

Based on Piaget's proposed stages and ability levels at each, certain teaching strategies have been offered for teaching in the Piagetian school of thought. In the preoperational stage, the teacher would have to use actions and verbal instruction. Because the child has not yet mastered mental operations, the teacher must demonstrate his or her instructions, because the child cannot yet think through processes. The use of visual aids, while keeping instructions short would most benefit the child in this stage (Woolfolk, A., 2004). Hands-on activities also aid with learning future complex skills, as the text mentions, reading comprehension (Woolfolk, A., 2004). The teacher must be sensitive to the fact that these children, according to Piaget, are still egocentric and may not realize that not everyone shares the same view (Woolfolk, A., 2004).

Teaching children in the concrete operations stage involves hands-on learning, as well. Students are encouraged to perform experiments and testing of objects. By performing experiments and solving problems, students develop logical and analytical thinking skills (Woolfolk, A., 2004). Teachers should provide short instruction and concrete examples and offer time for practice. With skills such as classification, compensation, and seriation developing during this stage, teachers should provide ample opportunities to organize groups of objects on "increasingly complex levels" (Woolfolk, A., 37).

Teaching those in the formal operations stage involves giving students the opportunity to advance their skills in scientific reasoning and problem solving, as begun in the concrete operations stage. Students should be offered open-ended projects in which they explore many solutions to problems. Opportunities to explore hypothetical possibilities should be granted to these students often. As the text states, teachers need to teach the "broad concepts" of the material while relating it to their lives. Idealism is assumed to be acquired by a person in the formal operations stage; therefore, understanding broad concepts and their application to one's life aid in the realization of ideal concepts.

Piaget also proposed that a child acts on his own environment for learning. Social interaction takes place mainly to move a young child away from egocentricism. It is also important to note that Piaget stated that a child either held the mental structure for conservation, for example, or he did not. A child in the preoperational stage could not be taught to understand the liquid volume experiment; she does not possess the mental structure of a child in concrete operations.

As part of their cognitive development, children also develop schemes, which are mental representations of people, objects, or principles. These schemes can be changed or altered through what Piaget called assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is information we already know. Accommodation involves adapting one's existing knowledge to what is perceived. Disequilibrium occurs when new knowledge does not fit with one's accumulated knowledge. When one reaches what Piaget called equilibrium, assimilation and accommodation have occurred to create a new stage of development (Woolfolk, A., 2004). When learning the concept of conservation, a child must first "struggle" with the idea that the liquid amount in the cylinders has not changed (disequilibrium). After accommodating the new knowledge, equilibrium occurs, and the child may advance to a new cognitive stage (concrete operations).

Around this time, another psychologist was offering his views on child cognitive development. Lev Vygotsky offered an alternative to Piaget's stages of cognitive development. Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory of Development became a major influence in the field of psychology and education (Woolfolk, A., 2004). This theory stated that students learn through social interactions and their culture – much different from Piaget's theory that stated children act on their environment to learn. Through what Vygotsky called "dialogues," we socially interact and communicate with others to learn the cultural values of our society. Vygotsky also believed that "human activities take place in cultural settings and cannot be understood apart from these settings" (Woolfolk, A., 45). Therefore, our culture helps shape our cognition.

Through these social interactions, we move toward more individualized thinking. The co-constructed process involves people interacting during shared activities, usually to solve a problem (Woolfolk, A., 2004). When the child receives help through this process, he or she may be able to utilize better strategies in the future, should a similar problem arise. The co-constructed dialogues lead to internalization, which in turn leads one to independent thinking (Woolfolk, A., 2004).

Scaffolding is another Vygotskian principle for the sociocultural perspective. Scaffolding involves providing the learner with hints or clues for problem solving in order to allow the student to better approach the problem in the future (Woolfolk, A., 2004). While Piaget would assume the student does not yet have the mental structures to solve such a problem, Vygotsky would offer encouragement or strategies, in the form of scaffolding, in order for the student to attempt the problem.

The development of language is considered to be a major principle of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. The language of a certain group of people indicates their cultural beliefs and value system. For example, a tribe with many words meaning "hunting" indicates that hunting is an important aspect of their lives. The text states that children learn language much the same way that children learn cognitive skills. Vygotsky states that humans may have "built in biases, rules, and constraints about language that restrict the number of possibilities considered" (Woolfolk, A., 2004). A child's thinking regarding these language constraints is very important in language development (Woolfolk, A., 2004).

Another aspect of language development involves private speech. Private speech is self-talk children (and adults) may use to guide actions and aid in thinking. While Piaget may view private speech as egocentric or immature, Vygotsky understood the importance of self-directed speech. Private speech is considered to be self-directed regulation and communication with the self, and becomes internalized after about nine years (Woolfolk, A., 2004).

Vygotsky also emphasized the importance of cultural tools in cognition. Cultural tools can be any technological tool or any symbolic tool which aids in communication (Woolfolk, A., 2004). Language, the media, television, computers, and books are only a handful of all the cultural tools available for problem solving or learning. Higher-level processing is "mediated by psychological tools, such as language, signs, and symbols" (Woolfolk, A., 2004). After receiving co-constructed help, children internalize the use of the cultural tools, and are better able to utilize the tools in the future on their own (Woolfolk, A., 2004).

Another Vygotskian principle for teaching involves the zone of proximal development. Like Piaget, Vygotsky believed that there were some problems out of a child's range of understanding. However, in contrast, Vygotsky believed that given proper help and assistance, children could perform a problem that Piaget would consider to be out of the child's mental capabilities. The zone is the area at which a child can perform a challenging task, given appropriate help (Woolfolk, A., 2004).

Piaget and Vygotsky also differ in how they approach discovery learning. Piaget advocated for discovery learning with little teacher intervention, while Vygotsky promoted guided discovery in the classroom. Guided discovery involves the teacher offering intriguing questions to students and having them discover the answers through testing hypotheses (Woolfolk, A., 2004). The students are engaged in the discovery process; however, they are still receiving assistance from a more knowledgeable source.

A teacher utilizing Vygotskian methods for teaching would be a very active member in her student's education. The teacher would apply the technique of scaffolding by providing assistance and offering feedback when relating new information (Woolfolk, A., 2004). Teachers should also make sure that students are provided adequate tools for learning. Students should be taught how to use tools such as the computer, resource books, and graphs in order to better utilize these tools in the future (Woolfolk, A., 2004). Teaching in the Vygotskian method would also incorporate group or peer learning (Woolfolk, A., 2004). By having students tutor each other through dialogues and scaffolding, the students can begin to internalize the new information and come to a better understanding of the material.

I believe that both Piaget and Vygotsky provided educators with important views on cognitive development in the child. Piaget proposed that children progress through the stages of cognitive development through maturation, discovery methods, and some social transmissions through assimilation and accommodation (Woolfolk, A., 2004). Vygotsky's theory stressed the importance of culture and language on one's cognitive development.

Regarding the two cognitive theories, I would be more apt to apply Vygotskian principles to my classroom. I believe that principles such as scaffolding, co-constructed knowledge, dialogue, and cultural tools are all important components of a student's knowledge acquisition. By helping students within their zone of proximal development, we offer them useful learning strategies which they internalize and utilize later. Piaget proposed many applicable educational strategies, such as discovery learning with an emphasis on activity and play. However, Vygotsky incorporated the importance of social interactions and a co-constructed knowledge base to the theory of cognitive development.

In conclusion, a teacher's focus should be to provide assistance to students in need, and provide cultural tools as educational resources. Teachers should provide for group and peer learning, in order for students to support each other through the discovery process. Especially in today's diverse classroom, the teacher needs to be sensitive to her student's cultural background and language, and be an active participant in his knowledge construction.

Woolfolk, Anita. (2004). Educational Psychology. (9th ed). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

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Comparing Piaget and Vygotsky Methods and approaches to teaching have been greatly influenced by the research of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Both have contributed to the field of education by offering explanations for children's cognitive learning styles and abilities.

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CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Stud Backstory

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CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Stud Backstory

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Mentions of the ACE Study - the CDC's Adverse Childhood Experiences Study - have shown up in the New York Times, This American Life, and Salon.com recently. In the last year, it's become a buzzword in social services, public health, education, juvenile justice, mental health, pediatrics, criminal justice and even business. Many people say that just as everyone should be aware of her or his cholesterol score, so should everyone know her or his ACE score. But what is this study? And why is it so important to, well, almost everyone in 2012, the same way polio became important to almost everyone in the 1950s? Here's the backstory.
The ACE Study - probably the most important public health study you never heard of - had its origins in an obesity clinic on a quiet street in San Diego.

It was 1985, and Dr. Vincent Felitti was mystified. The physician, chief of Kaiser Permanente's revolutionary Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, CA, couldn't figure out why, each year for the last five

years, more than half of the people in his obesity clinic dropped out. Although people who wanted to shed as little as 30 pounds could participate, the clinic was designed for people who were 100 to 600 pounds overweight.

Felitti cut an imposing, yet dashing, figure. Tall, straight-backed, not a silver hair out of place, penetrating eyes, he was a doctor whom patients trusted implicitly, spoke of reverentially and rarely called by his first name. The preventive medicine department he created had become an international beacon for efficient and compassionate care. Every year, more than 50,000 people were screened for diseases that tests and machines could pick up before symptoms appeared. It was the largest medical evaluation site in the world. It was reducing health care costs before reducing health care costs was cool.

But the 50-percent dropout rate in the obesity clinic that Felitti started in 1980 was driving him crazy. A cursory review of all the dropouts' records astonished him - they'd all been losing weight when they left the program, not gaining. That made no sense whatsoever. Why would people who were 300 pounds overweight lose 100 pounds, and then drop out when they were on a roll?

The situation "was ruining my attempts to build a successful program," he recalls, and in typical Type-A fashion, he was determined to find out why.

The mystery turned into a 25-year quest involving researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and more than 17,000 members of Kaiser Permanente's San Diego care program. It would reveal that adverse experiences in childhood were very common, even in the white middle-class, and that these experiences are linked to every major chronic illness and social problem that the United States grapples with - and spends billions of dollars on.

But in 1985, all that Felitti knew was that the obesity clinic had a serious problem. He decided to dig deep into the dropouts' medical records. This revealed a couple of surprises: All the dropouts had been born at a normal weight. They didn't gain weight slowly over several years.

"I had assumed that people who were 400, 500, 600 pounds would be getting heavier and heavier year after year. In 2,000 people, I did not see it once," says Felitti. When they gained weight, it was abrupt and then they stabilized. If they lost weight, they regained all of it or more over a very short time.

But this knowledge brought him no closer to solving the mystery. So, he decided to do face-to-face interviews with a couple hundred of the dropouts. He used a standard set of questions for everyone. For weeks, nothing unusual came of the inquiries. No revelations. No clues.

The turning point in Felitti's quest came by accident. The physician was running through yet another series of questions with yet another obesity program patient: How much did you weigh when you were born? How much did you weigh when you started first grade? How much did you weigh when you entered high school? How old were you when you became sexually active? How old were you when you married?

"I misspoke," he recalls, probably out of discomfort in asking about when she became sexually active - although physicians are given plenty of training in examining body parts without hesitation, they're given little support in talking about what patients do with some of those body parts. "Instead of asking, "How old were you when you were first sexually active," I asked, "How much did you weigh when you were first sexually active?' The patient, a woman, answered, 'Forty pounds.'"

He didn't understand what he was hearing. He misspoke the question again. She gave the same answer, burst into tears and added, "It was when I was four years old, with my father."

He suddenly realized what he had asked.

"I remembered thinking, 'This is only the second incest case I've had in 23 years of practice'," Felitti recalls. "I didn't know what to do with the information. About 10 days later, I ran into the same thing. It was very disturbing. Every other person was providing information about childhood sexual abuse. I thought, 'This can't be true. People would know if that were true. Someone would have told me in medical school.' "

Worried that he was injecting some unconscious bias into the questioning, he asked five of his colleagues to interview the next 100 patients in the weight program. "They turned up the same things," he says.

Of the 286 people whom Felitti and his colleagues interviewed, most had been sexually abused as children. As startling as this was, it turned out to be less significant than another piece of the puzzle that dropped into place during an interview with a woman who had been raped when she was 23 years old. In the year after the attack, she told Felitti that she'd gained 105 pounds.

"As she was thanking me for asking the question," says Felitti, "she looks down at the carpet, and mutters, 'Overweight is overlooked, and that's the way I need to be.'"

During that encounter, a realization struck Felitti. It's a significant detail that many physicians, psychologists, public health experts and policymakers haven't yet grasped: The obese people that Felitti was interviewing were 100, 200, 300, 400 overweight, but they didn't see their weight as a problem. To them, eating was a fix, a solution. (There's a reason an IV drug user calls a dose a "fix".)

One way it was a solution is that it made them feel better. Eating soothed their anxiety, fear, anger or depression - it worked like alcohol or tobacco or methamphetamines. Not eating increased their anxiety, depression, and fear to levels that were intolerable.

The other way it helped was that, for many people, just being obese solved a problem. In the case of the woman who'd been raped, she felt as if she were invisible to men. In the case of a man who'd been beaten up when he was a skinny kid, being fat kept him safe, because when he gained a lot of weight, nobody bothered him. In the case of another woman - whose father told her while he was raping her when she was 7 years old that the only reason he wasn't doing the same to her 9-year-old sister was because she was fat - being obese protected her. Losing weight increased their anxiety, depression, and fear to levels that were intolerable.

For some people, both motivations were in play.

Felitti didn't know this at the time, but this was the more important result - the mind-shift, the new meme that would begin spreading far beyond a weight clinic in San Diego. It would provide more understanding about the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world who use biochemical coping methods - such as alcohol, marijuana, food, sex, tobacco, violence, work, methamphetamines, thrill sports - to escape intense fear, anxiety, depression, anger.

Public health experts, social service workers, educators, therapists and policy makers commonly regard addiction as a problem. Some, however, are beginning to grasp that turning to drugs is a normal response to serious childhood trauma, and that telling people who smoke or overeat or overwork that these are bad for them and that they should stop doesn't register when those approaches provide a temporary, but gratifying solution.

Ella Herman was one of the people who participated in the obesity clinic, but had dropped out because any weight she lost, she regained. Herman owned a successful childcare center in San Diego. Herman said she was sexually abused by two uncles and a school bus driver; the first time occurred when she was four years old. She married a man who abused her repeatedly and tried to kill her. With the help of her family, she fled with her children to San Diego, where she later remarried.

"I imagine I've lost 100 pounds about six times," she recalled. "And gained it back." Every time she lost weight and a man commented on her beauty, she became terrified and began eating. But she never understood the connection until she attended a meeting at which Felitti talked about what he'd learned from patients. At this time, Herman was just over five feet tall and weighed nearly 300 pounds. "He had a room full of people," she said. "The more he talked the more I cried, because he was touching every aspect of my life. Somebody in the world understands, I thought."

Herman later sent a letter to Felitti. "I want to thank you for caring enough about people to read all those charts and finding out what happens to all of us who are molested, raped and abused in childhood," she wrote. "...I suffered for years. The pain became so great I was thinking of jumping off the San Diego Bay Bridge....How many people may have taken their life because they had no program to turn to? How many lives can be saved by this program?"
What do you do when you've got something important to tell the world, but the world thinks it's stupid?
So, if you were Vincent Felitti, whom would you pick as your first audience to reveal your stunning findings? A group relatively informed about obesity that would greet the new information with extreme interest, praise and applause? Natch. So, in 1990, Felitti flew to Atlanta to give a speech to the members - many of them psychologists and psychiatrists - of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity. The audience listened quietly and politely. When he finished, one of the experts stood up and blasted him. "He told me I was naïve to believe my patients, that it was commonly understood by those more familiar with such matters that these patient statements were fabrications to provide a cover explanation for failed lives!"

At dinner, Dr. David Williamson, an epidemiologist from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sat next to the perplexed Felitti. Williamson was intrigued. He leaned over and "told me that people could always find fault with a study of a couple of hundred people," says Felitti, "but not if there were thousands, and from a general population, not a subset like an obesity program. I turned to him and said, 'That's not a problem.' "

Williamson invited Felitti to meet with a small group of researchers at the Centers for Disease Control. Dr. Robert Anda, a medical epidemiologist was among them. If Felitti is the model for a TV show featuring a wise and stately chief physician who sits straight, stands straight, and keeps his personal feelings in check, Anda would be the dashing, young, brilliant researcher who wears his tie askew, slumps in chairs, laughs easily, loves to joke around, and puts his heart on his sleeve for all to see.

Anda began his career as a physician, but became intrigued with epidemiology and public health. When he met Felitti, he had been studying how depression and feelings of hopelessness affect coronary heart disease. He noticed that depression and hopelessness weren't random. "I became interested in going deeper, because I thought that there must be something beneath the behaviors that were generating them," says Anda.

Kaiser Permanente in San Diego was a perfect place to do a mega-study. More than 50,000 members came through the department each year, for a comprehensive medical evaluation. Every person who came through the Department of Preventive Medicine filled out a detailed biopsychosocial (biomedical, psychological, social) medical questionnaire prior to undergoing a complete physical examination and extensive laboratory tests. It would be easy to add another set of questions. In two waves, Felitti and Anda asked 26,000 people who came through the department "if they would be interested in helping us understand how childhood events might affect adult health," says Felitti. Of those, 17,421 agreed.

Before they added the new trauma-oriented questions, Anda spent a year pouring through the research literature to learn about childhood trauma, and focused on the eight major types that patients had mentioned so often in Felitti's original study and whose individual consequences had been studied by other researchers. These eight included three types of abuse - sexual, verbal and physical. And five types of family dysfunction - a parent who's mentally ill or alcoholic, a mother who's a domestic violence victim, a family member who's been incarcerated, a loss of a parent through divorce or abandonment. He later added emotional and physical neglect, for a total of 10 types of adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs.

The initial surveys began in 1995 and continued through 1997, with the participants followed subsequently for more than fifteen years. "Everything we've published comes from that baseline survey of 17,421 people," says Anda, as well as what was learned by following those people for so long.

When the first results of the survey were due to come in, Anda was at home in Atlanta. Late in the evening, he logged into his computer to look at the findings. He was stunned. "I wept," he says. "I saw how much people had suffered and I wept."

This was the first time that researchers had looked at the effects of several types of trauma, rather than the consequences of just one. What the data revealed was mind-boggling.

The first shocker: There was a direct link between childhood trauma and adult onset of chronic disease, as well as mental illness, doing time in prison, and work issues, such as absenteeism.

The second shocker: About two-thirds of the adults in the study had experienced one or more types of adverse childhood experiences. Of those, 87 percent had experienced 2 or more types. This showed that people who had an alcoholic father, for example, were likely to have also experienced physical abuse or verbal abuse. In other words, ACEs usually didn't happen in isolation.

The third shocker: More adverse childhood experiences resulted in a higher risk of medical, mental and social problems as an adult.

To explain this, Anda and Felitti developed a scoring system for ACEs. Each type of adverse childhood experience counted as one point. If a person had none of the events in her or his background, the ACE score was zero. If someone was verbally abused thousands of times during his or her childhood, but no other types of childhood trauma occurred, this counted as one point in the ACE score. If a person experienced verbal abuse, lived with a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father, his ACE score was three.

Things start getting serious around an ACE score of 4. Compared with people with zero ACEs, those with four categories of ACEs had a 240 percent greater risk of hepatitis, were 390 percent more likely to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema or chronic bronchitis), and a 240 percent higher risk of a sexually-transmitted disease.

They were twice as likely to be smokers, 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, seven times more likely to be alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs.

People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, more auto-immune diseases, and more work absences.

"Some of the increases are enormous and are of a size that you rarely ever see in health studies or epidemiological studies. It changed my thinking dramatically," says Anda.

Two in nine people had an ACE score of 3 or more, and one in eight had an ACE score of 4 or more. This means that every physician probably sees several high ACE score patients every day, notes Felitti. "Typically, they are the most difficult, though the underpinnings will rarely be recognized."

The kicker was this: The ACE Study participants were average Americans. Seventy-five percent were white, 11 percent Latino, 7.5 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and 5 percent were black. They were middle-class, middle-aged, 36 percent had attended college and 40 percent had college degrees or higher. Since they were members of Kaiser Permanente, they all had jobs and great health care. Their average age was 57.

As Anda has said: "It's not just 'them'. It's us."
Changing the landscape of understanding human development
In the last 14 years, Anda, Felitti and other CDC researchers have published more than 60 papers in prestigious peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Other researchers have referenced their work more than 1,500 times. Anda and Felitti have flown around the U.S., Canada and Europe to give hundreds of speeches.

Their inquiry "changed the landscape," says Dr. Frank Putnam, director of the Mayerson Center for Safe and Healthy Children at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and professor at the University of Cincinnati Department of Pediatrics. "It changed the landscape because of the pervasiveness of ACEs in the huge number of public health problems, expensive public health problems - depression, substance abuse, STDs, cancer, heart disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes."

The ACE Study became even more significant with the publication of parallel research that provided the link between why something that happened to you when you were a kid could land you in the hospital at age 50. The stress of severe and chronic childhood trauma - such as being regularly hit, constantly belittled and berated, watching your father often hit your mother - releases hormones that physically damage a child's developing brain.

Flight, fight or freeze hormones work really well to help us accelerate when we're being chased by a vicious dog with big teeth, fight when we're cornered, or turn to stone and stop breathing to escape detection by a predator. But they become toxic when they're turned on for too long.

This was determined by a group of neuroscientists and pediatricians, including neuroscientist Martin Teicher and pediatrician Jack Shonkoff, both at Harvard University, neuroscientist Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller University, and child psychiatrist Bruce Perry at the Child Trauma Academy.

As San Francisco pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris recently explained to host Ira Glass on the radio program, "This American Life ", if you're in a forest and see a bear, a very efficient fight or flight system instantly floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol and shuts off the thinking portion of your brain that would stop to consider other options. This is very helpful if you're in a forest and you need to run from a bear. "The problem is when that bear comes home from the bar every night," she said.

If a bear threatens a child every single day, his emergency response system is activated over and over and over again. He's always ready to fight or flee from the bear, but the part of his brain - the prefrontal cortex - that's called upon to diagram a sentence or do math becomes stunted, because, in our brains, emergencies - such as fleeing bears - take precedence over doing math.

For Harris' patients who had four or more categories of adverse childhood experiences "their odds of having learning or behavior problems in school were 32 times as high as kids who had no adverse childhood experiences," she told Glass.

Together, the two discoveries - the ACE epidemiology and the brain research - reveal a story too compelling to ignore:

Children with toxic stress live much of their lives in fight, flight or fright (freeze) mode. They respond to the world as a place of constant danger. With their brains overloaded with stress hormones and unable to function appropriately, they can't focus on learning. They fall behind in school or fail to develop healthy relationships with peers or create problems with teachers and principals because they are unable to trust adults. Some kids do all three. With despair, guilt and frustration pecking away at their psyches, they often find solace in food, alcohol, tobacco, methamphetamines, inappropriate sex, high-risk sports, and/or work and over-achievement. They don't regard these coping methods as problems. Consciously or unconsciously, they use them as solutions to escape from depression, anxiety, anger, fear and shame.

What all this means, says Anda is that we need to prevent adverse childhood experiences and, at the same time, change our systems - educational, criminal justice, healthcare, mental health, public health, workplace - so that we don't further traumatize someone who's already traumatized. You can't do one or the other and hope to make any progress.

"Dr. Putnam is right - ACEs changed the landscape," Anda says. "Or perhaps the many publications from the ACE Study opened our eyes to see the truth of the landscape. ACEs create a "chronic public health disaster"that until recently has been hidden by our limited vision. Now we see that the biologic impacts of ACEs transcend the traditional boundaries of our siloed health and human service systems. Children affected by ACEs appear in all human service systems throughout the lifespan - childhood, adolescence, and adulthood - as clients with behavioral, learning, social, criminal, and chronic health problems."

But our society has tended to treat the abuse, maltreatment, violence and chaotic experiences of our children as an oddity instead of commonplace, as the ACE Study revealed, notes Anda. And our society believes that these experiences are adequately dealt with by emergency response systems such as child protective services, criminal justice, foster care, and alternative schools. "These services are needed and are worthy of support - but they are a dressing on a greater wound," he says.

"A hard look at the public health disaster calls for the both the prevention and treatment ACEs," he continues. "This will require integration of educational, criminal justice, healthcare, mental health, public health, and corporate systems that involves sharing of knowledge and resources that will replace traditional fragmented approaches to burden of adverse childhood experiences in our society."

As Williamson, the epidemiologist who introduced Felitti and Anda, and also worked on the ACE Study, says: "It's not just a social worker's problem. It's not just a psychologist's problem. It's not just a pediatrician's problem. It's not just a juvenile court judge's problem." In other words, this is everybody's problem.

According to a CDC study released earlier this year, just one year of confirmed cases of child maltreatment costs $124 billion over the lifetime of the traumatized children. The researchers based their calculations on only confirmed cases of physical, sexual and verbal abuse and neglect, which child maltreatment experts say is a small percentage of what actually occurs.

The breakdown per child is:

* $32,648 in childhood health care costs

* $10,530 in adult medical costs

* $144,360 in productivity losses

* $7,728 in child welfare costs

* $6,747 in criminal justice costs

* $7,999 in special education costs

You'd think the overwhelming amount of money spent on the fallout of adverse childhood experiences would have inspired the medical community, the public health community and federal, state and local governments to integrate this knowledge and fund programs that have been proven to prevent ACEs. But adoption of concepts from the ACE Study and the brain research has been remarkably slow and uneven.

On the federal level, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) - probably the largest federal agency you never heard of - launched the National Child Traumatic Stress Network in 2001, and the National Center for Trauma-Informed Care (NCTIC) in 2005. Much of the work focused on stress from individual traumatic events, or individual types of child abuse; only recently has there been a focus on dysfunctional families or changing systems that engage those families to become trauma-informed, i.e., not further traumatizing already traumatized people, as so many of our systems do.

Until the last 10 months, the medical community practically ignored the ACE Study. Just last December, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement recommended that its members look for toxic stress in their patients. Except with local exceptions, the public health community has not embraced it. In fact, the CDC - the one agency you might think would use its own research to reorganize how it approaches prevention of alcohol, obesity, sexually transmitted diseases and smoking - has whittled down funding for the ACE Study to practically nothing, and nobody's working on it full time.

However, on a local and state level, there's been considerably more action. Washington was the first state to embrace the ACE Study and the research on children's developing brains, when its Family Policy Council distributed the information through a statewide network of 42 communities. Over the last three years, 18 states have done their own ACE surveys, with results similar to the CDC study.

Some cities have set up ACE task forces. Trauma-informed practices are popping up around the U.S., Canada, and countries in Europe, Asia, and Central and South America in schools, prisons, mental clinics and hospitals, a few pediatric practices, crisis nurseries, local public health departments, homeless shelters, at least one hospital emergency room, substance-abuse clinics, child welfare services, youth services, domestic violence shelters, rehab centers for seniors, residential treatment centers for girls and boys, and courtrooms.

In these dozens of organizations, the results of the new approach are nothing less than astounding: the most hopeless of lives turned around, parents speaking "ACEs" and determined not to pass on their high ACEs to their children, and a significant reduction in costs of health care, social services and criminal justice.

NEXT (but not tomorrow): What happens when a homeless shelter in Petaluma, CA, integrates ACE concepts.

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The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study - the largest, most important public health study you never heard of - began in an obesity clinic

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Mentions of the ACE Study - the CDC's Adverse Childhood Experiences Study -- have shown up in the New York Times, This American Life, and Salon.com recently. In the last year, it's become a buzzword in social services, public health, education, juvenile justice, mental health, pediatrics, criminal justice and even business.

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 Important activities to use in the classroom to develop knowledge. Comparison of the implications of Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories for each task.

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 Important activities to use in the classroom to develop knowledge. Comparison of the implications of Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories for each task.

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For my future classroom to implement classroom management

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For my future classroom to implement classroom management

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Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman ► Animated Book Summary

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Poster for my future classroom: The theory of the emotional intelligence

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Poster for my future classroom: The theory of the emotional intelligence

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Special Education and Inclusive Learning

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Daniel Goleman’s Theory of Emotional Intelligence and Teaching

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Emotional Intelligence: What Teachers Need to Know Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to perceive, understand, and manage one’s own emotions and relationships. It involves being aware of emotions in oneself and others and using

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The Mood Meter: Teaching Emotional Intelligence in early childhood

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The Mood Meter: Teaching Emotional Intelligence in early childhood

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Every morning, Ms. Mitchell thinks about how her feelings will affect her teaching. If she feels frustrated or overwhelmed when she arrives at school, she takes a deep breath and makes a plan for managing her emotions so that she can fully engage with her students and coteachers. She greets children and families as they walk through the door and asks how they are feeling. Throughout the day, children use a classroom mood meter to acknowledge their feelings. Ms. Mitchell also uses the mood meter to talk with children about her own feelings, how characters in books feel, what happened to cause their feelings, and how characters' emotions change throughout a story. In many different ways, Ms. Mitchell models emotional intelligence and supports its development in her students.

Emotional intelligence is a set of skills associated with monitoring one's own and others' emotions, and the ability to use emotions to guide one's thinking and actions (Salovey & Mayer 1990). Emotions impact our attention, memory, and learning; our ability to build relationships with others; and our physical and mental health (Salovey & Mayer 1990). Developing emotional intelligence enables us to manage emotions effectively and avoid being derailed, for example, by a flash of anger.

Children with higher emotional intelligence are better able to pay attention, are more engaged in school, have more positive relationships, and are more empathic.

Emotional intelligence is related to many important outcomes for children and adults. Children with higher emotional intelligence are better able to pay attention, are more engaged in school, have more positive relationships, and are more empathic (Raver, Garner, & Smith-Donald 2007; Eggum et al. 2011). They also regulate their behaviors better and earn higher grades (Rivers et al. 2012). For adults, higher emotional intelligence is linked to better relationships, more positive feelings about work, and, for teachers in particular, lower job-related stress and burnout (Brackett, Rivers, & Salovey 2011).

Drawing from Mayer and Salovey's (1997) refined theory of emotional intelligence, Brackett and Rivers (2014) identified five skills that can be taught to increase emotional intelligence: Recognizing emotions in oneself and others; Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions; Labeling emotions accurately; Expressing emotions in ways that are appropriate for the time, place, and culture; and Regulating emotions. These skills, which form the acronym RULER, are the heart of an effective approach for modeling emotional intelligence and teaching the emotional intelligence skills children need to be ready to learn (Hagelskamp et al. 2013; Rivers et al. 2013).

While the full RULER approach provides a range of tools and instructional strategies, in this article we focus on the mood meter, which is a color-coded tool that provides a shared language for becoming aware of emotions and their impact on teaching and learning. (To learn about the full RULER model, visit the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence website at http://ei.yale.edu/ruler/.)

Introducing the mood meter

If you ask a group of 3-year-old children how they are feeling, what would they say? Fine? Good? Happy? What if you ask a group of early childhood educators? Their responses might not be that different! Most of us use a limited vocabulary to describe our feelings when answering the question "How are you?" In contrast, schools that value children's and educators' emotions encourage a diversified vocabulary to describe feelings. The mood meter is a concrete tool that can shift conversations about feelings from rote responses like good to more nuanced responses like curious, excited, or worried. Accurately labeling and discussing feelings helps adults and children acknowledge the role that emotions play throughout the day. Taking time to recognize feelings, elaborate on their causes, and jointly brainstorm potential strategies to shift or maintain them helps ensure that adults and children use emotions effectively to create a climate supportive of learning.

The mood meter has two axes. The horizontal axis represents pleasantness and ranges from -5 (on the far left) to +5 (on the far right), with -5 being the least pleasant you can imagine feeling (e.g., your job is at risk) and +5 being the most pleasant you can imagine feeling (e.g., you were recognized as Teacher of the Year). Our feelings usually fall somewhere between these values. The vertical axis, which has the same range, represents the energy we experience in our bodies (e.g., heart rate, breathing). At -5, you might feel drained of all energy (e.g., you have the flu and can hardly move) while +5 represents feeling the most energy you can imagine having in your body (e.g., you just received a big raise and feel like jumping for joy). Together, the two axes create four colored quadrants (from the top left and counterclockwise) red (unpleasant, higher energy), blue (unpleasant, lower energy), green (pleasant, lower energy), and yellow (pleasant, higher energy).

With young children ages 3 to 8, a simplified color-only version of the mood meter works best, in our experience. When first introducing children to the mood meter, we tend to describe each color with one word: red = angry; blue = sad; green = calm; yellow = happy. As children learn to use the mood meter, they acquire more feeling words that correspond to each color (and in later grades, they learn how to use the numeric ranges to express their degree of pleasantness and energy). With the mood meter, children learn that there are no good or bad feelings. There may be feelings that we like to have more often than others, but all feelings are okay. Even for those unpleasant feelings, we can learn to employ strategies that use the information we receive from our feelings to respond to them in ways we feel good about.

Using the mood meter to practice emotional intelligence

Research suggests that an important part of effectively teaching emotional intelligence is modeling the five RULER skills for children (Jennings & Greenberg 2009). One way to do this is by regularly checking in on the mood meter throughout the day.

Recognize: How am I feeling? Cues from our bodies (e.g., posture, energy level, breathing, and heart rate) can help us identify our levels of pleasantness and energy. Think about how our feelings may affect the interactions we have with others.

Understand: What happened that led me to feel this way? As feelings change throughout the day, think about the possible causes of these feelings. Identifying the things (e.g., people, thoughts, and events) that lead to uncomfortable feelings can help us both manage and anticipate them in order to prepare an effective response. Determining the causes of feelings we want to foster can help us consciously embrace those things for ourselves and others more often.

Label: What word best describes how I am feeling? Although there are more than 2,000 emotion words in the English language, most of us use a very limited number of words to describe how we are feeling (e.g., happy, sad, mad). Cultivating a rich vocabulary allows us to pinpoint our emotions accurately, communicate effectively, and identify appropriate regulation strategies.

Express: How can I express appropriately what I am feeling for this time and place? There are many ways to express each of our feelings. At different times and in different contexts, some forms of expression are more effective than others. Explaining to children what we are doing and why, as we express different feelings at school, provides them with models of different strategies to express their own emotions.

Regulate: What can I do to maintain my feeling (if I want to continue feeling this way) or shift my feeling (if I do not want to continue feeling this way)? Having short-term strategies to manage emotions in the moment as well as long-term strategies to manage emotions over time is a critical part of effective regulation. Educators with a range of regulation strategies to choose from are better able to manage the full range of emotions and to model these strategies for children and families.

Strategies that can effectively regulate emotions include

Taking deep breaths

Engaging in private self-talk (e.g., "I know I can do this!")

Reframing negative interactions (e.g., "She is having a hard day. No wonder she reacted that way.")

Stepping back and allowing physical distance (e.g., taking a short walk at lunch time)

Seeking social support (e.g., talking to a friend and making plans to spend time together)

Promoting children's emotional intelligence skills

How do you want children to feel when they are in your classroom? Most educators respond with emotions like happy, secure, safe, peaceful, and curious-pleasant feelings that are conducive to learning (Reschly et al. 2008). There are exceptions, however. For example, feeling extremely excited (high in the yellow) can make it challenging to concentrate on a quiet task. There are also occasions when unpleasant feelings can be helpful. For example, mild frustration may help a child persevere to complete a challenging task, and some sadness (which is connected to compassion and sympathy) is necessary to develop empathy. While we do not want to foster unpleasant feelings in young children, we do want to provide them with strategies to both accept and manage these feelings when they occur.

In addition to modeling, educators can promote emotional intelligence through direct instruction by embedding the mood meter in classroom management practices as well as formal and informal learning activities. We provide examples of each in the following sections.

Integrating emotional intelligence into classroom management practices

Educators can use their own emotional intelligence to acknowledge the feelings children experience throughout the day and to inform classroom management. For example, by recognizing emotion cues in children, educators can help children connect their physical experience of emotions with new vocabulary on the mood meter (e.g., frustrated, annoyed, calm). A teacher could say, "I see you are frowning and crossing your arms. I do that when I feel frustrated or annoyed. It looks like you might be in the red. How are you feeling? What happened that caused you to feel that way?" Recognizing and discussing emotions with children lays a foundation for their self-regulation. Educators can also use this information to identify when a classroom activity needs to be modified to better engage students. For instance, an activity requiring children to cut a complex shape with scissors may be too challenging, leading children to feel frustrated and require more support. Similarly, adding more materials to a table activity might shift children who are feeling bored (in the blue) to feeling interested (yellow). Using music and movement during group time might shift children who are feeling excited (yellow) to feeling relaxed (green) after they release their energy appropriately. If students are experiencing separation anxiety (blue) in the mornings, for instance, educators can use role-play at circle time to explore how children can help a friend who is feeling lonely. Children can then practice empathy by supporting one another.

Supporting emotional intelligence through read-alouds

Educators can help children expand their knowledge of feelings with carefully selected read-alouds. Teachers can use read-alouds to introduce children to new vocabulary for expressing emotions and then relate the feelings in stories to classroom themes. For example, words like nervous or brave fit well with a theme focused on visiting the doctor's office. When introducing a new feeling word, consider providing children with developmentally appropriate definitions of the word (e.g., "Disappointed means feeling sad because something did not happen the way you wanted it to.") and pairing the new word with related familiar words (e.g., "Disappointed is a blue feeling, like sad."). Using the mood meter during read-alouds helps children consider the emotions of storybook characters and practice applying their emotional intelligence. Photocopies of pictures from books can be placed on the mood meter and moved around as their feelings change throughout the story. Thinking through how characters feel and react helps children better prepare to deal with their own range of emotions and behaviors.

Developing emotional intelligence enables us to manage emotions effectively and avoid being derailed, for example, by a flash of anger.

The RULER acronym can guide educators in their discussions with children about each new feeling word. For example, using book characters, educators can help children understand what a feeling looks like ( recognizing and labeling), different things that cause feelings in themselves and others ( understanding), and appropriate ways to show their feelings at school as well as how to shift or maintain that feeling ( expressing and regulating). Use the questions in the table "Sample Read-Aloud Questions" to help children explore feelings during shared reading and guide conversations with children throughout the day.

Sample Read-Aloud Questions

Recognize: How is the character feeling? How do you know he/she is feeling that way? Can you show me a _________________ face?

Understand: What happened that made the character feel _________________ ? What happens that makes you feel _________________ ?
Label: Where would you put this character on the mood meter? What is the name of this feeling?
Express: How did the character act when he/she was feeling _________________ ? What else can you do when you are feeling _________________ ?
Regulate: What did the character do when he/she felt _________________ ? What could you do to help a friend who is feeling _________________ ? When you feel _________________ , what do you do?

Sharing personal stories about emotions

Another way teachers can embed emotional intelligence in the classroom routine is by sharing stories about their own feelings. Hearing about the emotional experiences of others helps children understand helpful ways to express and regulate emotions. Educators can share short (2-3 minute) developmentally appropriate stories during morning meeting, large or small group time, or snacks or meals. If educators describe how the emotion looked and felt, the situation that caused the emotion, and how they expressed and regulated the emotion, they will foster a classroom environment where children feel supported sharing their own emotions. Here is an example of an appropriate personal story to relate:

I remember a time when I was your age and I felt scared. I was afraid of my neighbors' dog. Whenever I walked by their house, the dog would bark. My eyes would get wide like this, I could feel my shoulders tensing up like this, and then I would run past their house as fast as I could. Sometimes I even had bad dreams about the dog chasing me, so I decided to tell my mom about it. Talking to someone is one thing you can do when you feel scared. My mom gave me a big hug, and that helped me feel better. She told me she had met the neighbors' dog, and his name was Jack! She said he was very friendly and took me to meet him. I didn't want to pet him at first, but then I touched his tail. Our neighbor said that barking was just Jack's way of saying hello. After that, I didn't feel so afraid of him anymore.

Of course, the goal of sharing a story isn't merely for children to listen. The teacher's personal stories should be discussed (much like a read-aloud), and children should be invited to share their stories about times they felt that emotion and what they did as well.

Encouraging children to place their name or picture on the corresponding mood-meter color can help children think about how they are feeling, why, and how to appropriately express and regulate their feelings.

Extending emotional intelligence throughout the day

Educators can help children develop RULER skills by integrating them into a range of activities, including creative arts, music and movement, and more. Here are a few examples:

Integrate green feelings (pleasant and lower energy) into creative arts by having children paint calmly and slowly while taking deep breaths and listening to soft music.

Invite children to practice feeling yellow (pleasant and higher energy) by dancing to fast music. After they've been dancing long enough for their heart rates to quicken, have children place their hands on their chests to feel their hearts beating, and talk about heartbeats as one way we can feel the energy in our bodies. (For a math extension, the teacher can also measure the resting and dancing heart rates of a few children, then create a chart with the class.)

Use pretend play to help children practice appropriately expressing red and blue emotions. Teachers can guide children's responses to pretend scenarios and model appropriate language and emotional expression.

Integrate mood meter check-ins into classroom routines (e.g., when children arrive and during group time). Encouraging children to place their name or picture on the corresponding mood-meter color can help children think about how they are feeling, why, and how to appropriately express and regulate their feelings.

Conclusion

Along with teaching the RULER skills and embedding the mood meter in classroom practices, educators should take time to discuss with colleagues the most helpful ways for children to express emotions in the classroom, especially unpleasant emotions. How can a child effectively express anger in your classroom? Is it okay for a child to verbalize "I'm angry?" Probably. Is it okay for a child to push another child? Probably not. Having these discussions among educators, as well as engaging parents, is critical to developing a set of school norms on emotions and effectively teaching these norms to children. Take time to share the mood meter with families. Let them know how you use the mood meter at school, and offer strategies that help them talk with their children-and each other-about emotions at home. By taking these simple steps, we can boost children's emotional intelligence, helping them positively engage in school and in life.

References

Brackett, M.A., & S.E. Rivers. 2014. "Transforming Students' Lives With Social and Emotional Learning." In International Handbook of Emotions in Education, eds. R. Pekrun & L. Linnenbrink-Garcia, 368-88. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Brackett, M.A., S.E. Rivers, & P. Salovey. 2011. "Emotional Intelligence: Implications for Personal, Social, Academic, and Workplace Success." Social and Personality Psychology Compass 5 (1): 88-103.

Eggum, N.D., N. Eisenberg, K. Kao, T.L. Spinrad, R. Bolnick, C. Hofer, A.S. Kupfer, & W.V. Fabricius. 2011. "Emotion Understanding, Theory of Mind, and Prosocial Orientation: Relations Over Time in Early Childhood." The Journal of Positive Psychology 6 (1): 4-16.

Hagelskamp, C., M.A. Brackett, S.E. Rivers, & P. Salovey. 2013. "Improving Classroom Quality With the RULER Approach to Social and Emotional Learning: Proximal and Distal Outcomes." American Journal of Community Psychology 51 (3-4): 530-43.

Jennings, P.A., & M.T. Greenberg. 2009. "The Prosocial Classroom: Teacher Social and Emotional Competence in Relation to Student and Classroom Outcomes." Review of Educational Research 79 (1): 491-525.

Mayer, J.D., & P. Salovey 1997. "What Is Emotional Intelligence?" In Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence: Educational Implications, eds. P. Salovey & D.J. Sluyter, 3-31. New York: Basic Books.

Raver, C.C., P.W. Garner, & R. Smith-Donald. 2007. "The Roles of Emotion Regulation and Emotion Knowledge for Children's Academic Readiness: Are the Links Causal?" In School Readiness and the Transition to Kindergarten in the Era of Accountability, eds. R.C. Pianta, M.J. Cox, & K.L. Snow, 121-47. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.

Reschly, A.L., E.S. Huebner, J.J. Appleton, & S. Antaramian. 2008. "Engagement as Flourishing: The Contribution of Positive Emotions and Coping to Adolescents' Engagement at School and With Learning." Psychology in the Schools 45 (5): 419-31.

Rivers, S.E., M.A. Brackett, M.R. Reyes, J.D. Mayer, D.R. Caruso, & P. Salovey. 2012. "Measuring Emotional Intelligence in Early Adolescence With the MSCEIT-YV: Psychometric Properties and Relationship With Academic Performance and Psychosocial Functioning." Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment 30 (4): 344-66.

Rivers, S.E., S.L. Tominey, E.C. O'Bryon, & M.A. Brackett. 2013. "Developing Emotional Skills in Early Childhood Settings Using Preschool RULER." The Psychology of Education Review 37 (2): 19-25.

Salovey, P., & J.D. Mayer. 1990. "Emotional Intelligence." Imagination, Cognition, and Personality 9 (3): 185-211.

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Teaching Emotional Intelligence in Early Childhood

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Children with higher emotional intelligence are better able to pay attention, are more engaged in school, have more positive relationships, and are more empathic.

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Educational Psychology: Strategies for Working with Diverse Learners

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Educational Psychology: Strategies for Working with Diverse Learners

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Text Book: Why don't students like school

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Text Book: Why don't students like school

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Jane Elliott “Blue Eyes - Brown Eyes” Experiment Anti-Racism

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Jane Elliott “Blue Eyes - Brown Eyes” Experiment Anti-Racism

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Jane Elliott “Blue Eyes - Brown Eyes” Experiment Anti-Racism

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Jane Elliott on Her "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise" and Fighting Racism

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Jane Elliott on Her "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise" and Fighting Racism

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Jane Elliott on Her "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise" and Fighting Racism

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I focus on the resource "Speak up at school".

Age: 12-16 years old (secondary level)

Time: Beginning of the year

Content area to increase relevance and connection to students' lives: Learning Indicator N.CP: I can identify some basic cultural beliefs and values.

What materials would you use to help your students internalize the meaning of your activity? Poster, journals, role-play cards.

Activity:

Day 1. Create our own classroom culture

Objective: Establish the importance of respect and introduce classroom ground rules to create a positive and productive learning environment.

Class discussion: "What does a safe classroom look and sound like? Collaborate to draft a list of ground rules. Prepare a poster with the collaborative rules. Rules could include respect, no slurs or hurtful language, raising your hand to talk and waiting to be called on, challenging ideas rather than people, speaking up, and using inclusive language.

Day 2.  Explore how different people from different cultures define respect.

Objective: Students will explore and compare how respect is defined and demonstrated in different cultures, and reflect on how these diverse perspectives influence interactions within the classroom.

Assignment:  Respect interviews: Student will interview a family member or friend from different backgrounds (including their own) about what "respect" means in their culture. They will come back to share their report in class.

Day 3. Understanding Slurs, Hurtful language, and their impact.

Objective: Define slurs/hurtful comments. Discuss why they are harmful. Practice role-play (without using slurs, practice what would you say). At the end, write a personal reflection of "How do words affect people?

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Activity Diversity Resources for Teachers

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Activity Diversity Resources for Teachers

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I think it is important to think about how we present these topics to our students. As we can see in the Jane Elliott videos, her idea had a great impact (you can even see an interview with the kids in the video as adults where they talk about the impact of this experiment and how it shaped them to be more tolerant) scroll to minute 20 if you want to see their thoughts as adults: https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-class-dividedLinks to an external site.

I think the important thing to take away is Jane talking about the results of her doing this demonstration in her class... I am sure many of you are thinking you would be fired if you did what she did with her third grade class.

The following links are resources that can be used by teachers to create activities for students that address complex issues (often generalized into the label of "bullying")

You will look over one of these resources and discuss the material, then formulate a plan for how this could be presented to students in school. You can connect with classmates in the discussion board if you want but NO response posts are required.

Consider the following to present your idea to the class in your first post:

What age group of students would your activity be appropriate for?

What time of the school year would you plan for this activity?

Would you be able to integrate your activity within a specific content area to increase relevance and connection to students’ lives?

What materials would you use to help your students internalize the meaning of your activity?

Resources for the activity:

1. SPEAK -UP AT SCHOOL: How to Respond to Everyday Prejudice, Bias and StereotypesLinks to an external site.

2. The Kids Guide to Working Out ConflictsLinks to an external site. (preview version from Free Spirit PublishingLinks to an external site.)

3. Responding to Everyday BigotryLinks to an external site.

4. What did you just say? Responses to racist comments from the fieldLinks to an external site.. & Specific, Candid, and Helpful Responses to Expressions of Racism and BiasLinks to an external site.

5. Responding to Micro Aggression in the ClassroomLinks to an external site. & Here's how to respond to MicroaggressionsLinks to an external site.

6. For the artists in the room: The Art of Restorative QuestionsLinks to an external site.