2020 Beyond Calming Down

March 3, 2020 | Hill Learning Center

REGISTRATION IS CLOSED | WORKSHOP IS FULL

We know student anxiety is on the rise, and many schools are hiring health and wellness teams to help students with anxiety. But school schedules and budgets might limit any given student’s access to school psychologists, guidance counselors, and nurses—and even when they do get involved, their goal is to help the student choose to go back to class. Since students spend the majority of their time in academic classes with their teachers, how can teachers support anxious students?

In this highly experiential workshop, teachers will learn four ways they can support students who are anxious: by teaching simple coping tools, providing supportive accommodations, designing meaningful assignments, and embedding social-emotional learning into academic work. We’ll focus on how academic tasks—lessons, assignments, projects, and performances—can become opportunities for students to explore and enact their values, even when they feel anxious because stress and struggle inevitably come along with living a values-consistent life. Teachers will leave knowing how to turn their classrooms into places where students not only do meaningful academic work; they also choose how to approach their schoolwork, their peers, and themselves.

Informed by evidence-based psychotherapies such as Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), the workshop involves drawing, trading cards, contextual behavioral science, making stuff you can use, serious discussions about values and vulnerabilities, and empowering all students to become the people they want to be.

Cost: $135

Target Audience: classroom teachers of core academic subjects in grades 4-12

Speakers: Lauren Porosoff & Jonathan Weinstein