| By: Committee for Children Book Review: The Magic Fan Yoshi has always built useful things for his village. One day, though, he gains strange inspiration from a magic fan he finds, and his friends are not pleased. He must learn not only to rely on his own “magic,” but also to stand up for himself so that he can be a more helpful member of the community.Read More
| By: Committee for Children How Can We Turn Around K–12? Take a Page Out of Preschool! By focusing on academic standards and high-stakes tests, American public education is missing a key contributor to students' school, work, and life success – something that could help it turn around K-12 education and outcomes for students. This missing piece goes by many names: social-emotional learning, self-regulation skills, growth mindset, grit, character, non-cognitive skills, soft skills, habits of mind, and non-technical skills, just to name a few.Read More
| By: Committee for Children Let’s RIG Our Classrooms for Success! Part 2 of 2 Last week, in Part 1, you learned how to begin RIGging your classroom for success with Routines. This week you'll learn how Individuals and Groups can help you teach those social-emotional skills throughout the day! Read More
| By: Committee for Children Let’s RIG Our Classrooms for Success! Supporting social-emotional learning (SEL) in the classroom can be hard at times. SEL is much more than just behavior management, which even by itself can be an overwhelming task. My rule of thumb is to keep it simple. The more complicated systems get, the more confusing they get, and there's less follow-through. Read More
| By: Committee for Children The Call On the first Friday of my first week in my first year of teaching, I had to make the call. “Peter” came to school with a huge bruise on his forehead. I asked him what happened, and he said his dad hit him. There was further discussion, and as a first-year teacher, I had to make the call right then and there. Not just the actual call to Child Protective Services (CPS), but the call that as a teacher, I would do anything in my power to keep children safe – physically, socially, and emotionally. Read More
| By: Committee for Children The Economic Value of Social and Emotional Learning Given the many responsibilities in a day and the limited timeframe for accomplishing them, I often find myself considering which tasks are most worth my time when prioritizing what to do. In other words, what is the return on my investment? Read More
| By: Committee for Children Book Review: Not in Room 204 When a teacher goes beyond a standard “stranger danger” lesson to tell her class it's more likely to be someone a child knows who touches a child inappropriately and that she would help anyone who had a touching problem, this is just the information and encouragement young Regina needs to report her own scary secret. Read More
| By: Committee for Children He Just Disclosed in Class! What Do I Do? The goal of the Child Protection Unit lessons is to develop students' ability to recognize, report, and refuse unsafe or sexually abusive situations. During the lessons, students will hear stories and scenarios about children in unsafe and potentially abusive situations who use their skills to stay safe. This may prompt students to disclose information about similar situations in their own lives, sometimes in the middle of a lesson in front of the entire class! Needless to say, this can put teachers in an uncomfortable position, and in the moment it's hard to know how to respond.Read More
| By: Committee for Children The Second Step Child Protection Unit: A New Approach to Protecting Children from Abuse and Neglect Committee for Children has long been at the forefront of the effort to prevent child sexual abuse. In fact child sexual abuse prevention was the goal of Committee for Children's first published curriculum, the Talking About Touching program. Committee for Children has come a long way since then, bringing the power of social-emotional learning into schools around the world with the Second Step program and helping prevent bullying with the Second Step: Bullying Prevention Unit. Much has also changed in the field of child abuse prevention since the release of the Talking About Touching program, so Committee for Children recently returned to its roots and created the Child Protection Unit, a new Second Step unit designed to help protect children from sexual abuse and other forms of abuse and neglect. Read More
| By: Committee for Children Social-Emotional Learning from a Culturally Responsive Lens I have been fortunate to learn from many great people throughout my years in education. Recently, I had a chance to connect with Lea Denny, an advocate for First Nations youth. Throughout the past year, Lea has taught me the importance of culture in the teaching and modeling of social-emotional skills. I'd like to share some of that learning with you.Read More