General News

15 Oct Five Ways to Building a Trauma-Sensitive Classroom Environment

In her new book, “The Trauma-Sensitive Classroom: Building Resilience with Compassionate Teaching”, Tish Jennings helps teachers manage challenging classroom behaviors. Jennings, a leader with the Compassionate Schools Project, helps teachers embrace a new mindset in order to help students who exhibit behaviors that may have proven adaptive in their lives but turn out to be barriers to learning in the classroom.

Here are five ways to build a trauma-sensitive classroom environment according to Jennings:

• Let Go of Zero Tolerance
• Reframe Student Behavior
• Generate and Savor Positive Emotions
• Draw on the Power of Story
• Put On Your Oxygen Mask First

Read the Articles:
– How to Build a Trauma-Sensitive Classroom Where All Learners Feel Safe
– Changing How Educators See Negative Experiences in the Classroom

The book: “The Trauma-Sensitive Classroom: Building Resilience with Compassionate Teaching“

01 Sep Take the Mindful30 Challenge to Benefit CSP!

The Compassionate Schools Project has been chosen as a beneficiary of Mindful30, a 30 day mindfulness challenge of meditation and mindful exploration.

Join us September 1-30 by signing up now at CSP’s unique link: https://www.mindful.org/mindful30/csp/

What You’ll Get: Mindful30 gives you exclusive online access to expert guidance and inspiration delivered to you each day:

Exclusive Mindful30 Facebook Live events & community

• Daily themes designed to help you get the most from mindfulness
• Over 6 hours of video & audio delivered in short daily guided meditations
• Additional readings and expert Q & A
• Exclusive Mindful30 Facebook Live events & community
• Plus: a 1-year subscription to Mindful magazine. Current subscribers will have their subscriptions extended one year.

 
Mindful30 will help you experience the power of daily mindfulness to:

• Navigate stress and reduce anxiety
• Improve your health—physical and mental
• Sharpen your focus, performance, productivity
• Deepen your relationships with loved ones
• Rewire your brain with new habits for a better you

Learn More: https://www.mindful.org/mindful30/csp/

31 May How Do You Avoid Teacher Burnout?

Education Week’s Blog highlighted the advice of Tish Jennings and other leading practitioners, teachers, and scholars about navigating the pitfalls of teacher stress and burnout.

“Research shows that the burnout process begins with emotional exhaustion—feeling depleted, out of emotional energy. We now know that teaching is an incredibly emotionally demanding profession and teachers receive little training on how to manage these demands. The first step in the process is to recognize the need for self-care. Like the procedure on an airplane, we must put on our own oxygen mask before helping another or we may not be able to help. Self-care involves providing a balance of for our physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs. Getting enough exercise and eating right is a good start, but we also need to tend to emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs.” — Tish Jennings, Ph.D.
More here.

Other tips:
“Have a life outside of school. When you are organized at school and go home at a reasonable hour, you have time to cultivate friendships outside of school (Edwards, 2014).” — Jenny Edwards, Ph.D.
More here.

“Being able to detach requires figuring out what you feel like when you’re starting to get stressed. Cliche, perhaps, but know the signs. Stress manifests itself with me via shortened patience, and chaotic thinking, with a severe decrease in my focus and attention. I know when these happen, I need to reframe and rethink these 10 fundamentals of my life….” — Wendi Pillars, NBCT
More here.

Full articles: “Ways to Avoid Teacher Burnout” “Response to Teacher Burnout is ‘Contagious‘”

02 Apr Tish Jennings Presents Research to The Dalai Lama, Includes the Compassionate Schools Project

Tish Jennings visited the Dalai Lama at his home in India for the Mind & Life Conference – Reimagining Human Flourishing. On the fifth day of the conference, Jennings presented her research to the Dalia Lama including the Compassionate Schools Project (CSP). He watched the CSP video and replied, “wonderful.”

Sunmary of the event from the Mind & Life website: Patricia Jennings spoke about observing stress among teachers. She looked into why classrooms were a source of stress and found that some teachers are emotionally exhausted. She also noticed that everyone in a classroom is confined there. The remedy in this case is CARE—Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education—a program designed to help teachers reduce stress and enliven their teaching by promoting awareness, presence, compassion, reflection, and inspiration.

She noted that most teachers start their work with a strong sense of compassion. In CARE they are taught to monitor their attention, to notice when stress starts to rise and to take steps such as watching their breath to calm down and respond more effectively. Observed results include teachers’ improved emotional regulation, improved classroom atmosphere and improved student outcomes. Jennings made the important point that in this approach teachers not only teach skills, they embody them. They are encouraged to tell their class, “I’m feeling stressed and I’m going take steps to calm down’, so they also provide a model for students to follow.

Read more here.

15 Mar “It Could be a Huge Culture and Understanding Shift,” CSP Featured on WHAS News

Louisville’s WHAS11 News spoke to CSP students, teachers, administrators, and parents about the project in a video highlighting the difference the curriculum is making in students’ lives.

“They are learning amazing things. They’re learning compassion for others and themselves. I see little miracles happening in the compassion classroom every day,” Luhr Elementary Compassionate Schools Project teacher Candace McMahon said.

“It looks different for each of the kids,” said McMahon, “but they are being empowered in ways that they didn’t know was possible for them. I feel like it has to start inside with the kids knowing that they’re worth something and that they do have some power and control over their choices. They may not have control over their environment, but they are learning that self-love and compassion for others make them feel better inside. It also helps them to become better learners and listeners and better citizens.”

“They have little control over a lot of things in their lives, but they are given opportunities to figure out who they are, identify emotions, identify triggers, and they’re learning what to do with those. It matters. I think it’s the most important piece for our kids right now to be their best selves and to grow into the person that they’re supposed to be and to be excellent members of our society. I definitely believe it could be a worldwide epidemic,” said McMahon.

Watch the video: “Compassion Curriculum Comes to Life in JCPS“

20 Jan WDRB Discovers Majority of Kids “Seem to Love CSP”

WDRB News visited the “Compassion and Pastries” event in Louisville elementary school, that focused on becoming more in tune with children and how they learn.

“The students that are participating in the [Compassionate Schools] project are followed over a period of four years so that we can study the impacts of the curriculum on those student’s development,” Bloom Elementary PTA President Mollie Noe said. “We are waiting to see what the research says for the children, but overall the majority of the kids seem to love the program and are practicing mindfulness in their daily life.”

See the report: “Compassion and Pastries’ Event Held at Louisville Elementary School as part of JCPS Project“

08 Jan What the ‘Happiest’ Country, Denmark, and CSP Have in Common

Denmark’s status as a leader in teaching social skills is one reason it’s often ranked as the world’s ‘happiest’ country. Do Danes know something the rest of us don’t?

Or do we know it too? The Christian Science Monitor cited the Compassionate Schools Project for its focus on emotional intelligence. “Empathy is very important for democracy,” says Mette Løvbjerg, Møllevang’s headmaster. “You can’t have a democracy that is functioning if nobody puts themselves in another one’s shoes…. If we don’t teach our children that, then we don’t have a democracy in 50 years..”

Read the full story: “Reading, Writing and Empathy: How Denmark is a Leader in Teaching Social Skills”

 

13 Dec When Yoga Becomes Respected Part of School

“If we don’t find ways to help them overcome these reactions from trauma that they bring to school with them, it’s going to be hard to teach them the academic content,” said Tish Jennings in The Hechinger Report which highlighted the Compassionate Schools Project.

“The Compassionate Schools Project is really helping prepare their bodies and minds — the whole child — to be ready to learn what we want them to learn.”

Read the full story: “When Yoga Becomes a Respected Part of the School Day”

20 Nov Midterm Review: Mindfulness Feeds the Roots

Mindful Magazine attended a Compassionate Schools Project (CSP) project leader meeting and visited a CSP classroom.

“Using the image of caring for trees, the speaker argued that the education field tends to focus too much on the tree’s fruit (outcomes like test scores) while ignoring the roots. If you ignore the roots for too long, he continued, you don’t get any fruit at all. The takeaway: mindfulness and compassion feed the roots.

I heard this analogy when I was lucky enough to witness the mid-term review of Louisville’s “audacious” 7-year Compassionate Schools Project (CSP) serving over 10,000 K-5 students at 45 schools. The Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and the Contemplative Sciences Center have teamed up with the Louisville public schools on a randomized control study of a compassion, mindfulness and movement curriculum. In addition to being the largest and most innovative study of its kind, the curriculum will be free when it’s completed for any school that wants to use it.”

Read the full article: “Mindfulness Feeds the Roots“

17 Nov Louisville Magazine’s In Depth Look at CSP

Louisville Magazine featured the Compassionate Schools Project (CSP) in its November 2017 issue.

Does teaching mindfulness lead to kinder, more focused kids? Nearly 20,000 Jefferson County Public School students will help determine that.

You can’t be calm and threatened at the same time… When kids feel angry or fearful, stress hormones ravage the body. The brain ignites — fight or flight? Breathing slowly and intentionally distracts you, shifting your attention from fear. The nervous system messages the body: It’s OK.

Read the full story: “Compassionate Curriculum.”