Year: 2019

Becoming Trauma Informed: Successfully Managing Children’s Challenging Behaviors

Many of our children come from hard places and have experienced trauma. We know that early experiences adversely impacts brain development. Developmental trauma impacts children’s attachment system and their ability to self-regulate. This often results in children acting out through a multitude of challenging behaviors. Becoming trauma informed (learning strategies and language that increases safety while promoting optimal brain development) is a key piece of successfully addressing children’s challenging behaviors.

Head Start classrooms today contain more and more children with extreme behavior issues as well as children with diagnosed and undiagnosed special needs. Teachers often report that despite trying many different things to manage children’s challenging behaviors, nothing has been effective. We have found that the origin of many children’s challenging behaviors is rooted in developmental trauma.

Behaviorally challenging children are also relationship-resistant children. Instead of spending precious time trying to get challenging children under control, we can instead create a compassionate school culture. This strategy employs the natural power of connection between all members as a means of co-regulating behavior and teaching children to self-regulate.

Research shows that children who are connected to others in the early years of schooling are much more likely to develop socially, emotionally and academically. Children’s social and emotional functioning in the classroom is a primary indicator of school readiness.

We believe that successful behavior management training is based on shifting teachers’ daily practice from reward and punishment — to teaching, modeling and nurturing relationships within a positive school climate.

This highly interactive and custom designed training includes:

  • Understanding how developmental trauma impacts children’s attachment and their ability to self-regulate;
  • Defining teaching behaviors and interventions that improve children’s ability to pay attention and impulse control;
  • Learning to “meet children where they are” including specific strategies to reach challenging children in a way that builds trust and connection;
  • Exploring how these connections directly increase the ability to problem-solve, engaging students in interactions that facilitate effective learning;
  • Discovering how to connect with relationship-resistant children, reduce oppositional defiant behavior and increase cooperation and compliance.

Are you looking for highly interactive and practice-based Training on “Becoming Trauma Informed: Successfully Managing Children’s Challenging Behaviors”? Give us a call at (704) 451-3255 or email us at kristinecortina@hsessentials.com.

Hands-On CLASS Training

Are you looking for CLASS training that is relevant to your Head Start classrooms and that inspires your Head Start teaching staff to increase their CLASS scores? Are you looking for CLASS training that is highly interactive and fully engages your Head Start teaching staff in practice-based learning?

As you know, it’s important to have and maintain high CLASS scores. High scoring classrooms are a great indicator of positive teacher/child interactions that effectively support children’s learning and development. This leads to successful CLASS Reviews as well as best practices in the classroom.

Effective CLASS training consists of keeping the teachers highly engaged by utilizing a “learning by doing” approach. It’s based on the principles of adult learning, which results in high impact learning. This hands-on strategy allows the teachers to take back the information that they learn in the training and implement it in their classrooms. Adult learning is most effective when the participants can see, feel and experience the information that is being presented.

We offer highly interactive and practice-based CLASS training designed to increase CLASS scores. The training will be custom designed to meet the specific needs of your Head Start teaching staff. It can cover all of the domains and dimensions – or it can focus on specific domains or dimensions. This hands-on training will include specific examples and effective strategies in terms of the Head Start classroom.

Our CLASS trainings include showing video clips that demonstrate the interactions and teaching strategies that you want your teachers to display. We take each domain and dimension and show videos of what each dimension should look like and should not look like. We take time to discuss the video clips and talk about what the teaching staff saw and how they can score a “7” in their classroom. The training participants will have many opportunities to see what high-scoring domains and dimensions look like.  Additional hands-on activities may include small group activities; pair and share; role plays; question and answer sessions; and interactive exercises.

Are you looking for Hands-on CLASS training? Give us a call at (704) 451-3255 or email us at kristinecortina@hsessentials.com.