5 techniques to enhance listening in the classroom

Very no-nonsense, simple piece for enhancing students' classroom listening skills by Rebecca Alber.  This kind of teaching will benefit all students but in particular those with attentional difficulties.  

http://www.edutopia.org/blog-five-listening-strategies-rebecca-alber 

“Ah, listening, the neglected literacy skill. I know when I was a high school English teacher this was not necessarily a primary focus; I was too busy honing the more measurable literacy skills — reading, writing, and speaking. But when we think about career and college readiness, listening skills are just as important. This is evidenced by the listening standards found in the Common Core and also the integral role listening plays in collaboration and communication, two of the four Cs of 21st century learning.

”

Emotional Intelligence

Great piece about the benefits and pitfalls of teaching emotional intelligence.  I kept asking myself, "what about the role of parents?"  Schools are asked to do an awful lot and parents modelling emotional intelligence for kids is extremely powerful and needs to be supported.  Nevertheless a great read by Jennifer Kahn in the NYTM.   

“ Depending on our personalities, and how we’re raised, the ability to reframe may or may not come easily. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that while one child may stay rattled by an event for days or weeks, another child may rebound within hours. (Neurotic people tend to recover more slowly.) In theory, at least, social-emotional training can establish neurological pathways that make a child less vulnerable to anxiety and quicker to recover from unhappy experiences. One study found that preschoolers who had even a single year of a social-emotional learning program continued to perform better two years after they left the program; they weren’t as physically aggressive, and they internalized less anxiety and stress than children who hadn’t participated in the program.

It may also make children smarter. Davidson notes that because social-emotional training develops the prefrontal cortex, it can also enhance academically important skills like impulse control, abstract reasoning, long-term planning and working memory. Though it’s not clear how significant this effect is, a 2011 meta-analysis found that K-12 students who received social-emotional instruction scored an average of 11 percentile points higher on standardized achievement tests. A similar study found a nearly 20 percent decrease in violent or delinquent behavior.

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— http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/can-emotional-intelligence-be-taught.html?smid=pl-share

think differently

From Reese Rickards Blog

http://www.b93.com/pages/Reeserickards.html?article=11689913

“This was sent to me by a member of the listener family.

It took me a very humbling moment to realize the second grader deserved a perfect A on his homework.

Read more: http://www.b93.com/pages/Reeserickards.html?article=11689913#ixzz2gwqTfvyi
”

— http://www.b93.com/pages/Reeserickards.html?article=11689913

Art Therapy workshop worth checking out

https://montrealtherapy.com/events/5/expressing-that-which-lies-within-art-therapy-for-awareness-understanding-and-insight/

Great for parents of toddlers of all ages

A really nice introduction to Adele Faber, co-author of one of my all time parenting favorites.  "You can mess up and you get another chance... you always have another chance to do better..."  http://youtu.be/Rv0k1U1NfCA

Therapy, including family therapy, is helpful and important even in the age of SSRIs

From the New York Times.  Despite the dire title, I find this article hopeful. 

“...for patients with the most common conditions, like depression and anxiety, empirically supported psychotherapies — that is, those shown to be safe and effective in randomized controlled trials — are indeed the best treatments of first choice. Medications, because of their potential side effects, should in most cases be considered only if therapy either doesn’t work well or if the patient isn’t willing to try counseling. ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/opinion/psychotherapys-image-problem.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0