Heading 1NDMTSS Conference
Description
Teachers have always needed to know and practice protective strategies in their social emotional first aid kits to manage the daily stressors of working on the front lines of a human-service oriented profession. That need has never been greater given the massive increase in uncertainty and unpredictability in the teaching profession and in one's personal life due to COVID.
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In short, teaching is emotional labor-- the effort required to manage and metabolize strong emotions like anger, shame, guilt, anxiety, and overwhelm, as well as generate and stoke positive emotions like joy, hope, and compassion.
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Stress significantly diminishes a teacher's capacity to regulate their negative emotions and cultivate positive emotions. Ironically, teachers who leave the profession often cite their inability to cope with their own emotional reactions to loss of control, unpredictability, and lack of purpose in their teaching as the primary reason for burnout.
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There are many, many strategies and practices rooted in cognitive and affective neuroscience and social and behavioral sciences that teachers can learn, practice, and integrate into their personal and professional lives as teachers to metabolize stress, manage negative energy, protect themselves from the burnout cycle, and find joy in teaching the whole year through!
Learning Objectives
In this session, teachers will:
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Explore the core elements of the teacher burnout cycle and learn how to protect one's self from the 2 paths to burning out,
The Present Teacher Restoration ProjectTM is an innovative and unique professional development offering designed by Present Teaching TrainingTM that focuses on professional learning experiences for teachers to: ​
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learn about the origins of healing from toxic stress,
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receive targeted support for how to manage personal and collective trauma triggered in teaching,
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learn specific mind and body practices that re-store a teacher's energy and passion to teach,
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experience strategies rooted in neuroscience, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mindfulness to "re-story" the stress to bring equilibrium to their mental health, stability in their emotional well-being, and a renewed sense of purpose.
Present TeacherTM Training is a research-based curriculum with a proven scope and sequence of topics, experiences, and practices that are designed to build off each other to bolster teacher emotional resilience, responsiveness, and readiness to teach.
Given the many social factors that are creating a toxic stress impact for our educators, this 4 hr training has been specifically customized to meet the teacher's mental and emotional health needs for teaching during a global pandemic and renewed called for racial justice.
Teachers can earn up to 4 "clock hours" to submit towards their continuing education.
Integrating experiential learning, transformative learning theory, neuroscience, and mindfulness-based practices, teachers and school personnel learn about their own humanity and innate resilience to transform the stress of the profession into opportunities for expanded humanizing dispositions like: critical consciousness, commitment, empathy, and compassion for self and others.
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We do this by engaging teachers in experiential learning opportunities where they cultivate increased self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and self-compassion through processing their current stressors or problems as the "portal" to deeper self, situational, and another awareness.
While earning clock hours to apply toward teacher mental health professional development, classroom teachers, paraprofessionals, and school counselors (or anyone who directly interfaces with students) can learn how to strategically stage-off burnout, process stress productively, be authentic, practice self-compassion, be emotionally resilient, deepen their passion & commitment to teach, and most importantly, connect with all students through justice, love, and belonging.
Course Core Concepts
Provide teachers with tools, strategies, and experiences rooted in mindful awareness for the deepening of self-awareness, self-compassion, and emotional resilience so that they can routinely adapt to the stressors of the profession in a functional and flexible way.​
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Cultivate the habits of mind and humanizing dispositions to remain calm in chaotic teaching moments, see student behavior through the lens of compassion and curiosity, and leverage stress as opportunities for greater insight and critical consciousness.
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Teach teachers how to strategically access their inner resources of calm, resilience, and positivity for counteracting the onset and manifestation of burnout and emotional fatigue while increasing their innate capacity to actualize happiness, passion, and joy in their professional and personal lives.
Course Modules
There are (8) 30 minute modules in this 4 hour training course. This current offering is specifically targeted at meeting the mental, emotional, and social needs of our teachers during these times of toxic social stressors.
Module 1
Prioritizing your Well-Being
The Power of Attention, Attitude, and Awareness
Mindfulness Focus: Breath & Body Awareness
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Learn about the core elements of mindful awareness and the benefits of mindfulness for teachers.
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Explore core values, commitments, and "why" as a teacher.
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Explore elements of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and learn how the fundamental elements of mindful awareness help you to meet your basic needs during times of intense stress.
Module 2
Banishing "Time" Stress: The art of managing your energy and not your time
Mindfulness Focus: Mind Awareness
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Learn about the origins of "time stress" for teachers while discovering how to create a new relationship with time and ONLINE learning during COVID.
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Discover strategies for re-thinking how "seat-time" for online instruction and student learning looks and feels in the new reality of education.
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Explore the 4 key practices for shape-shifting your relationship with the chronic sense that there is never enough time.
Taming the Toxic Stress Impact: Learning the Art of Metabolizing Stress
Module 3
Mindfulness Focus: Perceptual Awareness
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Explore the origins of what makes "stress" toxic and learn about the body's physiological, mental, and psychological reaction to toxic stress.
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Identify your own personal toxic teacher stressors while you explore the cycle of teacher burnout to increase your awareness of the sign, symptoms, and manifestations of burnout.
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Take an intimate look at "seeing what frames your seeing" and how previous stressful experiences diminish your "window of tolerance" to managing current stressors with ease.
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Learn the 4 core components of metabolizing stress into strength and "presence power."
Compassionate Teachers ~ Calm and Centered Students
Module 4
Mindfulness Focus: Mind Awareness
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Learn the 3 elements of self-compassion by Dr. Neff.
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Discover how compassion's protective properties diminishes the onset of compassion and COVID fatigue.
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Explore the ways that compassion protects personal energy and power while creating space for another to experience "attunement."
Trauma & Teaching: Transforming Teacher Stress into Strength
Module 5
Mindfulness Focus: Breath Awareness
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Explore current research toxic stress and collective trauma and its impact on teachers, students, and learning,
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Learn about the origins of teacher trauma and how to create "trauma sensitive" classrooms spaces not just for your students, but for yourself.
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Discover how to leverage perfectionism, anxiety, and overwhelm to cultivate the 3 R's of emotional resilience.
Teacher Emotional Intelligence & Agility
Module 6
Mindfulness Focus: Emotions & Interpersonal Mindfulness
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Learn how to manage your emotional reactions as a teacher and protect yourself from draining emotional and mental energy through anxiety, uncertainty, and overwhelm.
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Discover the power (and necessity) of positivity, joy, and happiness in teaching and how these states of being are essential elements for creating socially just classroom spaces for students.
Teacher Restoration AS Social Justice Work
PART I
Module 7
Mindfulness Focus: Intra-personal Mindfulness & Body Awareness
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Learn the basics of RE-STORING your physiological, emotional, and mental systems to balance after experiencing a trauma trigger.
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Discover the top 10 Teacher Thinking Traps while learning how to RE-STORY stress and trauma triggers to produce insight and greater critical consciousness of the self and others.
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Explore the foundations of creating LOVING classrooms spaces based on the 6 qualities by bell hooks from her book: all about love (2000).
Teacher Restoration AS Social Justice Work
PART II
Module 8
Mindfulness Focus: "Another"-Awareness
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Learn how teacher "wellness is wisdom" and how personal well-being creates spaces of compassion and healing where another can feel seen and known.
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Discover how toxic stress and burnout produces the phenomenon of "bad othering" in the classroom setting, and learn strategic practices to reduce bias, explore your judgments, and see beyond, behind, and beneath challenging student behavior.
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Practice engaging the Infinite Well-Being ModelTM to leverage a "problem as a portal" to intentional cultivating core elements of social justice work: critical consciousness, commitment, and conviction and discover how mental health creates the conditions to fight racism, disrupt systems of oppression and neglect, and "freedom-dream" a new future where human beings are the center of our systems of learning.
Module Components
Each 30 minute training module engages the intellect, calms the mind, and restores balance to the body.
10 minute training video
5 minute guided audio or video meditation
10 minute guided gentle yoga practice
5 minute guided "put into your practice" reflection activity
Supplemental Materials Included:
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Related articles for additional reading,
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Additional "Invitations to Practice" to extend core concepts and mindfulness practices in the classroom and at home.​
