Diana Kennedy
Crying Kids Can’t Learn to Read:
How to Attend to the Socio-Emotional Needs of Your Students
and Still Teach Everything Else
Bio:
Diana Black Kennedy is an educational therapist in San Anselmo, California. She taught in the classroom for ten years, from second grade through high school, in rural Mississippi and urban and suburban California, in public and private school, to students with learning disabilities, gifted and talented students and everywhere in between. She holds a Certificate in Educational Therapy from UC Santa Cruz, a Master's Degree in Elementary Education from UC Berkeley, and a Master's Degree in English Literature from Indiana University. She has presented workshops at the Learning Disabilities Association of America International Conference, the Association of Educational Therapists National Conference, in a webinar by Learning Ally, and to many groups in and around the Bay Area. She is the Study Group Leader of the Association of Educational Therapists Marin and writes a blog about education at www.MindSparkLearning.com/blog.
Description:
Phonics. Phonemic awareness. Comprehension. Higher order thinking skills. As a teacher, in the classroom or in an office, you know what you need to teach to help your students succeed in school.
But, are your children too stressed to learn? Stress and negative emotions decrease the receptiveness of brains to learning, leaving our best-planned lessons bouncing off our students' Teflon brains. How does a busy teacher fit in support of a student's emotional life and still meet all the academic demands?
This session will present the neurobiology of stress and attachment teaching and explore the power gained from attending to the socio-emotional needs of students. It will go on to offer both a framework for thinking about integrating socio-emotional responsiveness into the reading and writing curriculum and several Monday-morning ready examples of lessons that integrate socio-emotional attunement with academic goals.
Objectives:
Participants will:
- Explain attachment teaching and why it is important for student learning
- Integrate attuned responses to students’ socio-emotional needs with academic lessons
- Apply a framework in order to prepare for predictable and unpredictable stressors in their students’ lives