We personalize social-emotional learning to address the challenges holding each child back
Our social-emotional approach focuses on preparing the child to respond in the moment, and is integrated into all aspects of program and curriculum design. As with all aspects of our programming, we approach this with a highly-individualized, problem-solving approach in which our goal is to give the child agency over their own social-emotional outcomes by gradually developing the scaffolded skills they need to do so.
We start by understanding what’s holding back this child’s social-emotional experiences
Rather than a “one-size-fits-all” approach, we personalize social-emotional programs for our students to address the specific challenges holding them back. For one child, this may be a challenge with picking up “hidden” social rules; for another, it may be maintaining the self-regulation required to follow them. Either way, just like in our work to understand and address a child’s learning differences, we start with a multi-disciplinary inquiry by our team of licensed therapists to understand what challenge is most interfering for this child, so we can work to address it.
We combine expertise in neurological regulation with a trauma-informed approach to empower students to understand their own learning, social & emotional experiences.
Our team integrates expertise in neurophysiological regulation with a trauma-informed approach to coach children in how to identify and gain agency over triggers ranging from prior academic trauma to ongoing learning differences to hidden neurophysiological events like sensory processing disorder and even immunological reactions. We partner with each student to help them learn to identify their own triggers, understand their autonomic and emotional reactions to them and then, gradually, to learn how to interrupt these cycles and choose how they want to respond to them in the moment.
We coach students in personalized strategies they can use to self-regulate for each of the triggers that they identify.
Once we have identified a “trigger” that consistently causes a child to dysregulate, work begins to coach the child in strategies they can use to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for those needs. This work is directed by our team of licensed therapists and diagnosticians and integrated into the classroom through co-taught “studio” sessions and ongoing, multidisciplinary collaborations so students can practice the real-world strategies in the settings where they need them most.
We help kids “connect the dots” through customized programs to fill gaps in their social cognition
Engaging in successful social interactions is actually a highly complex process, with lots of opportunities to go awry. At the base of it all is the assumption that children are intuitively picking up basic social rules, understanding how they apply in one context versus another, and efficiently cataloging social feedback so they can reapply it later. Unfortunately, for many kids this assumption is false.
Identifying and addressing social cognition gaps is an important part of our program for kids who struggle in these areas. From watching movie clips and shows emphasizing team work to making our literature selections, we present and discuss real world examples that allow our students to study social interactions just as one would any other academic discipline, tapping into their high analytical reasoning skills. In the moment, we use flowcharting and other techniques to help students tap into these “superpowers” to analytically dissect and take accountability for their own actions. We see that these approaches are particularly powerful for the unique population of kids that we serve in helping them to make sustained changes to their behaviors and social-emotional outcomes, in ways that translate across settings to facilitate their independence outside of school as well.
We foster a growth mindset by sharing the science behind it all with the students themselves.
We help students develop an authentic growth mindset by helping them to understand their challenges as “just science,” and the neuroscience of how and why our interventions work. In the process, students develop compassion and forgiveness towards themselves, and empathy for peers whose struggles may be very different from their own.
Ongoing neuropsychological and psychological services provide real-time identification and strategies to help students live their best lives.
Each of the students in our program meets with Dr. Mattis, our school’s Psychologist and Director of Programs and a recognized neuropsychologist who brings decades of experience as a clinician, researcher and academic. He brings this knowledge to his work with our students, identifying how discrepant skill gaps in a child’s neuropsychological profile and hidden neurophysiological events combine to impact a given child’s day to day experiences. He then collaborates with our licensed occupational and physical therapists to develop both short-term self-regulation strategies the child can use in the moment and long-term therapeutic interventions to reduce these obstacles.
We help kids find the courage to try new things by helping them understand their own objections
Twice exceptional kids and other students with uneven neuropsychological skills often become resistant to new tasks, or seek to avoid ones that aren’t directly within their areas of interest. We understand these behaviors as a logical defense mechanism that kids develop when they have widely divergent skills and haven’t been given a lens they can use to predict which tasks will be boringly easy and which will be impenetrably hard.
We understand task avoidance not as a “behavior” problem, but as evidence that the child has become hypervigilant to the possibility of failure—a common response to the challenges of going through life with both outlying strengths and outlying challenges. Rather than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ curriculum, we create highly-personalized strategies to address the specific issues driving the challenge for this child, leveraging close teacher relationships and a trauma-informed approach.
A community of kids who “get it”
All of our work to help children develop as humans is supported by a culture of not just accepting but celebrating one another’s differences. By educating students on the science of how children grow, think and feel, and on the range of neurophysiological differences, we provide the basis for true empathy towards one’s peers. Learning differences, self-regulation challenges and more become “just science,” taking the judgment out so kids can bring their best selves to the learning experience. We carefully foster a culture of sharing and supporting both our challenges and our victories, to harness the healing power of a safe and supportive peer group. Students are rewarded for celebrating each others’ progress towards what may be very different goals. This provides what will for many kids be a first experience of being able to safely acknowledge and receive support for their struggles within a peer community, fostering life-long skills in seeking and accepting support for our challenges.
This approach flows through our academic work as well. Our highly-individualized programs come together through socially-engaged learning. In fact, we specifically chose project-based learning because it is a collaborative learning model.
Each child’s personalized social-emotional program is a part of a broader, holistic approach to addressing each of the challenges holding that child back in their academic and life-lived experiences. Find out more about the other strategies we employ to empower each child’s growth.