1. STRESS MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES
Managing Students’ Emotional Demands
Introduce Self: School Psych. For 23 years-14 in SCSD. I have had a great deal of experience working with youth in trauma. I worked in Berkshire Farms Union Free School District at Berkshire Farm Center and Services for Youth, a residential center for teen boys placed by courts, elementary and high school levels in Lansingburgh School District in Troy, NY and upon entering SCSD I have worked at McCarthy and Salem Hyde Schools.
I am completing my first year on special assignment as Special Education School Improvement Specialist (SESIS) for the district.
I am passionate about childhood trauma, brain impact, and behavioral impact. Evidence continues to grow supporting the use of mindfulness, meditation, and yoga/exercise to combat trauma in children so they increase their capacity to problem solve, self-regulate, and focus on academic tasks, creating more successful students. Today I will show you some ways to use these techniques during the course of the busy school day.
I am going to ask that we go around the room, give our name, the school we are currently working in and position, and what motivated you to attend this session today.
Summer Summit 2017
Irastina Reid, Assistant Director of Special Education
Annette Gustafson, SESIS

2. OBJECTIVES Today you will explore and learn:
The Brain-Behavior Connection
Stress Reduction Strategies to Manage Students’ Emotional Demands Including:
Breathing Exercises to Calm and Energize
Yoga Poses for Relaxation and Stress Reduction
How to Create Calming Tools for Use in the Classroom
Go over objectives.
Folder Walk:
Also, before we get started, point out where bathrooms are and that if a break is needed please feel free to do so on their own. Norms for the day: 1-keep cell phone use to a minimum. If you must take a call, please move into the hallway as to not disrupt the flow of today since we only have one hour. 2-Please respect each others opinions and maintain an atmosphere of comfort and safety as we proceed through activities. When we are doing stretches and poses today, please only work to the capacity you feel comfortable. This is not a competition between you and your neighbor. The stretches and poses should be comfortable and enjoyable. 4-Keep an open mind-there are no magic wands to be given out today. Working with children who experience daily trauma is not easy and the activities need to be repeated consistently in conjunction with building a trusting relationship within the classroom.

3. ICEBREAKER: THE FEELINGS GAME
In a minute we will hand out bags of M&M’s. Please wait until everyone has one prior to opening them. For each color M&M we are asking that you share with your elbow partner a feeling associated with that color. The color and feeling are noted on the next slide.

4. THE FEELINGS GAME THE FEELINGS GAME
RED THING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL ANGRY
ORANGE THING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL AFRAID
YELLOW THING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL HAPPY
GREEN THING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL LOVED
BLUE THING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL SAD
BROWN THING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL PROUD
SHARE OUT IDEAS ON HOW YOU COULD MODIFY AND USE WITH STUDENTS-CAN USE VARIETY OF CANDIES THAT COME PACKAGED IN COLORS LIKE SKITTLES-CAN USE FOR GET TO KNOW YOU, FEELINGS, HOW TO HANDLE ANGER, ETC.

5. THE BRAIN BODY CONNECTION
Our overwhelming focus is to create student success. We know that many of our children face adversity and trauma daily. There is a huge connection between environment, brain development, and the way children behave. Trauma causes changes in brain structure and cognitive understanding of themselves, others, and their environment.
Let’s take a look at how this happens.

6. Amygdala is the caveman.
Filters information based on emotional state. Reaction without thought.
Fight/flight/freeze!
Our brain’s response to stress is linked to the amygdala which filters information based on our emotional state. When we are calm, the filter is open and allows information to flow to the prefrontal cortex where processing, organization, and focus occurs. However, when we are stressed out or feeling negative, the filter closes and gets processed right on spot-reaction without thought. This is our flight, fight or freeze mechanism that saved us from those prehistoric animals. Higher order thinking and judgment is shut down by anxiety and fear.
Eric Jensen, educator, brain expert, and author of Teaching With Poverty in Mind, notes the effect of stress on the brain: Neurobiological studies are showing that children who are neglected or abused have alarming alterations is brain development. The stress hormones produced in response to their trauma atrophy those areas that control emotional development.

7. Hippocampus is the cave.
Storage vault for memory and learning. Manages responses to fear and threats.
The hippocampus helps us to manage our response to fear and threats and is the storage vault for memory and learning. The way children remember events in their lives impacts their ability to cope with future stressors. Children will obsess over traumatic experiences and how the event could have happened differently. This, in turn, limits motivation to explore new ideas and patters of behavior. Memories of traumatic events can intrude into the child’s consciousness, causing stress reactions in inappropriate venues, such as the classroom. This may look like a child explodes or reacts without reason or trigger, however, something in the environment triggered the old memory. For example, if a student was witness to a parent being physically abused just as the family was sitting down to watch a movie with popcorn, the smell of popcorn could bring back the memory of the event, triggering a meltdown.
As a result, children experiencing trauma are always in a state of hypervigilance-they are hyper alert to every sound, movement-always trying to be ready for what threats might exist.

8. Prefrontal Cortex is the wise sage.
Highly evolved area of the brain-academics, decisions, attention, analysis, prediction, comprehension, interpretation.
The prefrontal cortex is the learning, reasoning, thinking center of the brain. This part of our brain controls decision making, focuses our attention, and allows us to learn to write, compute, analyze, predict, comprehend, and interpret. When children are constantly in stress, this area of the brain becomes closed off as they are always reacting. Their ability to focus and complete tasks, to problem solve and make good decisions, is compromised.

9. Connect
Please take out the handout, 7 Ways to Get a Happier Brain. Take about three to five minutes to read this handout to yourselves and share your thoughts with a partner at your table.
* Ask participants to share something they noted or they heard.

10. Brain and Behavior The Stressed Brain The Happy Brain
The Mindful Brain
So we now know the impacts of a stressed brain. However, the good news is we can retrain our brains and those of our students. When individuals are engaged in pleasurable activities, our brains get a rush of domapine. This neurotransmitter helps to open our amygdala’s filter and energize the prefrontal cortex. Even anticipating something pleasurable increases the dopamine flow.
Dopamine surges when students are fully engaged with learning and filled with positive feelings such as optimism, gratitude, hope and a sense of well-being. Classrooms are a wonderful place to increase dopamine! Activities which involve acts of kindness, collaboration, making choices and solving problems, engaging in physical activities, and engagement in creative outlets such as music, art, drama, and reading all increase dopamine.
Just a note that high risk behaviors also increase domapine-these can include drugs and alcohol, promiscuity, and fast driving. It is important to involve children at early ages in appropriate activities such as sports and music to keep them from engaging in these inappropriate high risk behaviors as they get older.
The Mindful Brain is one where students learn how their own brain functions and what to do to become healthy, optimal individuals. It is self-awareness and resiliency. Through teaching social-emotional strategies, we as educators teach students to become aware of their impulses, thoughts, feelings, behaviors and how to enhance their confidence, pleasure, and investment in their own learning.
Terms are taken from the Curriculum,
a product of The Hawn Foundation

11. Some of the most important lessons kids learn happen at a desk.
Some happen on a yoga mat.

12. PUTTING ZEN IN THE DAY
Practical Strategies to De-Stress and Regulate Children
We will now break into two groups. Group one will be over here with me. We will be practicing some mindful breathing exercises and calming yoga poses you can use with children during the course of the school day to help them destress and self-regulate. Group two will be with Irastina on the other side of the room. You will be creating two tools for your classroom that students can use along with the breathing exercises to help them stay calm. You will have two products to take with you before the end of this pd. Have participants line up by month of birth and then count off by twos. 1’s with me and 2’s with Irastina.

13. “The children who need love the most will always ask for it in the most unloving ways.”
Russel Barkley
There is a connection between environment, brain development, and the way children behave. We all have “those” days-days that we aren’t functioning or behaving at our best. Children are the same way, especially those who live in consistent stress. When you are ready to give up, remember what your most stressful day feels like and think about what it would be like to have your bodies in that kind of stress day in and day out. That is what many of our students are feeling on a daily basis. I know its hard to think that way when they are pushing your buttons and stressing you to the point of no return but those behaviors are their way of testing you to see if you are going to stick with them or give up. Consistency, trust, continuously teaching them how to calm down, acknowledging that their feelings are legitimate but there are better ways to deal with those feelings, and that you will hold them to high expectations not only academically but behaviorally as well are keys to change!