Presentation by: Laurence Greeff, Gwen Thornburn
Session: E | Time: 10:45AM – 11:00AM | Location: Room 203
Gwen and I work at Langley Secondary in a school based program that works with students struggling with anxiety, depression and trauma.
We have designed our program at LSS to create a supportive and flexible learning environment to build their self esteem and address the trauma, anxiety and depression in their lives. All our students experience these mental health problems.
We have adjusted our teaching to focus on individualization and encouraging learning risks. A student coming into our “Focus Program” should feel emotionally safe, have acknowledgement and respect, and feel growth in their individual learning. Our classroom organization and teaching practice reflects these perspectives.
What we propose is to do a case study for the group. Have the group engage in determining behaviours that impinge on the classroom. (The CTF survey suggests one in four students struggle with mental health problems) Look at classroom behaviours that make the child’s experience unsuccessful in a classroom. We will explore with the group successful strategies and techniques to support the student.
In the process, we will show them the importance of working with and accessing current mental health resources in order to change learning behaviour. We want teachers in every setting to apply the strategies and techniques to help students struggling with mental health problems in their classroom and we want early career teachers to embrace a more expansive approach to teaching students with mental health issues.
We do request 2 hours for the workshop because it will require time to work through building a positive learning environment for those students struggling with anxiety, depression and trauma.
Abstract: 554