On October 10-11, McCormick Elementary School provided an insightful professional development opportunity for staff on Positive Behavioral Supports in the Classroom. For the second time this quarter, the school also created a special night for families to discuss strategies for positive behavior at home.
Last week’s training was led by Dr. Ben Springer, best-selling author, psychologist, and Director of the Family Education Center, who spent two days discussing how to fight volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (or VUCA) with positive emotions, engagement, resilience, mattering, and accomplishment (or PERMA).
Dr. Springer mixed practical examples for reaching students with humor and making sure educators don’t resort to negative reinforcement but use positive support. This, he mentioned, should be practiced for students and for our own benefit.
He explained that students have two main reasons to come to school, a sense of belonging and a sense of success or accomplishment. Both, he said, provide educators with plenty of opportunities to practice new ways of reaching students.
On September 10, McCormick Elementary School welcomed Dr. Antonio Fierro to the school to present his research on the cognitive effect that excessive phone and tablet use can have on our students.
We can mitigate any harm that might come from focusing on electronics, he explained, by having conversations with our children regularly. Engaging with your student can facilitate the learning process to discover how to properly pronounce words and use them in a sentence, as well as understanding syllables and even learning other languages.
Dr. Fierro is a former Texas State Teacher of the Year and is currently the Vice President of Professional Learning and Academics with the 95 Percent Group.
He provided a professional development workshop to help McCormick teachers create a classroom in which students can better understand language nuance and encourage connections between language and background knowledge.
To show their appreciation to our amazing Celtic families, the school gave out books and resources that matched the student’s grade level. These resources will help our parents and students learn and grow together as a family. The school also provided a copy of “GPS: Good Parenting Strategies: The No-Guilt Survival Guide for Parenting During the Pandemic and Beyond” by Dr. Ben Springer.
We’re very grateful to Dr. Springer, Dr. Fierro, and our dedicated school staff for making these opportunities possible for the McCormick community.
Recommend reading:
“Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work with Resilience, Creativity, and Connection—Now and in an Uncertain Future” by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin Seligman.
“Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
“Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.