Building Healthy, Thriving Learning Communities (Private Event)

All SD79 invited staff are welcome. If you belong to SD79, please contact your principal for more information.

Description:

This seminar will support participants in understanding how we can begin to transform our classroom and school cultures into communities, not cliques. Communities are where you can be yourself in a culture of togetherness. Cliques are where you have to be like everyone else in order to be together. Thriving classrooms are classrooms that feel emotionally safe; therefore, thriving classrooms are where inclusivity in its purest form can begin to exist, not simply on paper but in lived experience. Inclusivity happens when diverse individuals have a space in which they can genuinely be themselves and receive the support they need to be able to do so. This can only happen in the presence of emotional safety as people need to feel safe enough to actually be who they are. They need to feel safe enough to get the support they need without being teased, safe enough to excel without being made fun of. Children need to feel safe enough to be different from one another without being ostracized. The development of such thriving learning communities is not accidental. As educators, we can take conscious steps to build and create thriving classrooms and schools.

This seminar will examine:

• How we can create emotional safety in our classrooms
• How we can support a culture of celebrating difference
• Inclusivity: what it is and what it isn’t
• Why you can’t teach kids to feel and what we can do instead to grow caring feelings and inclusive classrooms