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Child Psychologists Joelle vanLent and Gillian Boudreau tackle topics related to schooling in our modern times including navigating impossible expectations and the power of curiosity in education, empowering educators to redefine success, overcoming fear and shame and their effects on school communities with open dialogue, and balancing high demands with compassion and understanding.
26 Episodes
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Gillian and Joelle do a deep dive into justice seeking behavior, which can present as someone treating others the way they were treated or seeking to make others feel like they are feeling. It turns out there are a lot of reasons why we might be inspired to do so. Our most helpful response in such situations is empathy, validation, and reassurance that their needs are as important as everyone else’s. An emphasis on the use of visual processing tools to find an alternate path...
Our lovely and talented guest week, Lauren Hough Williams, offers her expertise as an educator and expert in creating inclusive educational experiences for neurodivergent students. Lauren helps us see inclusion as a mindset that can manifest in a variety of ways. We discuss how to encourage sharing responsibility with the classroom teacher in this effort, as well as creating an environment in which thoughtful risk taking and creativity are supported. While there is no questi...
Gillian and Joelle talk about the tension that can emerge in professional teams that are in the midst of intense work and limited time for debrief and connection. There are some realistic and practical approaches that can help us effectively process our experiences without risking passing our stress on to our colleagues. For example, there is intentionality in how we use the brief pauses in our day that can shift our overall cognitive and emotional stress. There is also an a...
Joelle and Gillian discuss what they have learned about depression through their clinical practice. How can we be curious about our own responses to gain insights into how a depressed person is feeling without taking those on as our own? What strategies and approaches are most effective? Why is it almost as hard to support a depressed person as it is to be depressed? Is depression the enemy or another form of self-protection? Where do we find hope in each other ...
In today's episode Joelle and Gillian discuss the nature of childhood anxiety in general and how powerful it can be in creating physical symptoms and derailing learning. Below is Joelle's amazing one-pager including all we discuss in this episode, and more! Strategies for students who get stuck when feeling anxious. Joelle van Lent, Psy.D. 1.) Externalize the anxiety and align with the child against the anxiety. Ask the child to give anxiety a name and even draw a picture of what it...
This week Joelle and Gillian took a look at a pattern where students might learn how to use breaks out of the room to self regulate (great!) but then might become over-reliant on this one coping strategy, contributing to extra time out of the class and also perhaps getting in the way of opportunities for belonging and co-regulation in their classroom community (not so great!) Often our over reliance on breaks results in lowered stress tolerance and stamina. Often what the student ...
In this week's episode, Joelle and Gillian discuss how we tend to conceptualize, and what we tend to recommend for "breathtakingly inappropriate" behaviors and words that can come up in any classroom, but particularly on the middle school and high school level. We discuss the role of social media as having the capacity to bring folks down darker "rabbit holes" when they are mentally dissociated and somewhat vulnerable to assimilating information outside of their values, and the ways in ...
Gillian and Joelle discuss concepts related to healthy identity formation, belonging, and motivating behavior change. There are many nuances in this discussion, such as the difference between feeling ashamed and feeling shame, the role of guilt as a "rumble strip" keeping us on track with our values, and how our language can either motivate positive growth or cement a negative/hopeless self-concept. We reference Brene Brown- https://brenebrown.com/articles/2013/01/15/shame-v-guil...
The podcast welcomes our second guest, Aaron Lanou! Aaron is one of Gillian's longtime favorite colleagues and thought partners, and you can read all about his work here: In brief, Aaron worked as a special education teacher in New York City public schools for 10 years, working with students with autism and learning disabilities in inclusion and specialized settings, from kindergarten through high school. He went on to be the Director of Professional Development and Executive Dire...
Gillian and Joelle discuss their ever-evolving professional opinions on technology, social media, and video gaming use among elementary, middle, and high school students. While it may seem clear what schools should do in elementary and middle school, high school turns out to still be an area of debate. Joelle proposes that setting clear boundaries is easier than it may seem. Gillian offers nuance from neurodiversity-affirming practice and what she is learning from self-advoc...
Gillian and Joelle talk about the framework of PDA and how it can both reinforce approaches we have long-used very wisely, as well as inspire some new ways of understanding student responses and needs. As with any new concept, we can temporarily lose our sense of confidence and competence. The ideas offered by the PDA framework can also increase our depth of understanding of the capacity for our community to support all learners. Joelle and Gillian talk through some examples...
Gillian and Joelle chat about frequent suggestions that they make to school teams to support students who are strugging to cope effectively. They talk about the specific ways that we can approach a stressed person to help assure their needs will be met, validate their emotions, and move forward together successfully. The strategy of replacing “You need…” with “I need…” along with other ideas helps align with the child against the problem, invite them to an alternate approach, and ...
Gillian offers a version of the stance of curiosity that will guide our approaches with students who are non-speaking. Our culture is so reliant on spoken communication that we can have implicit bias that influences our social behavior to under-estimate the capacity of those who communicate via different channels. How can we change our mindset to presume the competence of non-speaking learners, while taking responsibility to adjust the pace, volume, and language that we use in our...
In this episode Joelle and Gillian talk about a strategy to support students who are seeking a connection from a teacher in which they have some kind of status or privilege that is atypical. This pattern often comes up among students who do not have the basic human need met of feeling special in some part of their lives. Sometimes this pattern comes up when students have family lives outside of school in which their parents are overwhelmed, the student is in foster care, or the st...
A liminal experience is a concept related to an "in between" time in which there is both familiarity and disruptive change. Joelle and Gillian talk about the impact of the many significant challenges of public schooling in the past five years including the COVID-19 pandemic, staffing shortages, budgetary changes, and the current political context. They talk through how to deal with all this, with the conclusions that: Grounding can be found in one’s values, core beliefs, and goals...
Gillian and Joelle explore the theme of being humans in helping professions, and especially in schools when it can be important to stay “on” and present as fully regulated when in front of students. When we are experiencing big emotions but can’t show them, this can contribute to something called “allostatic load,” or the stress response our bodies and brains have to try to address a problem and come back to homeostasis. Joelle and Gillian consider an “emotional parking lot” to re...
Gillian and Joelle talk about the importance of including scheduled time to play in the school routine. Recess is unstructured child directed play and offers students a time for movement, fresh air, social connection, creativity, and a break from responding to task demands. Elementary school students also have semi-structured child directed play in which the teacher creates stations in the classroom and children choose among play options. These times are often called “choice...
Joelle and Gillian draw on their years of conducting autism evaluations, and interpreting the results of these evaluations with children and families to share their perspective on disclosing this diagnostic information. Both note that despite the nervousness parents and psychologists both can feel before letting children know about an autism diagnosis, these conversations are typically somewhere between neutral and very positive for the children and adolescents receiving the information...
Gillian and Joelle talk about the skill of self-monitoring, which is an executive functioning skill in which one can self-evaluate and take a “bird's-eye view” to see how one’s emotions, thoughts, and actions are working to meet their goals. This goals is related to but unique from situational awareness, which is the skill of recognizing the focus, actions, and energy of a group of people. In both cases, the awareness of self and social context can inform how the person may need t...
Joelle and Gillian continue some “greatest hits” of school consultation, with two more interventions they keep finding themselves recommending in their travels this year. A “parking lot” is a tool that can help with impulsivity and calling out in the group. Having an idea, then sorting through whether it is a helpful idea for the group in the moment, and THEN figuring out how to “shelve” and remember it for later if it’s not a “right now’ thing are an incredibly complex set of men...
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This is a wise and resourceful conversation. It is full of helpful and practical information by two seasoned clinicians. I would strongly advise listening to all episodes for anyone that works in or with schools.