Teachers and school leaders often feel like they have to be “everything to everyone”.
 
Not only are educators expected to deliver high-quality instruction in traditional academic areas, they’re also expected to provide social-emotional support, vocational training, and everything in between.

When it comes to supporting mental health, this can be a tricky ethical line to walk when you’re trained as a teacher and not as a clinician. 

Additionally, school staff are constantly trying to manage their own mental health needs, which is a challenge when the public tends to be unforgiving. 

That’s why I invited Dr. Hayley Watson to episode 198 of De Facto Leaders to talk about how to help teachers support mental health in a way that falls within their scope. 

Dr. Hayley Watson is the founder and CEO of Open Parachute, a Tier 1 K-12 curriculum program that supports the mental health of students, teachers, and parents. She is also an author and Clinical Psychologist and holds a PhD in school bullying interventions. She has been creating and delivering programs for youth and practitioners across the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia for the past 20 years.

In this conversation, we discuss:

✅Special education accommodations feel like “extra” work for teachers: Embedding mental health into Tier 1 curriculum solves this problem.

✅Why talking about mental health in general education helps educate peers on diverse learning needs.

✅Destigmatizing mental health and giving youth the language to talk about self-regulation and self-care. 

✅Service delivery models: Why we need BOTH structured, explicit intervention and real-life practice in social-emotional curriculums.

You can learn more about Open Parachute and Dr. Watson’s mental health curriculum for schools on her website here: https://openparachuteschools.com/

Listen to her TEDx talk “Youth Mental Health is not as complicated as we make it out to be” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVZdMXK4kvk&t=2shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVZdMXK4kvk&t=2s

Connect with Dr. Watson on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-hayley-watson-2b249a16/

In this conversation, I mentioned this previous episode: EP 151: Does your system support your policy and your curriculum (with Jalita Johnson) here: https://drkarendudekbrannan.com/ep-151-does-your-system-support-your-policy-and-your-curriculum-with-jalita-johnson/

In this episode, I mention the School of Clinical Leadership, my program that helps related service providers develop a strategic plan for putting executive functioning support in place in collaboration with their school teams. You can learn more about that program here: https://drkarendudekbrannan.com/clinicalleadership

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