Week 15

The 19th Annual Spring Conference on Problems of Adjustment in School Settings: A Prevention Programs Review

April 24th, 7-9 pm

Education Building - Room 22

This week I chose to attend an Ed Psych symposium on programs aimed to help with behavioral problems in the classroom. I wanted to go to this because I thought that it could be helpful for my teaching in the future. A lot of the times kids with behavioral problems and problems with self-regulation are labeled and then neglected; in this case, these programs are trying to find ways to include them into the classroom, while also taking a preventative step forward to make sure that incidents don't occur and that students are respecting themselves, their peers, and their teachers.

The front of our presentation pamphlets.

Unfortunately I didn't learn as much from the conference as I had hoped. It was set up a bit like speed dating, where at each table was a grad student in the EPSY program who had picked a preventative program to present about. I didn't think that this layout was very conducive to good presentations, because it was hard to hear the speaker and because you only learned a very very brief amount about the program since each presentation was one 15 minutes long. I ended up staying for 5 presentations. 

Another critique I have is that the grad students were presenting with these posters that were so crappily made that I was positive my 5 year old sister had made all of them. I feel like if you take the time to research something so deeply, you might want to take the extra 10 minutes to make a power point or at least make the poster on photoshop. That took away some of the validity of the research for me. Luckily each presenter had a hand out that looked much nicer than their posters did. I got most of my information from these.

Handouts for two of the presentations.

My favorite presentation was for a program called Project Happiness, which is a preventative and collaborative learning program aimed at kids in grades 5-12. It's completely free and can be accessed online by anyone who's interested in using it. This program focuses on collaborative exercises that teach empathy, teamwork, respect, and compassion. I really liked that it was a collaborative program, because I feel that learning self regulation comes from having lots of real world experience with conflict. Hearing stories from your peers about a situation you might be going through can make coping a bit easier and also spark connections between people. Project Happiness is a way of creating community in the school as well as helping kids find ways to deal with issues that don't involve harming themselves or others. I think that a program like this can be really beneficial to any school, not just kids with a lot of "at risk" students. Being able to communicate with others is a strong skill to have and can ease frustrations that might cause conflict.

 I kind of regret wasting my time with this conference, but it also sparked an interest that could really benefit my classroom in the future. I think I'm going to keep researching preventative programs so I can possibly implement one at my school in the future.