Education Commons^™

Creating Safe, Strength-Based Classrooms, Lori Desautels

Scholarship and Professional Work – Education

Schools are not machines. Schools are a network of human beings who feel, think, behave, and function within a human system that is alive and never static. Inside living systems, we need to feel safe and felt. This system is wired to thrive, even through difficult times. We're here for deep learning, which is profoundly relational, and connection to one another is a prerequisite for our collective emotional, social, spiritual, and cognitive growth and development.

Incentivizing Your Class: The Engagement-Based Classroom Management Model, Lori Desautels

Scholarship and Professional Work – Education

When I think of our most struggling and distracted students, I see how social pain and rejection often hijack their ability to be academically focused and successful. Optimal school performance requires positive emotional connections with those students that we want to prosper while feeling capable and competent.

When students and teachers feel this connection, we are all responding from the higher cortical regions of the brain, and our dopamine reward centers are activated by these feelings, these positive emotions. Our interactions with students are intimately connected with our own feelings and agendas. When our efforts in the classroom meet with …

The Key Of Connection, Lori Desautels

Scholarship and Professional Work – Education

Over the past few weeks, I have learned deeply. My students were paramount teachers as I was privileged to share a part of their interior worlds, their "private logic" that is a culmination of accumulated beliefs, experiences, values, thoughts and feelings. This inner world is often kept tucked away unless an environment is created that allows for feelings of safety and an untainted sense of belonging. When any child or adult enters into a space that accepts, inspires and affirms their "ever-changing personhood," we have finally found the key that unlocks the door to extravagant learning! What is that key? …