How Promoting Social-Emotional Learning Can Help Support Suicide Prevention

There is an old parable about a fishing village, where each day, the fishermen had to rescue residents from nearly drowning in the river downstream. Knowing this was not sustainable, the fishermen decided that instead of rescuing victims, they would discover how villagers were falling into the river in the first place. They ventured upstream to discover a dangerous overlook on a cliff where people were losing their footing and falling into the river. After building a protective barrier and safeguarding the edge, the fishermen no longer had to rescue drowning victims.

For the past 27 years, I have worked as an educator and later as a Coordinator of Health Education Programs for Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest school district in the nation. In that time, I’ve seen how educators and communities can form “protective barriers” to curb the devastating consequences of youth suicide. The idea of “upstreaming,” or identifying and mitigating the source of a crisis, has been the focus of my career as a teacher, advocate and school district administrator. All too often, after a crisis occurs, the common question arises: “Why didn’t someone do something?”

America is heading back-to-school, and students and teachers alike are preparing for an exciting, new year of learning ahead. While students are tackling their back-to-school supplies lists, teachers have their own preparation to do: locking in lessons, going over their curriculums and accessing the resources they need to best manage their classrooms.

Classroom management refers to the range of skills and techniques teachers use to keep students organized, focused, engaged, on task, and academically productive. Put simply, effective classroom-management strategies minimize student behaviors that impede learning and maximize behaviors that enhance it.

Everyone learns differently and at a different pace. With differentiated instruction tactics, such as flexible grouping, teachers can use these differences to better accelerate learning in the classroom.

 By using instructional grouping strategies, teachers can encourage students of similar or complementary levels to work together and collaborate on projects, discussions and daily assignments where students learn as a team. Here are some top tips to help you group students like a pro.

How this learning technique is helping teachers do the impossible.

As educators, we’re all in search of that “eureka moment” - that moment when a student fully grasps a new concept for the first time. These moments of discovery can change a student’s life forever. These moments are what we live for as educators. What if there was a way to maximize these eureka moments - to reach every student, and speak their learning language so they could understand new material and grasp new concepts faster and more fully?

In our last blog post, we provided an overview of how to setup your Google Admin console. This week, we're taking a look at how to use your Google Admin console to set homepages to open automatically for students.

Most of the time, Chromebooks will start with either a blank page or Google search when opened. While these are nice websites to have open, homepages can be much more useful with a little bit of extra setup.

The Possibilities

There are so many ways to use the startup page. Maybe you plan to show a school district’s homepage or an attendance roster in Google Docs? How about a light and fast learning game to get students' brains firing on all cylinders?