Our social-emotional approach focuses on preparing the child to respond in the moment, and is integrated into all aspects of program and curriculum design. As with all aspects of our programming, we approach this with a highly-individualized, problem-solving approach in which our goal is to give the child agency over their own social-emotional outcomes by gradually developing the scaffolded skills they need to do so.
Engaging in successful social interactions is actually a highly complex process, with lots of opportunities to go awry. At the base of it all is the assumption that children are intuitively picking up basic social rules, understanding how they apply in one context versus another, and efficiently cataloging social feedback so they can reapply it later. Unfortunately, for many kids this assumption is false.
Identifying and addressing social cognition gaps is an important part of our program for kids who struggle in these areas. From watching movie clips and shows emphasizing team work to making our literature selections, we present and discuss real world examples that allow our students to study social interactions just as one would any other academic discipline, tapping into their high analytical reasoning skills. In the moment, we use flowcharting and other techniques to help students tap into these “superpowers” to analytically dissect and take accountability for their own actions. We see that these approaches are particularly powerful for the unique population of kids that we serve in helping them to make sustained changes to their behaviors and social-emotional outcomes, in ways that translate across settings to facilitate their independence outside of school as well.
Twice exceptional kids and other students with uneven neuropsychological skills often become resistant to new tasks, or seek to avoid ones that aren’t directly within their areas of interest. We understand these behaviors as a logical defense mechanism that kids develop when they have widely divergent skills and haven’t been given a lens they can use to predict which tasks will be boringly easy and which will be impenetrably hard.
We understand task avoidance not as a “behavior” problem, but as evidence that the child has become hypervigilant to the possibility of failure—a common response to the challenges of going through life with both outlying strengths and outlying challenges. Rather than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ curriculum, we create highly-personalized strategies to address the specific issues driving the challenge for this child, leveraging close teacher relationships and a trauma-informed approach.
All of our work to help children develop as humans is supported by a culture of not just accepting but celebrating one another’s differences. By educating students on the science of how children grow, think and feel, and on the range of neurophysiological differences, we provide the basis for true empathy towards one’s peers. Learning differences, self-regulation challenges and more become “just science,” taking the judgment out so kids can bring their best selves to the learning experience. We carefully foster a culture of sharing and supporting both our challenges and our victories, to harness the healing power of a safe and supportive peer group. Students are rewarded for celebrating each others’ progress towards what may be very different goals. This provides what will for many kids be a first experience of being able to safely acknowledge and receive support for their struggles within a peer community, fostering life-long skills in seeking and accepting support for our challenges.
This approach flows through our academic work as well. Our highly-individualized programs come together through socially-engaged learning. In fact, we specifically chose project-based learning because it is a collaborative learning model.
Each child’s personalized social-emotional program is a part of a broader, holistic approach to addressing each of the challenges holding that child back in their academic and life-lived experiences. Find out more about the other strategies we employ to empower each child’s growth.