Culturally responsive approaches to building agency and connection /Enfoques culturalmente receptivos para construir agencia y conexión Written in collaboration with Zadeth Orama-Vega, school psychologist/ Escrito en colaboración con Zadeth Orama-Vega, Psicóloga escolar Each week I host Trauma Informed Office hours with educators from around the US, we share small (or…

Lesson plans for online instruction that promote agency and meaningful participation Parents and teachers are scrambling to create lessons and engage children in activities while they are out of school. The challenge is to make activities meaningful and affirming in a time of disruption and uncertainty. Trauma is defined by…

Suicide rates among children ages 10–16 has increased 70% in California in the last 10 years. This indicates tragically that something in the environment has changed dramatically, what could it be? Students who are suicidal enter a school psychologist’s office in a variety of ways. A friend may make a…

Like millions of others, I received the request from Facebook yesterday to reset my password in response to the report of a major hack. The prompt was a bit different than expected of a password change. Facebook took me through friends I recently added, posts I had made and things…

‘He doesn’t know his letters!’ I told the support teacher regarding Pax, a 7 year old that just entered our classroom. As an educational psychologist, I was a visiting teacher this past year at a public Montessori school in Oakland to gain perspective. The class was an active one, 30…

Have your child read 30 minutes a night. For some families this is a no brainer, their child reads so much they have to ask them to stop. For others it requires some scheduling and encouragement and it gets done. For at least 20% of parents whose child has difficulty reading, they might still be recovering from the last time they tried to enforce this. For those 20%, here are some ways to encourage reading without resorting to force: