Acknowledging Our Humanity
Reimagining A Professional Development Plan that Supports Educator Emotional Wellness, Too
January 21, February 4, February 18, March 4 and March 18, 2025
12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. PT / 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. CT/ 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. ET
This event has passed.
- In the aftermath of the school crisis, how can we use professional development time wisely and sensitively?
- How might we address the emotional and psychological impact of the burdens placed upon schools, which is often undeserving of our young people (experiencing and witnessing the cycles of violence)?
- How might we, as professional development facilitators and designers, cultivate the culture within our school teams so that attending to our emotional landscape is safe and possible?
- How might your school’s professional development expand to support your staff’s varied experiences and needs as they hold students through and amidst crisis?
What is this?
Professional development (PD) spaces – whether an hour weekly or a couple of days every semester – have the opportunity to be experiences that are wellness-oriented and sensitive to the needs of the staff and team members. Often amid a crisis or the months or years of recovery after a big thing happens, we go “back to business as usual”. We might feel challenged with how to incorporate this big experience into our regular PDs.
In this community of practice, we acknowledge that a precursor to creating a trauma-informed and healing-centered school space is ensuring that the adults in the space have the emotional, cognitive, and relational capacity to address the shifting dynamics of each day.
Join this five-week community of practice to explore the power and potential of expanding our healing-centered engagement to include the way we approach professional development.
Humanizing the processes and practices included in professional development strengthens staff internal fortitude, engagement, and retention by increasing our emotional and psychological capacity, ultimately strengthening positive outcomes for students.
Why is this necessary for crisis work?
Now more than ever, experiences of burnout and vicarious trauma are on the rise given the intersectional experiences and stressors facing teachers and administrators. A key protective factor and critical element of renewal, amidst pervasive crisis, loss, and instability is having access to spaces and processes that support honest expression, witnessing, attuning and co-regulating, mourning, remembering, and connecting.
Through these efforts, we can establish, restore, and protect our sense of safety and the bandwidth to engage in social action efforts to challenge and transform the conditions that are causing us harm. But how to do that can be daunting, scary, and a big change in our conditioned responses and programming if we aren’t trained on how to create those kinds of spaces!
How might it feel?
Each week we will engage in text study, reflective inquiry and conversation to incorporate healing centered values and practices in professional development.
Through self and community reflection, we will disrupt our default and unnatural practices in schooling. Within this collaborative space, we will use a humanizing lens to enhance best practices within professional development such as peer consultancy, self and community assessment, goal setting, resourcing and active learning.
SESSION THEMES:
- January 21, 2025 – Naming Our Experiences
- February 4, 2025 – Exploring Our Current Staff Culutre
- February 18, 2025 – Identifying Humanizing Interventions
- March 4, 2025 – Intervening to Meet Our Vision
- March 18, 2025 – Reflecting Upon Our Impact
Learning Goals
- Develop skills to attune and attend to the emotional needs of school employees in the workplace.
- Create an emotional needs assessment to help identify what is being experienced by school teams (the collective).
- Create your own professional development plan including scope and sequence through a humanizing frame, responsive to the needs of the team and community.
Intended Audience
- School administrators, instructional leadership team members, teachers leaders, and anyone who is in charge of professional development spaces in or outside of school walls.
- Anyone who tends to support the goal setting, visioning, and implementation of school or organizational professional development or smaller planning teams, supervisors, or peer leaders.
- Anyone who works to address school culture, climate, or professional development for school staff and or/ students, especially after crises.
Lead Faculty
Oriana Ides (she/her), MA, APCC, PPS
SCRR Field Coach
Oriana Ides is the School Mental Health Training Specialist at CARS, who approaches healing the wounds of trauma and oppression as core elements of social justice. She has worked with young people across life course from elementary school to college, and has served as teacher-leader, school counselor, classroom educator and program director. She is committed to generating equity within school structures and policies by focusing on evidence-based mental health techniques and institutional design. Her work to forge a more just world is motivated by and dedicated to Amilca Ysabel Mouton Fuentes.
Noor Jones-Bey (she/hers), Ph.D
SCRR Guest Faculty
Noor Jones-Bey is a transdisciplinary educator, researcher and artist from the Bay Area, CA with over a decade of experience working within the field of education. As a scholar and practitioner deeply interested in the movement between theory and practice, Noor has extensive experience designing humanizing programming and curriculum that is responsive and relevant to the global and local communities she works within. Noor currently serves as an equity and design consultant, providing technical assistance to client serving professionals and organizations nationwide. Noor received an PhD in Urban Education from New York University, a M.A. in Sociology of Education from New York University and a B.A. in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Noor’s interests engage across disciplines of sociology, education, Black and Native studies, and visual culture to examine issues of liminality, identity, space and power as they relate to education. Her dissertation work examines intergenerational knowledge of Black womxn and girls navigating in and out of schools. In her spare time, she loves to cook, dance, run marathons, travel, and stir up good vibes.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Will closed captions be provided? Zoom generates automated captions and a transcript that participants can enable during the training.
- Will this offering be recorded? Yes.
- Is this offering eligible for Continuing Education (CEs)? No.
- Who can I contact if I have additional questions? Email us at scrr [at] cars-rp.org with “Acknowledging Our Humanity” in the subject line.
Resources (priming for participants)
- Humanizing Professional Development with Linda Darling Hammond
- Humanizing Pedagogy: Reinventing the Principles and Practices of Education as a Journey Toward Liberation
- Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, And Safety
- Grief Work: Being with and Moving Through Resistance to Change in Teacher Education
