This page hosts materials related to educator and school leader crisis recovery and renewal: how have, do, or might we resource ourselves and each other to regulate, restore, and repair after harm and rupture?
Quick Links to Key Sections on this Page
- SCRR Resources for Educator & School Leader Recovery & Renewal
- Resources from our “Mending Our Wounds,” our Winter and Summer Institutes for Educator Healing
- Videos and Accompanying Materials on Educator Healing
- Resources & Research from the Field: Educator and School Leader Recovery & Renewal
Below Oriana leads a “Metta” meditation practice – also known as loving kindness – which is something we can always offer ourselves as we mend our wounds. We hope that you might use these resources to ground, attune, and dream through recovery and into renewal.
SCRR Resources for Educator & School Leader Recovery & Renewal
What does recovery from, through, and after crises mean for educators? What might our school leaders be experiencing as individuals, as teams, and as a body of professionals navigating our collective overwhelm? Below, we provide a number of SCRR resources developed to support you in answering these questions.
Our Right to Grieve: Grief-Informed Recommendations and Resources for Healing-Centered & Racially-Just School Cultures (2023)
This resource highlights the consensually offered learnings gathered from “Right to Grieve,” a field-based program conducted in 2022.
Cultivating Conflict Culture After a Crisis (2023)
In this handout we offer practices and principles for school leaders to adopt both as individuals and as collective school cultures that move us through crisis recovery towards and into renewal.
Creating and Holding Space for Ourselves and Each Other After Student Death (2023)
This is designed for educators who wish to grow their skills, knowledge, and practice when it comes to talking openly about loss. We offer a series of reflection exercises, principles, and practices that will lead you toward collective healing.
Trauma-Informed COVID-19 Leadership Practice Guide For Recovery And Renewal (2021)
A practice guide to support your trauma-informed COVID-19 leadership to help your school communities towards recovery & renewal.
Listening to Voices from the Field: Educator Reflections on COVID (2021)
This resource highlights our learning from Listening Into Voices from the Field: Educator Reflections on COVID-Looking Back to Look Ahead (fueled by our June 2021 and August 2021 listening sessions) Graphic illustrations by Rio Holaday.
What Helps & What Harms Students’ Crises Recovery? Young Adult Reflective Listening Sessions (2021)
According to students, what helps and what harms recovery and renewal in the context of school crisis? Find out more from our Youth Move National and SCRR listening sessions.
Grief Leadership Recovery and Renewal After Wildfire: A Place to Process for Educators, School Mental Health Providers, and Youth/Young Adult Leaders and Allies (2023)
In times of crisis, coming together to make meaning of what we are each holding helps us show up for ourselves and for each other professionally. On September 14th, 2023, we gathered to explore grief leadership, to create space for providers to process the August 8th wildfires in Lahaina, Hawai’i, and to explore how those devastating fires affected people far beyond Maui. These are our learnings.
Resources from our “Mending Our Wounds,” our Winter and Summer Institutes for Educator Wellness
One of our project’s central tenets is to listen and learn from educators: what do they need to recover from a school crisis? How might we create spaces for educators to experience their own processing so that they might be more resourced and supported to support students and their colleagues? Each year since our project launched, we gather in the summer – before the school year – and winter – mid school year – with hundreds of community members (school based professionals including instructors, administrators, community-based organizations/ school partners, caregivers) for our Institutes for Educator Healing. Our virtual institutes focus on joy and healing in the context of the collective loss so many educators were and are holding.
“Mending Our Wounds” Educator Recovery & Renewal Institute Goals:
- Provide an opportunity for educators and other school professionals to learn new ways in which they can utilize ritual to recover and renew to support their community after a big thing (crisis event).
- Create a safe, generative, and regulating experience for educators, school-based mental health providers, and people who tend to the emotional well-being of youth.
- Engage participants in evidence based, art centered, ritual activities that positively impact the process of recovery and renewal after a crisis.
- Support participants in imagining new ways to incorporate ritual and art into their personal practice in crisis recovery
To meet these goals, we explore storytelling and coherent narrative construction, movement and embodiment, visual art, music, as well as shared and learned rituals that support recovery and renewal after and through school crises, and more. Our resources and recordings are organized by the evidenced based practices we believe are necessary for recovery and renewal.Below is the keynote address Dr. Stephanie Cariaga gave at our Summer 2021 Institute: “Mending Our Wounds: Recovering from School Crisis through Art and Ritual,” a space for educators to process the previous year and steady themselves for the space of the summer. Dr. Cariaga’s words anchor our vision for educator healing.
What We Learned from Mending Our Wounds Summer Institute & Our Summer Listening Sessions (2021)
In addition to the Summer 2021 Institute for Educators, we also hosted two Summer listening spaces for educators across the country to join, find each other, share their challenges and celebrations in accessing space to consider accessing recovery. 187 educators gathered virtually to interrupt isolation and experience the intimacy of reflecting on the 2020-2021 school year and to engage in creative outlets to foster healing and share their experiences.
We offer this summary of our learning in and from these spaces to center educator voices as our country contemplates creating the conditions and climates for our school crisis recovery to be possible.
There are two parts to this learning capture; each includes written summaries and a visual capture by Rio Holaday to facilitate capacity and sustainability of the learning. Whether you are a coach, consultant, school leader, researcher, scholar, activist, student-advocate, administrator, policy developer – we hope this capture provides the data helpful and needed to foster educator-centered school crisis recovery.
Part 1 (graphic illustration) highlights our learning from Mending Our Wounds: Recovering from School Crisis through Art & Ritual. Graphic illustrations by Rio Holaday.
Please note: Part 2 “Listening Into Voices from the Field: Educator Reflections on COVID-Looking Back to Look Ahead” can be found here.
Videos of SCRR Teachings and Materials on Educator Healing
Movement & Embodiment; Storytelling & Building Coherent Narratives; Self-Attuning Practices; Art-Based Therapeutics; and, Relational Leadership
Visit our Table of Contents below to see which materials are in each Recovery and Renewal Practice category.
Click on the “+” accordions to see the embedded videos and materials and the “-” to collapse a section.
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Thank you to all of our “Mending Our Wounds” SCRR Institutes for Educators Faculty
- Amber McZeal, Ph.D, Founder Decolonizing the Psyche
- Ana Rosa Najera, LCSW, Lumos Transforms
- Antoine Moore, MA, MPP
- Brittany Tanner and Ayesha Wakefield, Be Imaginative
- Candice Rose Valenzuela, MA
- Dulce Lopez, Psy.D
- Francine Ostrem, Ph.D, LMFT
- Jen Leland, MFT
- Jo Brownson, Radicle Root Collective
- Karla Broady, MA
- Leora Wolf-Prusan, Ed.D
- Liz Solis, MAT
- Michelle Mush Lee, MA, The Whole Story Group, and Youth Speaks
- Michelle Seijas, Ed.D
- Nnaemeka Ekwelum, Ed.M & Doctoral Candidate
- Noor Jones-Bey, Ph.D
- Oriana Ides, MA, LPCCI, PPS
- Patrick “Cam” Camangian, Ph. D, University of San Francisco
- Stephanie Cariaga, PhD, California State University, Dominguez Hills
- Shirley Johnson, LMFT, MA, Soulistic Wellness
- Tanya Suzuki, MS, PPS, The People’s Education Movement
- Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D, New York University
- Zeruiah Buchanan, Doctoral Candidate