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| From Risk to Resiliency |
| Satir's Self-Esteem System |
| Social Development Model |
| Bullying |
| Diversity in Your Classroom |
| What Works Ideas |
| Note: Click the links below to connect with the other pages in The Self-Esteem Resource Center. |
| Center Home Page |
| Little Kids Page |
| Big Kids Page |
| Parents Page |
| About Self-Esteem |
| Resource Center Info |
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| Parents are the single most important influence on a child's decision to use or not to use alcohol and other drugs (AOD). |
| Parents who talk frequently with their children about AOD have children who are half as likely to use them. |
| The number of parents who believe they are talking to their children about drugs far exceeds the number of young people who say their parents are doing so. |
| Parents of elementary-aged kids tend to think that AOD is a middle/high school issue. Remind them that the earlier they discuss important life topics with their children, the better. |
| Offer workshops about alcohol and other drugs and other messy topics. Include how and when parents should talk to their kids. Encourage the parents of your students to discuss the tough issues with their children. |
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| Check these books out: |
| Virginia Satir's The New Peoplemaking, Palo Alto, CA: Science & Behavior Books, Inc., 1988. |
| Emmy Werner & Ruth Smith's Overcoming the odds: High risk children from birth ..., New York: Cornell University Press, 1992. |
| Nan Henderson & Mike Milstein's Resiliency in Schools, Making It Happen ... Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc., 1996. |
| Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer's Raising Confident Girls - 100Tips, Cambridge, MA: Fisher Books, 2001. |
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| Visit the web sites below for useful info for you and your students. You will leave McCall Kids Dot Org and enter other websites from this page. . |
| Use the back button on your browser to return to this page. |
| This award winning National Youth Anti-Drug Media site offers a solid resource to community groups, parents, educators, and other adults working to prevent youth drug use. Pages in 6 languages are packed with useful info, tools, counsel, and materials. |
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| Created by the Nat. Center for Disease Prevention & Health Promotion to answer kids' questions on health issues and ways to make their bodies and minds healthier, stronger, safer. |
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| Information about feelings & changes, food and fitness, how your body works. More. |
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| Food safety, health, & other info for kids ages 9-12 from the Food & Drug Administration. |
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| This site has the most complete drug information on the web. Click the logo to link with the kids and teens page. |
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| This button links you with the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Other Drug Information. |
| Schools are much more than settings where kids master the 3 Rs. Schools are vital resources for children and youth to use in the development of their ability to handle adversity, solve problems, manage pressure, and learn and adapt other skills required for success in life. |
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You won't find too much about the 3 Rs on these pages, but you will find resources to help you help kids become more competent with their non-academic life skills. |
| And as kids grow skilled and competent in diverse areas of their lives, non-academic as well as academic, they strengthen their self-image. This page is about helping teachers helping kids helping themselves to self-esteem - about helping teachers helping kids to one of life's greatest insights: the realization that they are lovable, capable and important. | |
| From Risk to Resiliency: A Strength-Based Approach | |
| A growing body of research conducted over the past decade has generated a healthy shift away from deficit-based strategies based on children and youth at risk to strength-based strategies based on children and youth at promise. Studies clearly indicate protective factors that strengthen kids' healthy development. These protective factors serve as a strong base for classroom strategies that foster resiliency in all kids. | |
| "Resilient children develop a positive self-image...usually based in some skill or competency...School, that is, the adult models and not the bricks, is critical...Resiliency transcends geography, cultural and ethnic concerns and is more profound with greater influence on children’s and youths' lives than any combination of specific risk factors..." For more on what Emmy Werner, Mother of Resilency, and others have determined from their studies on resiliency, click here. |
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| Satir's Self-Esteem System | |
| Virginia Satir's insight, more than any other influence, has shaped this web center. Her self-esteem system offers a realistic approach and viable strategies to strengthen how individuals, families, and other groups think and feel about themselves. Using her model we can help ourselves and others. We can do more than talk about self-esteem - we can make healthy changes. | |
| All kids - that's all kids - have what they need to change and grow; they just need to learn how...Educational goals should include helping students develop creative coping skills (and to heal); not solve (and cure)... For more on Virginia Satir's systemic approach to healthy self-esteem, click here. | |
| Hawkins' Social Development Strategy | |
| Kids need a variety of opportunities in school to strengthen their self-esteem - to think and feel lovable, capable, and important. When they take advantage of these opportunities, they bond with school, behave well and are good citizens. In order to take advantage of opportunities, however, they need to develop skills and be consistently reinforced for making the effort. A healthy connection with an adult in school who can teach and coach these skills, as well as provide encouragement and validation, is a powerful strategy. Mentoring is the essence of Hawkins' Social Development Strategy. | |
| "...Children and youth need to be motivated through strong attachments and relationships with individuals who hold healthy beliefs and clear standards, individuals who are invested in action that adheres to these standards..." | |
| For more on The Social Development Strategy, click here. |
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| Bullying and Self-Esteem | |
| Bullying is an affront. Bullying deprives children of their right to attend a safe, caring school and obstructs children's learning, concentration and desire to go to school. Bullying influences the self-esteem of everyone in the school. Most children have been influenced by bullying in some manner as targets and witnesses. Kids, staff, and school culture are all victims in one way or another of this form of violence. | |
| Schoolyard bullying is a significant and pervasive problem that requires the attention of your student assistance system. Bullies, their targets, and witnesses need the help of caring educators. School policy and procedures, awareness and education programs, prevention initiatives and early intervention procedures and activities need to support efforts to stop bullying, reduce fear, and strengthen school safety. For more on bullying, click here. | |
| Fostering Diversity in Your Classroom | |
| Classroom diversity allows students and teachers of different origins and backgrounds to work and play together successfully. In addition, it offers them opportunity to value and take advantage of their differences. Differences, however, go beyond differences in color. Diversity exists in racially homogeneous settings. Diversity in the classroom is numbered by the number of individuals participating in that classroom, including the adults. People have different values, different personality styles, and are influenced by family traditions and gender issues. Efforts to improve attitudes and feelings toward one another require efforts to attend to people's differences, needs, characteristics, and wants. A productive, harmonious, efficient, and creative classroom is the idea, regardless how visually diverse that classroom may be. Continue reading. | |
| What Works Ideas | |
| • Get to know your players. Get the players to know the other players … and themselves. Try the following statement-completion exercise as the base for activities that allow all in the classroom to get to know themselves and one another: | |
| • I am … | • I wish I knew why … |
| • I wish I knew how … | • I wish I knew more about … |
| • I wish I knew when … | • I dream … |
| • I worry about … | • In 10 years I'd like to be … |
| • I like classes that … | • I don't like classes that … |
| Tailor this activity to your needs and style. Spread it over time. Play along with your students. The key is to use it in safe settings with participants' right to pass. It allows teachers to get to know their kids; the kids to know themselves, one another, and their teacher. Its purpose is to increase awareness and respect among all participants (including the teacher), promote understanding of their differences and similarities, decrease judgmental behavior, enhance acceptance and flexibilty. Its purpose is to strengthen the value of diversity. And strengthen individual and class self-esteem. | |
| • Special places foster special results. Teachers who take pains to make their classroom space special send the message to their students, "I love to teach and I care about you." We all have special places. Picture yours for a moment and think about why it is special to you. It is probably special because special things are likely to happen to and for you while you are there. | |
| Students entering classrooms where teachers have taken pains know why they are there and know what is expected of them. And they know this teacher cares. Special places foster special results. And this goes for middle and high school classrooms as well as those in primary schools. | |
| • Strengths Activity. This feel-good activity has been used successfully as a team-building activity during student assistance team training. You or many of your colleagues across Connecticut have found it a valuable exercise and some have planned to use it with their students. It will work easily in a cooperative learning team setting. It can also be used with an entire class, but would have to be accomplished over a period of a few days. | |
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Participants will: |
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| • Promote Optimism in Your Classroom 1. Attend to the words you and your students use to express thoughts. Accent the positive. Move from a pessimistic, passive view to an optimistic, active perspective. Pessimists tend to be victims. Optimists take action. |
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Pessimistic
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Optimistic
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| • I can't … | • I won't … |
| • I have to … | • I choose to … |
| • I should, ought … | • I will … I want to … |
| • … but … | • … and … |
| • They … | • Say who they is. |
| • Everyone / No one … | • Some people … |
| • Never … always … | • Sometimes … today … |
| • Everywhere … | • Here … there … at school … |
| 2. Promote optimism in the way you communicate with your students. Level with them. Reflect honesty, sincerity, genuineness, realism, and accuracy during your interaction. Some examples: | |
| Pessimistic | Optimistic |
| • You're so lazy. | • You can do more when you try. |
| • How many times do I have to tell you to throw the trash in the trash can? | • The trash. |
| • Do your work now or else! | • Would you like to do your work now or after school? (after lunch, recess …?) |
| • I've told you a million times not to hit other students. When will you learn? | • Do you remember our rule about hitting others? What did we decide? What can you do so that it won't happen again? |
| • Hurry up! The bell is about to ring and I want these papers handed in before class is out! | • It appears that this assignment is taking longer than I expected. Who needs more time? Do you want to finish it at home? (Offer choices for completion.) |
| • If I catch you running through the halls one more time, I'm sending you to the principal. | • No more running. Here are your choices: Either walk by yourself or I'll walk with you. Your choice. |
| 3. Provide opportunities for students to develop competencies. Challenge them to take risks. Help them organize and allow sufficient time for activities. Model how to handle mistakes. - Validate their right to make mistakes, how important mistakes are and how to learn from mistakes, losing, and failure. Try a what's-the-worst-that-can-happen approach. Teach them that success and failure are parts of the same learning and growing process, that they are worthy and valuable separate from their successes and failures. | |
| 4. Teach life skills, including how to organize, how to problem-solve, where to go when they need help, how to ask for things and improve other communication techniques, how to take necessary risks. | |
| 5. Provide guidance, not answers. Help kids develop creative coping skills, don't solve their problems for them. Coach process. | |
| 6. Provide choice and structure. Teach kids how to take control over things in their lives that they can take control over. Guide them to the insight of autonomy. | |
| 7. Maintain high expectations for all. Promote responsibility. Hold kids accountable. Be consistent - watch out for kids you like, sometimes teachers overlook things with students they like. Don't "enable." All students are responsible and accountable for their behavior - boys and girls alike. | |
| 8. Intervene with behavior that concerns you, not character and ability. Behavior is learned and can be relearned. Guard against criticizing girls for lack of ability and boys for behavior. Use your student assistance process when you need help. | |
| 9. Hold class meetings to foster conflict resolution, communication and other interpersonal skills. Build a sense of community and meaningful participation. Promote altruism. | |
| Designer's Note: This section on promoting optimism is adapted from notes and handouts from a workshop presented by Nancy Sharp-Light, 602 San Juan de Rio, Rio Rancho, NM at the 1996 Institute on Resiliency in Action held in Nashua, NH. | |
| Teachers! Why not click here and email us what's working in your classroom. Let's build a what's-working inventory right here. | |
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| Fostering Diversity in Your Classroom continued | |
| We need to understand ourselves as well as others. How many people know what differentiates them from others? How many know how history has influenced their lives and perceptions? How many understand the power of the messages they receive from their families and the media? Before we begin to understand and appreciate others, we need to begin to understand and appreciate ourselves. | |
| The reality is that Jews can't tell you all there is about Jewish people. Native Americans don't know everything about every tribe. No African-American can speak for all African-Americans. No woman can speak for all women and on and on. People can speak only of human experiences. We can teach and learn about history and accomplishments. We can teach and learn about many cultures. Ultimately, however, people want to be treated as individuals. They don't want to carry the baggage of generations. They don't want to be held accountable for what someone else thinks their group should do. They want to be themselves and, hopefully, they want you to be yourself. | |
| Try the "Get to Know Your Players" activity outlined in Other Helpful Topics on this page, a useful exercise for beginning to address diversity in your classroom. | |
| What Works Ideas continued | |
| The Strengths Activity continued These instructions apply to the activity's use within a cooperative learning team. Allow at least thirty minutes to complete. It is important that all teams finish the activity which means the smaller or more cohesive teams will complete it more quickly than the others. Teachers need to be comfortable with noise and allow some of the teams to be off task for a few minutes. It may take a little time for teams to get comfortable with the instructions. Introduction In a team setting, individual strengths are only important in how they help the team to accomplish its tasks. The importance of individuals (players) on teams is how they contribute and help the team. Individuals and their teammates should be aware of the strengths each brings to the team. Part One: Individual Activity 1. Distribute index cards and ask that players list the names of other team members present on one side of the card and next to each, write at least one usable strength that each of the others brings to the table. 2. Players then write their own names at the top of other side of the card and number 1 - 5 underneath. They then list five strengths they bring to the team. After allowing sufficient time to complete the list (some may struggle with this task), they check the three strengths most helpful to the team. Part Two: Team Activity 1. Players then go around the table and announce to the rest of the team the three strengths they bring to the table. 2. Other players then validate and add to their list. As team members validate or add to the speaker’s list, the only acceptable responses are • “Thank you,” or • “Thank you. I agree with you.” 3. To close, ask for responses to the activity. Discuss. Usually, player insights include: • Their discomfort with identifying and discussing those personal traits of which they are more or less proud (at least at the onset); • That the activity was a feel-good few minutes; • That teams have a potential wealth of resources— - the bigger the team, the greater the wealth, - the greater the diversity, the greater the wealth. |
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| Labelling kids as "at risk" places them at further risk. We tend to lower our expectations of kids identified as "at risk." Low expectations are a risk factor. When we expect kids to succeed, that is, when we maintain high expectations of all our kids, we provide them a protective factor. For more on risk and protective factors, click here. |
| Our approach will always be strength-based. We'll consider all kids as "at promise" and never use the term "at-risk." |
| Material presented on this page will not make kids read, write, or do math better. It will, however, help teachers foster resiliency in their kids. |
| A growing body of research makes it clear: Resilient kids work well, play well, love well, and expect well. |
| Resiliency enhances kids' ability to be present, to learn, and to succeed. Resilency enhances kids' self-esteem. |
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Zack's Story
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| When I was a kid, Zack used to ride around town on his beat-up bike with a snotty nose and rolled up pant-leg. You'd see him speeding all over the place. And for no reason you were aware of, he'd pull over, jump on you, and whack you pretty good. You gave Zack plenty of space - no way you wanted to be in this kid's path. Zack was trouble heading for big trouble. Zack was notorious. |
| Then it changed. |
| When he got to high school, you'd see him running all over town. It was the late 40s and running wasn't in then - not many ran just for the joy of it in the late 40s. But Zack did. |
| And could he run - fast and long. You stopped and watched him. You read about him in the papers. And you talked about him and his running. With pride. After all, Zack was a hometown kid and Zack was famous. |
| He became a world-class distance runner and then coached world-class runners. Later, he owned a successful sporting goods store. He became a respected athlete, coach, and businessman. |
| I visited with him the other day and kidded him about his bullying days and how afraid I was of him. |
| This is what he told me: |
| He had a paper route and on collection days if he didn't pay off a kid on Coleman Street, the kid would do a pretty good number on him. Zack worked all week delivering papers and on collection day this kid would take most of his earnings. Or else. Zack lived in fear and rage. And he took his rage out on others. |
| Then in high school he met a coach. And together, he turned it all around. |
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woody woodworth
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| Hurt people hurt people. |
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| Paradigms are rules that define boundaries and how to be successful within those boundaries. They tell us there is a game, what the game is, and how to play the game succesfully. |
| A paradigm shift is a new set of rules. |
| Paradigm paralysis results from paradigms too strongly held. |
| Paradigm pliancy is the best strategy in changing times. Purposefully seeking better ways of doing things fights the tendency to explain why things are impossible. |
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| Click for info: |
| A Look at Teens Today |
| A Guide to Internet Lingo |
| Pharming Parties |