To help parents — and teachers — learn about the social-emotional learning program Conscious Discipline, MaryJane Hutchins and Cyndi Washington at Lamar Early Education Center have been awarded a $3,390 grant titled Parent Powers and Skills Academy from the Ector County ISD Education Foundation.
All together Lamar educators got four Education Foundation grants.
The Parent Powers and Skills Academy starts this month and lasts through the rest of the school year. Hutchins, who is principal at Lamar, said the academy was offered last year within the campus budget every month. Each month, they will talk about one of the powers and skills of Conscious Discipline.
Washington is the assistant principal.
“As a school we work on those, too. It’s not just with parents. We want parents to know what the kids are learning and what we’re learning as well,” Hutchins said.
She added that it has to start with the adults.
Conscious Discipline is based on three ideas — safety, relationships and problem solving, Hutchins said.
It also has three brain states — survival, emotional and executive functioning. There are also powers and skills.
Hutchins said powers are what adults use and the skills are used to help regulate students.
“It has to start with adults, because the first power, is perception, and the skill is composure. The power of perception allows us to make the choice, when a situation is crazy, we have the choice to see it as making us crazy, or to see it from a different perspective, maintain composure and then deal with the situation,” Hutchins said.
If the teacher is composed, the students will feel safe.
“It’s not what you know, it’s how you show up. … If I show up in my emotional state, then kids are not going to show up in their executive state, because they can’t be higher than the brain state that I’m in. And brain states are contagious, so if I’m in my emotional state, they’re going to be in their emotional state, or maybe their survival state, too. So it starts with the adults in the building,” Hutchins said.
Survival state characteristics are fight, flight, surrender, or freeze.
“It’s not just kids that get into survival state. Think of yourself in a traumatic, scary situation. How do you respond? Do you look for cover? Do you run away? … Only you know that,” Hutchins said.
“At the beginning of the year, we see that sometimes kids don’t feel safe yet. They’ll try to run away, so we have to help develop that felt sense of safety for them, so that those kinds of things don’t happen … All of that to say that we want to also help parents,” she added.
Students learn the acronym STAR, which means stop, take a deep breath and relax.
“That’s how we get out of that survival state is by doing some really deep, intentional belly breathing. Kids will go home and tell their parents, you need to be a STAR. Parents need to know what in the world they’re talking about, you know. That’s why we want to give parents the skills that we know work so well, and that’s why I wrote the grant,” Hutchins said.
The campus also has Feeling Buddies, which are stuffed characters, that kids can pick up when they have emotions such as happy, calm, angry, scared, anxious, frustrated, sad or disappointed.
She said you can see that Conscious Discipline works.
“We do know that. … We’re giving them skills to take with them. We’re teaching them the skill of using a big voice. ‘I don’t like it when you call me a name, call me by my name.’ Once we develop that skill in them, that’s a lifelong skill. … The skill of composure when we feel kind of out of control, knowing that we have a tool to breathe and to get ourselves regulated, I think that’s huge.
“I think it would help so much as they go up through school, because, teenagers don’t always have all the executive skills that they need to make great decisions. I’ve had several principals reach out to me because they know that we work on it very hard here. In fact, we have a Conscious Discipline coach on our campus with us today. … We pay for her to come twice a year … This is her week to be with us. She’s actually in the classrooms, coaching teachers and working with kids,” Hutchins said.
