THE THRIVING CLASSROOM

This session introduces participants to foundational content for their journey through several sessions. We recommend this session for groups that are booking 3 or more Thriving Classroom sessions.

This session explores what it means to belong and provides techniques and activities for creating safe space and facilitating connections within a group. Participants will experience the concepts firsthand as they participate in an intentional progression of Outward Bound activities that promote belonging.

This follow-up to Facilitating Belonging: Exploring the Power of Connection prompts participants to look more deeply at how they can help their students develop a sense of belonging.  Drawing from participant’s personal experiences, research, and Outward Bound methodology, this session prepares educators to take a comprehensive approach to belonging in their classrooms.

When Outward Bound takes students into a new environment, whether it’s a ropes course or a remote forest, we utilize structure to help students feel safe and open to learning. With brain science as a guide, participants will discover how Outward Bound’s approach to structure can help them create supportive learning environments in their classrooms. This sessions pairs with "Implementing Structure: Practices for success "

This session moves from theory to practice, giving participants the opportunity to examine their beliefs about structure and tangible practices to use in their classrooms.  Participants will leave with a plan for creating an optimal learning environment by using structure to help students feel safe and connected. This session pairs with "The Science of Structure: Designing a supportive environment".

This session prepares teachers to promote student engagement and teach social-emotional development skills using games and activities.  Expert Outward Bound facilitators will model activities participants can use in their educational environments and share tips and techniques for designing and facilitating effective learning experiences.  

At Outward Bound, social-emotional skills are taught explicitly, and they are also woven into the fabric of the program.  As students go about daily tasks, travel, play, and explore, our instructors implement practices that support their social and emotional growth.  This session defines eight key practices and gives educators a path to supporting social-emotional skill development in their own classroom. 

It’s been said that instructing is the art of asking questions. Questions are what make an experience, brief or long, into more than merely a happening. Not all questions are created equal. This session helps to identify reasons for inquiry, patterns in questioning, and methods for devising questions.  Participants will develop questions that engage, challenge and lead to deeper learning and awareness.  

Good learning is sticky! Sticky is not about answers, and it is neither fast nor efficient. It is about productive struggle and meaning making, most often connecting in conversation with other people. Promoting Discussion helps us to create a culture of back and forth dialogue. It provides methods for facilitation and practice to help with both planned and improvised discussion. Discussion promotes and can even become its own social-emotional skill.  

This session is a broad overview of resilience, trauma, and the behaviors that students exhibit when they become dysregulated. The session covers the learning environment, adult skills, and strategies that can promote self-regulation for students.

Note, this is a full day training.

In this final session, participants reflect on the variety of approaches to social-emotional development they have explored in The Thriving Classroom and make tangible plans for implementing practices to engage and support the learners in their classrooms and support students’ social and emotional needs in their classrooms.