Educators & Child Care Providers

The following areas are offered to teachers, other school professionals and childcare providers.

Creating a Trauma Sensitive Classroom

Designed for teachers and other school professionals.   This training explores the educational consequences of exposure to family violence and sexual trauma and how to create a compensatory school environment that will support learning and social development.

Based partly on the research of the Massachusetts Advocates for Children, the training explores:

• The emotional, social and academic consequences of witnessing domestic violence or experiencing child sexual assault
• Creating a trauma-sensitive classroom along with teaching strategies to compensate for negative impacts
• Identifying the child survivor or witness and sensitively handling disclosures
• Accessing supportive community resources
• Family dynamics and accountability of the protective vs. abusive parent
• Supporting parents to maximize protective factors and minimize negative factors

Trauma-sensitive strategies benefit the identified and non-identified survivor or witness. Because these strategies reflect best practices in teaching, however, all children in the classroom will benefit from the techniques.

Nurturing Pro-Social Behaviors in After-School Programs

Based on the Salmon Program as implemented by the Child & Family Agency of Southeast Connecticut, this training explores how the childcare provider can promote inter- and intra-personal skills for social emotional learning and social competence.

In the words of one of the programs’ developers, “The time when many children typically have the least adult supervision – immediately after school – is also the time they are the highest risk to act as perpetrators or become victims of antisocial behavior.”  This program addresses this risk through advancing pro-social behaviors.

Geared towards grades one through six, with some modification for use in pre-school settings, this training explores:

• The components of social competency
• Developmental impacts on learning
• The role of effective discipline within the model
• Caregiver self-analysis, and
• Best practices for implementation

Safe Families Safe Homes

This multi-session curriculum is a Connecticut Coalition of Domestic Violence (CCADV) modification of a longer curriculum developed by the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service, Glenwood Research and Tracey Cooley.

It is a multi-disciplinary sensitivity training in domestic violence for Headstart and other early daycare providers, mental health consultants, and Headstart parents. Representative topics include definitions of domestic violence, impact on children at different developmental stages, observation and documentation in the child care setting, dealing with difficult behaviors, working with families involved in domestic violence, responding to disclosures and safety planning.