Promising Practice Overview

The two workshops that I chose to participate in for Promising Practices were Promoting Resiliency in Kindergarten: How Mindfulness and PBIS can Work Together and Building Resiliency Through Play. When I originally picked these two workshops I thought they might be a little similar because they were both dealing with younger children, and I was wrong.  

The first workshop about being mindful and PBIS, and it was run by a counselor, a psychiatrist, and a kindergarten teacher who all work at the Henry Barnard Elementary School. In the first workshop about mindfulness I learned about how children aren’t always mindful of not only others, but themselves. The psychiatrist talked about different exercised that can be done to help a children become more mindful of themselves. One exercise she actually did with us was she rang a bell and we had to raise our hand when we couldn’t hear it anymore. She did this a second time, but this time we didn’t raise our hand when we couldn’t hear it. Instead we sat there until she started talking. This exercise made you sit there and think about how fast were you breathing and how you were feeling that day. This could be connected to Kristoff because the institution of education is teaching children how to be mindful of themselves and then learn how to be mindful of others. This will help them as they grow to recognize things such as bullying. While doing this exercise it made me feel more aware of myself on the inside. I learned that PBIS means positive behavior intervention and support. This technique is used as a discipline approach when dealing with behavior issues. Another thing I learned was that children need four positive interactions for every one interaction. If children receive too many negative interactions it can affect the way they see themselves and how they learn.

In the second workshop about Building Resiliency Through Play. The first thing I noticed was that the instructor started out by calling all of us friends. I found this interesting because last year when I was a preschool teacher before the children even knew each other we would refer to them as our friends and each other’s friends. For introductions we started out by doing different kinds of handshakes with one another. I can be really shy, so this felt extremely awkward I’m pretty sure for all of us. After our crazy handshakes we split up into groups. Some of us played Jenga, some people tossed stuffed animals, a few people played operation, and the group I was in was called builders and bulldozers. The object of my game was that ½ of us would build 3 story block stacks while the other ½ of us got to knock them down without physically following the builders. As some of the other games ended they became part of our game splitting up into builders and bulldozers. At first the new people didn’t know exactly what was going on. This could easily be related to Delpit because they had no idea what the rules and codes of power were for this game. In the beginning the new students seemed lost as to what they were doing because some of the buildings were 5 or 6 blocks high, and some of the bulldozers were following the builders. Once we told them about the rules they caught on and became part of the group and following the rules.  After everyone was settled into the game we all took turns being both jobs. While playing this game I became very protective of the buildings I was creating, but when I was a bulldozer all I wanted to do was knock as many buildings down as I could. While I was a bulldozer can be connected to our reading about Johnson and the position of having power. I had the power to knock down as many buildings as I could without anyone stopping me. It became so competitive between the two groups; you could feel it in the air. Once we were done playing the games the instructor asked us how we felt playing these games. A lot of answers were competitive, disappointment, protective, and aggravated. This was definitely an excellent way of showing adults how children can feel when they are playing with new friends in a new environment. While looking at websites a lot of them were from a parents perspective on how to teach a child to be resilient in general. They had some great ideas on how to teach a child about their strengths and techniques on how to achieve their goals.