Teachers learning new ways to help students

Teachers spend a lot of time with our kids. The teachers at Falls Valley Elementary school want to do more to help.

Thanks to a grant from the state’s Juvenile Corrective System, teachers are learning Restorative Justice Practices. Teachers spent a part of their day learning a new way to help their kids.

“It’s essentially about building relationships with kids, building connections with kids to support them in solving conflict. Also helping them build better relationships with their peers,” says Tina Orme, principal.

Some students may have trauma that prevents them from properly expressing themselves.

“Here at our school we have a lot of kids who have a lot emotional trauma in their life that they don’t know how to deal with and as a teacher we’re here to help them learn and sometimes that learning can’t happen when they’re so focused on things that are happening outside of what school is,” says Emily Thomas, teacher.

Which can lead to behavior problems like lashing out or shutting down.

“They’re not engaged, they’re not paying attention to what’s going on when we have students that are disruptive in the fact that they’re yelling, storming out of a classroom it disrupts the environment of the school and sometimes causes more trauma for other kids within the classroom,” says Thomas.

But they say with the proper training they can help those students.

“Rather than saying ‘Why did you do this?’ we ask questions like ‘What were you thinking at the time?’ or ‘How did that make you feel?'”

“Hear what they have to say and give them the time to be able to say it and we just need more of those strategies and using the right questions to really get down to the heart of the problem,” says Orme.

The teachers say they find the training helpful and are thankful for the opportunity.