About Self-Reg
The ideas, strategies, and tools presented in this handbook are not the product of some academic team working in a cloistered laboratory but the fruit of all the work the authors have done with educators, health professionals, support specialists, and parents since Calm Alert and Learning came out—learning from and with them. The first generation of “Self-Reggers” began sharing stories—examples of what worked and what did not; why it was so important to work on all five of the domains of Self-Reg and not just the biological; how important it was to ground everything they were trying to do with their students in their own lives (their own stress awareness); and, maybe most importantly, how every teacher and every school sets out from a different starting point and has their own unique obstacles to overcome.
In other words, the core principle of individual differences applies to how we do Self-Reg. What works for one child, one class, or one school may not work for another, which is one of the big reasons why Self-Reg is not something that can be bought off the rack but has to be custom tailored. It is the principles that matter here: the embodied understanding of what students or we ourselves are thinking and feeling.
It was from experiences from teachers that the authors came up with the four Self-Reg school streams: Seeds, Sunrise, Quilt, and Haven (See second tab to learn more about the streams)
Each stream is designed to meet the expressed needs of teachers, students, and schools—those who are just starting out on their Self-Reg journey, those who have started and are eager to get to the next stage, and those who are farther along in their journey. Regardless of where one might be on this journey, many share some common underpinning areas of professional learning focus:
- reading the signs of excessive stress in children and ourselves;
- recognizing the different kinds of stressors, hidden and overt;
- developing effective techniques for reducing stress and enhancing stress awareness;
- distinguishing the differences between misbehaviour and stress behaviour;
- recognizing maladaptive modes of self-regulation for what they are;
- evolving and testing out ideas about what students can do to maximize the learning experience; and
- supporting all educators to enhance their own beneficial modes of self-regulation and maybe even enhance (or rediscover) the joy that inspired them to become teachers in the first place. It was precisely in order to meet these needs that we created this handbook—as much an essential step in our own Self-Reg journey as it will be, we hope, for every one of you.
An overview of the 7 chapters:
- Chapter 1 reviews Self-Reg and the science behind it
- Chapter 2 reviews the framework (five-domain model, five-practice method)
- Chapter 3 to 6 outline 4 streams or journeys that a class or school can take to implement SR (each of these chapters Include indicators teachers and principals can use to assess readiness, tools, strategies, scenarios, stories from the field)
- Chapter 7 addresses three common conditions teachers face in classrooms: anxiety, autism, ADHD, written by guest contributors (Drs. Jean Clinton—anxiety, Gerard Costa—autism, Heather Yang—ADHD)
