Meditation Helps Lower Truancy and Suspensions Video Lecture | Understanding Social and Emotional Learning (SEL): Better Life - Personal Skills

I became principal of visitation Valley
Middle School in the fall of 1999
my first day here I heard noise outside
I looked out my window and there were
two students tearing the gate off the
hinges
to get into the yard to play basketball
when I got out to the yard I noticed
there were some young students playing
cops and robbers I walked up to a young
man and I said hey can I look at that
for a minute
and he said sure and he gave me his
father's 45
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in the 2002-2003 school year we had 41
murders occur in this neighborhood and
the students at this school either were
related to the persons who did the
shooting who were shot or were present
when the shooting took place so there
was a tremendous amount of stress and
anxiety and fear for the students stress
levels were so high that everyone was
really functioning at a disadvantage as
a result of the environment and it was
impacting their their psychological
well-being and many of the students
actually have not only ADHD but PTSD
they'll take a ride down any any value
or ghetto in America and you hear the
boom boxes you hear the shouting and
unfortunately too many of our kids have
been here gunfire I think that many
urban schools today are run like jails
because the kids are out of control
and that's because of the environment
they live in we're not running a jail
here we're running a school the research
is showing that stress is a major
problem in our educational system we
can't have an effective educational
system if we don't address the problem
of stress this impacts our
neurophysiological functioning in order
for kids to learn and be creative they
have to feel happy and safe so I needed
to start working on the social-emotional
end of things and I heard about quiet
time and we took a brave step forward
into a new world of teaching our
students how to meditate
head up eyes closed via time startsnow
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quiet time is the first activity of the
day when the students arrive and it's
also the last activity of the day before
they're dismissed the teacher rings a
bell and that starts the the quiet time
session there's a 12 minute time period
from when the teacher rings the first
bell until the teacher rings the second
Bell it's really completely silent in
the room students are meditating
well your meditated raise your hand
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I'm Jocelyn I am an eighth grader at
visitation Valley Middle School I live
on Sunnydale there was a day where the
people walking and then my dad heard
gunshots like I felt like I couldn't
move the meditation helped me was like
it was like a force that blocked what I
just experienced
we're giving the kids a coping mechanism
the problems that you have keep coming
except your ability to deal with them
changes
behaviorally you see a difference
especially it definitely saw a
correlation between their behavior and
being more manageable in class after
they started meditating
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if we continue to do what we've always
done we're always gonna get what we
always got is that good enough I don't
think it's good enough for the 21st
century we need to be the outliers to
try things that have never been tried
and see if they work in education our
job is to touch the future
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you
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