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- Creative ways to get kids to thrive in school | Olympia Della Flora
Creative ways to get kids to thrive in school | Olympia Della Flora
To get young kids to thrive in school, we need to do more than teach them how to read and write -- we need to teach them how to manage their emotions, says educator Olympia Della Flora. In this practical talk, she shares creative tactics she used to help struggling, sometimes disruptive students -- things like stopping for brain breaks, singing songs and even doing yoga poses -- all with her existing budget and resources. "Small changes make huge differences, and it's possible to start right now ... You simply need smarter ways to think about using what you have, where you have it," she says.
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Video Transcript
This is an elementary school
in Columbus, Ohio.
And inside of this school
there was a student named D.
When D started school here
he was six years old:
cute as a button,
with a smile that brightened
the entire room.
But after a few months in school,
D became angry,
and that smile faded.
D began to do things like flip tables,
throw desks and chairs,
yell at teachers,
stand in windowsills,
run in and out of the classroom
and even running out of the school.
Sometimes these fits of anger would put
the entire school into lockdown mode
until D could get himself back together,
which could sometimes take over an hour.
No one in the school knew how to help D.
I know this because
I was the principal at this school.
And what I quickly and collectively
learned with my staff
was that this situation was more extreme
than anything we had ever
been trained for.
Every time that D lashed out,
I kept thinking to myself:
what did I miss during
my principal prep coursework?
What am I supposed to do
with a kid like D?
And how am I going to stop him
from impeding the learning
of all the other students?
And yet after we did everything
that we thought we knew,
such as talking to D
and taking away privileges
and parent phone calls home,
the only real option we had left to do
was to kick him out,
and I knew that would not help him.
This scenario is not unique to D.
Students all over the world
are struggling with their education.
And though we didn't come up
with a fail-safe solution,
we did come up with a simple idea:
that in order for kids like D
to not only survive in school
but to thrive,
we somehow had to figure out a way
to not only teach them
how to read and write
but also how to help them deal with
and manage their own emotions.
And in doing that,
we were able to move our school
from one of the lowest-performing schools
in the state of Ohio,
with an F rating,
all the way up to a C
in just a matter of a few years.
So it might sound obvious, right?
Of course teachers should be focused
on the emotional well-being of their kids.
But in reality,
