Helping School Professionals Support Students

CEU Course Description

Part 1: School professionals are tasked with the goal of supporting students as they work toward both educational and personal goals. In order for students to be able to learn well, they need to feel safe. School professionals, including educators, often have access to a great deal of their students' personal information. It’s our job to make sure that our students feel safe despite this vulnerability. While we work to ensure that our students have a safe school experience, we also need to make sure that all students have access to the resources they need - perhaps particularly those students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, belong to marginalized communities, or have disabilities. Ultimately, being an ethical educator will require a wide array of efforts and fulfilled responsibilities. 

Part 2: In decades past, educators have said goodbye to outmoded forms of discipline—for example, corporal punishment. There are those who think that, soon, we’ll consider exclusionary types of discipline such as expulsions and suspensions in a similar light. Studies are confirming that exclusionary discipline doesn’t really help students; and Black students (along with other non-white individuals) tend to receive far more exclusionary discipline than their white peers. This means that these students miss out on far more instruction time than their peers do. This loss can be impossible to bounce back from, and tends to have issues that impact the rest of the students’ life. It’s time to do better. With restorative justice techniques and positive behavioral interventions, it’s possible to establish peaceful norms in your classroom and help provide your students with the support that they need.

Part 3: Research is telling us that one of the most important factors in a student’s educational experience is the support they find at home. Parental engagement is now widely considered to be of vital importance when working towards student success. In order to boost parental engagement, however, teachers and parents need to have a strong, meaningful, mutually-supportive relationship. This can be difficult to form and sustain.  

CEU Course Objectives

Part 1:

1. Review several of the federal regulations that protect a student’s educational experience
2. Discuss the importance of privacy protections for school age students
3. Posit how a school might mitigate confidentiality concerns
4. Brainstorm ways to work toward a more equitable academic environment as educators
5. Connect the concepts of empathy and equity in light of educator ethics, and discuss ways to help the members of an academic community practice empathy and equity