Build a supportive and empathetic classroom with our professional development focused on social-emotional learning and essential life skills. Our sessions offer educators effective strategies to integrate these skills into daily instruction, promoting students' emotional intelligence, resilience, and interpersonal abilities. Create a nurturing environment where every student can thrive both academically and in life.
Empowering Adults
We can’t teach what we don’t know. Teachers, administrators, and support staff are most effective when they understand and develop their personal social-emotional capacities before addressing students. Every adult that interacts with a student is a stakeholder in that student’s success. Because the school setting includes many contexts—classrooms, hallways, cafeteria, playground, bus—fostering a healthy school climate and culture requires active engagement from all adults and students.
In this session, learners will:
Workshops can be delivered in English and Spanish for teachers or caregivers.
Infusing SEL
There has long been a focus in education on the whole child and student well-being. That focus gained increased attention recently due to the challenges posed by remote learning. This workshop provides educators and parents with easy-to-implement social-emotional learning (SEL) strategies to address and improve student well-being.
In this session, learners will:
Workshops can be delivered in English and Spanish for teachers or caregivers.
Making Mindfulness Work
Implement mindfulness practices in school and support students’ learning and growth.
In this session, learners will:
English Language Development
Social-emotional learning is critically important to language acquisition. English learners often experience additional stressors that add to the complexity of learning a new language and/or adjusting to a new environment.
In this session, learners will:
We can’t teach what we don’t know. Teachers, administrators, and support staff are most effective when they understand and develop their personal social-emotional capacities before addressing students. Every adult that interacts with a student is a stakeholder in that student’s success. Because the school setting includes many contexts—classrooms, hallways, cafeteria, playground, bus—fostering a healthy school climate and culture requires active engagement from all adults and students.
In this session, learners will:
Workshops can be delivered in English and Spanish for teachers or caregivers.
There has long been a focus in education on the whole child and student well-being. That focus gained increased attention recently due to the challenges posed by remote learning. This workshop provides educators and parents with easy-to-implement social-emotional learning (SEL) strategies to address and improve student well-being.
In this session, learners will:
Workshops can be delivered in English and Spanish for teachers or caregivers.
Implement mindfulness practices in school and support students’ learning and growth.
In this session, learners will:
Social-emotional learning is critically important to language acquisition. English learners often experience additional stressors that add to the complexity of learning a new language and/or adjusting to a new environment.
In this session, learners will:
Trisha DiFazio is an education consultant, speaker, and co-author of Social-Emotional Learning Starts with Us: Empowering Teachers to Support Students. She is a former classroom teacher and adjunct professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California (USC). Ms. DiFazio holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lake Forest College with a double concentration in English and Spanish, a Master of Arts in Teaching from National Louis University, an ESL Endorsement from Dominican University, and International TEFL Certification from the International Teaching Center in Madrid, Spain. Trisha was a contributing author for TCM’s Language Power: Building Language Proficiency. She is passionate about empowering teachers, parents, and students.
SV Academy
Allison Roeser, Master of Health Science (MHS) and Professional Certified Coach (PCC), is an SEL consultant and author for Teacher Created Materials (TCM). As an avid learner of mindfulness practices, Allison has seen firsthand the value of integrating self-awareness into professional and personal development. She has almost two decades of experience working with leaders in education, child welfare, and social change. With a Masters in Health Science from Johns Hopkins University, Allison’s thesis focused on increasing effective communication for early childhood educators in disadvantaged districts. Allison is currently the lead career success coach at SV Academy (voted one of the top education start-ups in 2020 by Fast Company) in addition to leading workshops and training courses for schools and Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), a program that advocates for foster care youth in San Francisco.
Erick Herrmann is an independent education consultant for Teacher Created Materials and the author of the Shell Education book Effective Strategies for Integrating Social Emotional Learning in Your Classroom. Erick has a high degree of expertise in social emotional learning as well as sheltered instruction, meeting the educational needs of multilingual learners, and integrating academic language and literacy instruction into the content areas at all grade levels. He has taught Spanish at the high school level, Spanish literacy and English Language Development at the elementary level and served as a title VII grant coordinator and teacher on special assignment (TOSA).
Austin Independent School District (AISD)
James Butler has been teaching kindergarten and prekindergarten since 2002. He has a Bachelor of Science in education and early childhood from Indiana’s Manchester University and an Master of Education in curriculum and instruction from Grand Canyon University. He is now the SEL (social-emotional learning) mindfulness specialist for the Austin Independent School District (AISD), working with teachers, staff, administrators, parents, and grades PreK–12 students. During the 2016–2017 school year, James helped implement a mindfulness curriculum in all 130 AISD campuses. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Lindsay Giroux specializes in coaching preschool teachers on implementing the Pyramid Model to promote social-emotional development and prevent challenging behavior. Published by Free Spirit Publishing, Lindsay is the author of Create an Emotion-Rich Classroom, which provides frameworks for planning and implementing strategies to support emotional development in children. Her professional interests include teacher training, social skill instruction, and inclusion of preschoolers with special needs.