Who is Miss Kendra?
You Are
In schools across the country, classrooms that implement Miss Kendra Programs have fewer disruptions, more time dedicated to learning, and improved climate.
Miss Kendra Programs equip teachers, counselors and other school personnel to build healthy, resilient schools for every child through open classroom conversations that weave together trauma-informed care, SEL and resiliency.
The program is easy to teach, takes minimal prep time, includes a full-year curriculum and students look forward to “Miss Kendra Time!”
A TEACHER’S JOURNEY
This is a transformational journey where real change happens
Over your career, you likely learned a slew of classroom management strategies—and have a pretty full toolbox of techniques as a result. Yet few of these tools and strategies help students to share their emotions, navigate their relationships, and unburden themselves of the traumas and worries in their lives and get at the root of the issues that stand in the way.
Creating a safe space for kids to share these burdens requires you to engage and guide students in open conversations.
By becoming Miss Kendra, you can create these safe spaces in an imaginative and playful way that allows you and the kids to enter into these difficult conversations. Your students will wait with anticipation for “Miss Kendra time” as a way to learn and share their opinions, feelings, thoughts and personal experiences.
Along your Miss Kendra journey, you’ll begin to shift the way that you see behavior so that you are not “fixing an issue,” but honoring it, addressing it and helping kids to unburden themselves and build lifelong skills.
You may also find a change in yourself as you reconnect with your inner guide and reaffirm your passion for your teaching. These are long-term systemic changes that not only impact you and the children in your classroom, but create a billowing web within the school, in families and in the community.
Miss Kendra Programs guide you along this journey with structured lesson plans and support so that your role of Miss Kendra doesn’t just start and end with the structured classroom time, it becomes a way of managing the classroom and rekindles your passion for teaching.
This is not just another tool in the toolbox. This is a transformational journey and real change happens along the way.
Miss Kendra Model
At its core, Miss Kendra Programs center on asking every child on a regular basis if they have experienced stressful events in order to identify problems early and strengthen their psychological immunity. For the child, this process consists of:
- Identifying core stressors using Miss Kendra’s list (a list of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that helps children realize that their reactions to relatively minor stressors derive from the important stressors in their lives);
- Communicating to the child the existence of a knowledgeable and caring listener – their teacher and Miss Kendra; and
- Gaining language about these concepts to achieve more cognitive control over the emotions that are evoked.
Through the imaginative and playful world of Miss Kendra, students explore their worries and traumas that interfere with their ability to learn and focus on their schoolwork. It is rooted in the core social emotional competencies set out by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL).
Each lesson supports one or more of these SEL skills and the Miss Kendra curriculum easily indicates which skills are being practiced.
TEACHERS SUPPORT MISS KENDRA PROGRAMS
to other teachers
TEACHER, PRINCIPAL & PARENT TESTIMONIALS
