Dear Principals & Teachers,

Dear
Schools,

Professional Development and In-Service Days

Teachers are well-versed in behavior management, classroom management, and social and emotional  management. However, what teachers are often uninformed about is how to target the specific strategies they use towards particular children’s needs. Using the lens of temperament theory, neurodevelopment, motivational styles, learning styles, and emotion regulation style theory, the Targeted Teaching workshops will revolutionize teachers’ understanding of their students. The workshops use Dr. Koslowitz’s patented “TARGET” system to help teachers directly target classroom management and motivational strategies to their students needs.
Targeted Teaching workshops have been presented at K-12 schools across the country and internationally, to rave reviews from participants and principals alike.

Most workshops are associated with optional parent and student extension workshops. For example, a workshop on teaching adolescents has an optional parent’s workshop, so that parents and the school can operate from a shared understanding. In addition, these workshops include an optional student extension, so that students can participate in a separate workshop that introduces them to the same skills. Dr. Koslowitz will frequently offer all three options at the same school, so that all stakeholders (teachers, parents, and students) can operate from a shared set of assumptions.

Topics include (but are not limited to):
Targeted Teaching: The SCIENCE of Teaching Adolescents
This workshop uses cutting edge research on adolescent brain development to help teachers design lessons targeted to fully engage adolescent learners.
Targeted Teaching: Experimenting With Conflict
This workshop proposes a revolutionary stance with regard to student conflict. Instead of viewing it as a problem, view it as a “failed experiment in human interaction.” Help students learn to experiment with conflict by figuring out what went wrong in the experiment, and how to fix it. Includes practical, reproducible materials as handouts.
Targeted Teaching: Bravery Beyond Bullying
If bullying starts out as a game, let’s learn how to play. In this workshop, teachers learn the five strategies to help students handle distressing interpersonal events, such as insults or social exclusion. Includes ready-to-use handouts and lessons that can be implemented the same day. This workshop can be presented with a companion parent and child workshop as well, so the entire school has a shared value around how to deal with social aggression.
Targeted Teaching: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Helping teachers, mentors, and ancillary service professionals understand the concept of boundaries and how to manage boundaries when mentoring adolescents or parents.
Targeted Teaching: Temperament Based Teaching
This is a “Basics For Beginners” workshop, an introduction to the concept of temperament theory and how to distinguish and work with student temperament. A great deal of practical, hands on pre-written lesson plans and social emotional learning activities are included with this workshop. This workshop will help the novice teacher navigate student temperament in the elementary classroom.
Targeted Teaching: The Four Most Common Diagnoses in the Elementary School Classroom
Helping teachers support children with the four most common psychological disorders – ADHD, Anxiety Disorders, Disruptive Disorders, and Mood Disorders – in the classroom
Targeted Teaching: Common Disorders of Adolescence
Helping teachers understand and support adolescents with psychological disorders such as PTSD, Major Depressive Disorder, Mood Disorders, Body Dysmorphic Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, and Obsessive and Compulsive Disorders
Targeted Teaching: The Disorganized/Distractible Child
Practical strategies, using the TARGET System, to help the child with executive dysfunction in the classroom.
Targeted Teaching: The Moody Child
Practical strategies and a step-by-step guide to helping a child who has intense moods or is “tuned out” of school and/or religious values
Targeted Teaching: The Highly Reactive Child
Our most requested workshop! Helping teachers understand the Highly Reactive profile, helping teachers deal with outbursts in the classroom, teaching self-regulation to Highly Reactive students, and intervening with the Highly Reactive student to de-escalate situations
Targeted Teaching: The Cautious Child
Practical, hands on workshop helping teachers understand anxiety and how to help gently “stretch” anxious students to use bravery skills in the classroom and peer group settings.
Focus on Friendship
Helping teachers and administrators understand friendship skills, how to foster friendship, how to help socially awkward children attain social skills, and how to create shared classroom values around inclusion. Includes many reproducible handouts and lessons for teachers to use in their classrooms.
Don’t Lose Your Marbles: Self-Regulation in the Elementary School Classroom
If teachers can help students learn to self-regulate, students can learn more effectively. This workshop helps teachers learn to integrate self-regulation skills (including the MARBLES curriculum) into the classroom. Teachers will learn to teach skills such as levels of intensity in communication, how to disagree respectfully, and how to manage strong emotion in the classroom.

Professional Development and In-Service Days : Administrators

Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):
Engaging the Challenging Parent: The CARING Approach for Working with Stressed Systems
    • This 2 hour interactive workshop will help administrators work with challenging parents and stressed family systems. Some situations are so overwhelming, it feels like any intervention is trying to empty to ocean with a teacup. How can principals engage the parents of a family like this? Sometimes, the parents are hostile or completely apathetic. Frequently, they are so overwhelmed with other concerns, their children simply fall through the cracks. How can school administrators work with parents like this?
    • The CARING approach focuses on six points of action: Connection, Assessment, Resourcing, Integration, Normalization, and Generation to gain compliance from these parents. We will first discuss the bio-psycho-social model for understanding child problem behavior. We will then focus on techniques for helping to create consensus with difficult parents, and how to co-opt their concerns so that they are on the same team as the school. Finally, we will work on including parents in collaborative assessment, response production, integrating the plan into the child’s day, normalizing the child’s needs and the school’s response, and generating a stable plan for the next steps.
Socially Effective and Effectively Social: Integrating Social and Emotional Learning Into the Curriculum
      • One of the most challenging areas that teachers and administrators face is dealing with the pre-curricular, hidden-curricular and non-curricular areas of children’s’ lives.
        • Pre-curricular areas include things like executive functioning skills, time management, task planning, and remaining focused on the lesson.
        • Hidden-curricular areas include social expectations, such as whole body listening, respect for authority, and conduct expectations.
        • Non-curricular areas include social skills, nonverbal communication, conflict amongst peers, friendship, and bullying.
      • Although these areas seem only tangentially related to the actual priority of educating children in curricular areas, these are also the areas that directly impact motivation and readiness to learn.
      • By creating a school culture that emphasizes social and emotional learning and pro-social behavioral expectation, administrators can avoid many of these problems, distractions, and disciplinary incidents. In addition, educating children to practice emotional intelligence is the single greatest gift a school can bestow. Emotional intelligence can only be learned by enacting it and practicing it in the real world.
First Do No Harm: Crisis Intervention in the Schools
    • It’s no secret – we live in a much scarier world than we used to. Children today are growing up knowledgeable about so many frightening topics, from divorce to terrorist attacks. Information that used to be withheld from children is pervasive today. In some ways, this is a good thing – a family dealing with a terminally ill child doesn’t have to hide it – but in some ways, children are more insecure.
    • If you are an administrator, eventually you will be dealing with a crisis situation. Either there will be a story that directly impacts children in your school – the death of a child’s parent, a car accident involving a child, etc, or children will come to school having heard about a devastating event, such as a terrorist attack.
    • At the same time that there has been a seismic shift in children’s ability to access frightening information, there has also been a shift in parental attitudes and capabilities. Many young parents today don’t have the proper tools to help their children understand frightening events. Increasingly, this responsibility falls on the school. Research tells us that the initial impression children receive about frightening events will shape their ability to cope with adversity for the rest of their lives. Principals and school administrative personnel are on the front lines of shaping the narrative about these events. In addition, children who are directly affected by traumatic events require support and specific types of accommodations from the school administration.

How Can Targeted Parenting Classes Help The Students In Your School?

If you’re like most principals, you are working with a group of mothers  who are sometimes misinformed about their children’s needs and how to help them. In particular, children who either have a mental health diagnosis, or are at-risk for developing one are challenging to parent. Wouldn’t it be nice if the mothers could get together and learn everything they need to know about their children in an efficient and effective manner? It can be frustrating and time-consuming to tell parents the same things over and over. Often, parents make similar mistakes, and don’t really take the school’s guidance until the situation is reaching unmanageable proportions.

Enter Targeted Parenting™.
Developed by Dr. Robyn Koslowitz during her fifteen year research and clinical career, Targeted Parenting™ classes exist specifically for issues like these.

Do Any of these Sound Familiar?

Below is just a sampling of the classes we offer. There’s also the Moody Child, the Bold Child, the Trauma Survivor Child…….and many more.

The Cautious Child

A shy second grader in desperate need of help, but her parents say she’s fine at home? A boy who is terrified when the teacher says anything “scary?” 

Targeted Parenting™: The Cautious Child will help these mothers learn how to work with the school to help them, before therapy is indicated.

The Highly Reactive Child

An aggressive preschool child whose parents are convinced would not act up with a different teacher? A child who “freaks out” when anything doesn’t go her way? 

Targeted Parenting™: The Highly Reactive Child will help these mothers learn to teach their Target Child to control his strong reactions and instinctive aggression, and will help her learn to work with, and not against, the school.

The Distractible Child

A disorganized/distractible fourth grader who is starting to lose friends because the other children get annoyed by the mess and his spaciness when he talks to them?

Targeted Parenting™: The Disorganized/Distractible Child helps parents create specific, structured plans to keep this type of child organized, teach him executive functions, and work collaboratively with the school.

The Socially Ineffective Child

The child who just doesn’t “get it.” The other children don’t like him or her, and the Socially Ineffective Child just doesn’t understand why. You don’t want to blame the victim, but this child does tend to alienate his or her peers. The parents blame the teacher, or the other children in the class.

Targeted Parenting™: Teaching Social Effectiveness helps parents understand the bases of social thinking and works on how to teach social skills at home and in collaboration with the school.

Confused about a thorny situation in your school?

Dr. Koslowitz offers in-person school consultative services.

Services include:
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Helping to write socially, emotionally, and developmentally informed policies, rules and procedures

Helping teachers learn to deal with challenging or confusing situations in their classrooms

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Mediation between parents and the school, helping to resolve any disagreement as to the best way for the school to support a particular child

School-wide social and emotional learning curriculum design, instructional support, and ongoing teacher mentoring

Ready To Make Positive & Lasting Changes In Your School?