Creating a Felt Sense of Safety for Youth: Makin’ It Happen partners with Emily Daniels of HERE This NOW to offer The Regulated Classroom© to Local Youth Serving Professionals

by | Mar 2, 2021 | Makin ’It Happen Together

Makin’ It Happen recently partnered with Emily Daniels, M.Ed., MBA, NCC, SEP™, who is the owner of HERE This NOW a boutique consulting firm based in Peterborough, NH, to bring her training in The Regulated Classroom© to professionals that work with youth in the region.

Over 40 professionals that work with youth in the state of New Hampshire attended three sessions in December and January. Professionals that attended range from Student Assistance Program Counselors, classroom teachers, youth-serving nonprofit leaders, School Social Workers, and many more. Attendees came from across the state of New Hampshire with the majority of attendees being from the Greater Manchester region.

Emily developed The Regulated Classroom© in order to offer those working with youth the tools and practices that cultivate a felt sense of safety in themselves and the youth they serve. The core message of The Regulated Classroom© is that “the essential priority in supporting a child’s social and emotional growth is safety – a felt sense of safety – in the home and school environment.” Emily goes on to express that “despite what many Social and Emotional Learning companies claim, creating safety and enhancing a student’s social and emotional growth is not best accomplished through explicit instruction and lesson plans. It’s not something that can be scheduled once or twice a week for forty minutes. In school, a felt sense of safety spontaneously emerges during authentic exchanges between individuals in the context of caring and attuned relationships with a physiologically regulated adult.

The Regulated Classroom: “Bottom-Up” Trauma-Informed Teaching© is a new tier 1 somatosensory and Polyvagal-informed approach to creating a safe and connected classroom environment. Through The Regulated Classroom©, those working with youth learn to strengthen their relationships with students and their capacity for co-regulation. The Regulated Classroom© is designed to deepen self-awareness about stress activation in the body. Increased capacity for physiological state regulation enables those working with youth to be better equipped to co-regulate with hypo- or hyper-aroused students and re-regulate their class/group as a whole.

The Regulated Classroom teaches educators or those that serve youth a set of tools and practices that enable collectively activating and settling the autonomic nervous system (ANS), creating a synchronized experience that makes way for social connection, cooperation, impulse control, and academic learning.

Makin’ It Happen strives to engage, educate and empower those working with youth in our region in order to cultivate environments that feel safe which we believe will result in the ultimate resilience of the youth and adults we serve. We believe that The Regulated Classroom© has helped achieve this goal.

Makin’ It Happen is also partnering with HERE this NOW as a sponsor for their spring conference (June 1-4th).  The conference is the 3rd Annual HTN Trauma-Responsive Schools Conference and the conference theme is “Establishing Felt Safety in Schools in the Prolonged Absence of Predictability.”  The conference focus is the Polyvagal Theory and how it applies to all facets of school.  More information can be found at www.herethisnow.org