Creating Adoption Sensitive Classrooms

Course Description

This course is designed to help educators understand the many complex issues students who come from adoptive backgrounds face and how they can affect them in the classroom. While often regarded as a compassionate and beautiful way to form a family, it comes with challenges. The challenges some of these students may bring with them can have a major impact on the classroom and on that student’s learning.

This course will help educators go beyond the storybook idealism of adoption to help them understand the deeper issues facing these students. This course provides concrete information and strategies to support these students academically and socially-emotionally. Issues of childhood trauma (ACEs), race, gender and cultural consciousness are addressed.

Objectives

Teachers will be able to:

• Understand what adoption is and is not.
• Gain an understanding of how trauma may impact children who come from adoptive families.
• Learn strategies for identifying and managing trauma in the classroom.
• Understand the best methods for discipline and classroom management in support of adoptive students.
• Understand how special needs and disability may impact many adoptive students.
• Increase cultural sensitivity and sensitivity to adoptive issues in lesson planning.