As EARTHS’ Elementary School Counselor, it is my goal to help students achieve social, emotional, and academic success.  Young children are eager to learn how to deal with their anger, worry, negative self-talk, friendship issues, academic needs, etc..  They, more easily than adults and older children swap new more helpful coping skills for the ones that cause them problems.  It is truly a joy to see kids light up as they learn they can control the reactions they had thought uncontrollable.  It is for these reasons and others that I love working with children.  

 

I went away long ago to UC Santa Barbara intent on learning how the brain and the body work together to create our life experience.  I graduated with a BS in BioPsychology and then went on to earn my secondary teaching credential at Cal State Northridge.  I taught high school science for five years and then stayed home with my young children. While teaching I became interested in helping students learn how to deal with the social and emotional problems they faced and when my children became older I went back to school at Cal Lutheran and earned a Master’s degree in Marriage Family Therapy.  It was soon afterwards that I decided that what I really wanted was to help children become more successful in life earlier on.  A couple years later I received a counselor credential which allowed me follow my passion and become a school counselor. I absolutely love my job and feel completely fulfilled.  I am doing what I love to do.  

 

I have lived in the Conejo Valley for the past 23 years.  My four adult children have all attended Conejo Valley schools.  I love living in this area for its sense of community, the wonderful people and Conejo’s beautiful surroundings.  I enjoy riding my horse, tending to my chickens, gardening, traveling, kayaking, camping, reading, hiking and spending time with family and friends.  

 

 

Telling children that it is perfectly normal to sometimes fail at school can actually help them do better academically, according to newly published research.

The results of three experiments by French researchers are not definitive but they are intuitive; kids who don’t feel overwhelming pressure to do well all the time are more likely to feel free to explore, take academic chances and not fall apart if they make a mistake. The first experiment explains how the three were conducted: 111 sixth-graders were all given very difficult anagram problems. A sub-group of the students who were told that learning can be hard and that they should expect to sometimes fail did better on a test measuring working memory capacity than students in two other groups who did not have the same failure-is-okay discussion. Working memory capacity is said to be a good predictor of reading comprehension, problem solving and other aspects of academic achievement.

 

The findings are explained in article called “Improving Working Memory Efficiency by Reframing Metacognitive Interpretation of Task Difficulty,” by Frederique Autin and Jean-Claude Croizet of the University of Poitiers and the National Center for Scientific Research in Poitiers, France. The article was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by the American Psychological Association.

 

In a news release about the article, Autin was quoted as saying: “We focused on a widespread cultural belief that equates academic success with a high level of competence and failure with intellectual inferiority. By being obsessed with success, students are afraid to fail, so they are reluctant to take difficult steps to master new material. Acknowledging that difficulty is a crucial part of learning could stop a vicious circle in which difficulty creates feelings of incompetence that in turn disrupts learning.”

 

And Croize was quoted as saying, “People usually believe that academic achievement simply reflects students’ inherent academic ability, which can be difficult to change. But teachers and parents may be able to help students succeed just by changing the way in which the material is presented.”