By Ashlyn Beck | Staff Writer
Two members of the Baylor School of Education received the Innovation in Teaching and Learning Award for organizing a school safety seminar for seniors entering the workforce.
The seminar was created due to demand from students who were unsure of how to handle the increasingly dangerous environment of the classroom, according to one of the award recipients
“We tied everything together… by talking about how we really need to focus on our strengths, how we can take the things that bring us the most joy and… let that flow into our classrooms and what we do in the classrooms,” Clark-Goff said.Lisa Osborne, associate director of assessment and professional development in the School of Education.
“Last year, we had a couple of things happen that sort of put the need for school safety and training our pre-service teachers about school safety and how to respond emerged,” Osborne said.
According to the School of Education website, the award was given to them at the annual Teacher Education Conference of the Consortium of State Organizations for Texas Teacher Education.
“There were some of our students who voiced concerns about [not knowing] what to do to keep [their] students safe,” Osborne said.
According to Osborne, the aftermath of local lockdowns and safety situations in schools gave education students the desire to know how to de-escalate dangerous situations and keep their students safe from threats.
“We really wanted to make sure that … the students that were targeted were our outgoing seniors … the ones that were graduating and about to embark on their careers in the classrooms,” Osborne said.
A representative from the Texas Center for School Safety came to share what precautions the Texas legislature requires to have in place for schools and teachers, Osborne said.
“She … gave them really good information on what questions they need to ask as they were moving into their own classrooms going to different school districts, [and], I think, empowered them with that information,” Osborne said.
Additionally, the seminar connected students with a representative from the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work in an effort to understand how to communicate with students with mental illness.
“We were able to bring in some of them to just talk about … students that are encountering trauma and how you can go ahead and make sure that you’re using best practices to help them calm in a situation,” Osborne said.
Students in the School of Education are in a unique spot as university students who also have real-world jobs and responsibilities, which creates a lot of anxiety and stress, according to Kylah Clark-Goff, the other award recipient and director of clinical experience and school-based partnership.
“Our students are living in this weird space. They’re college kids living an adult schedule. They have a foot in both worlds,” Clark-Goff said.
Clark-Goff and Osborne both said mental wellness tends to be a problem, specifically for education students and teachers, because they tend to take on the burdens of their students, often without receiving any additional mental support.
“One of the things … that we’re really focused on this year is not just the safety piece, but also the wellness piece. I think [one of] the things that we encounter, even anecdotally, that our teachers need to really feel more supported,” Osborne said.
According to Clark-Goff, teachers may see up to 150 students a day, and when each student has specific mental and spiritual needs, it can take a dramatic toll on the teacher.
“You take on the worries for those kids because you spend so much time with them. They feel like your family. And so when you’re sending this child home to a situation that you know is not healthy, you can’t help but take that to heart… so they’ve got to learn how to take care of themselves,” Clark-Goff said.
Osborne and Clark-Goff both said their ultimate goal was to help students utilize their strengths in the classroom without focusing on their differences. The seminar began with school safety, but Clark-Goff and Osborne agreed to add aspects as students expressed the need for them. However, they said the seminar was intended to help students do their jobs well.
“We tied everything together… by talking about how we really need to focus on our strengths, how we can take the things that bring us the most joy and… let that flow into our classrooms and what we do in the classrooms,” Clark-Goff said.
