IBSC School Health and Well-Being Summit

Crescent School
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

April 5, 2019

Speakers

Denise Pope

A senior lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, Denise Pope specializes in student engagement, curriculum studies, qualitative research methods, and service learning. She co-founded Challenge Success, a research and intervention project that provides schools and families the tools they need to raise healthy, motivated students. Challenge Success is an expanded version of the SOS: Stressed-Out Students project that Pope founded and directed from 2003-08.

Her book “Doing School:” How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students garnered the Notable Book in Education from the American School Board Journal. Pope served as lead author of Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids and she also co-hosts the Stanford University SiriusXM radio show School’s In.

Pope lectures internationally on parenting techniques and pedagogical strategies to increase student health, engagement with learning, and integrity. She is a three-time recipient of the Stanford University School of Education Outstanding Teacher and Mentor Award, was honored with the 2012 Education Professor of the Year award, and won the Educators' Voice Award from the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences. Prior to teaching at Stanford, Pope taught high school English in Fremont, CA, and college composition and rhetoric courses at Santa Clara University.

The Well-Balanced Student

Hear the latest research on student health and well-being in K-12 schools, identify sources of distress and disengagement at your school, and discuss root causes, symptoms, and concrete strategies for improving student health and engagement. Collaborate, share, and report back on best practices that align with Challenge Success.

Michael Reichert

Michael Reichert has worked in a variety of clinical, school, community, and research settings for over 30 years. He currently serves as executive director of the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives, a research collaborative in a partnership with the University of Pennsylvania. He has led research teams that have conducted groundbreaking studies of boys’ education, resulting in presentations, publications, and professional development workshops for educators throughout the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.

He continues to serve as the supervising psychologist for The Haverford School (United States), an historic school for boys in Pennsylvania, where he has been since 1987 and where he founded one of the first research-based programs to explore boys’ lives.

Previously, he founded an urban youth development program in the tri-state region around Philadelphia, which was recognized as a “promising practice” in violence prevention by the state’s attorney general.

In clinical practice outside Philadelphia, he has long specialized in work with boys, men, and their families.

He has written numerous publications, including Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Lessons About What Works—and Why, I Can Learn From You: Boys as Relational Learners, and the forthcoming How to Raise a Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men.

The Power of Connection to Build Good Men

“How can we ensure that our sons are well prepared and well launched for the world they face?”

Michael Reichert begins with this question in a rigorous reconsideration of what we know and what we are missing when it comes to raising our sons. He guides us through decades of research and practice toward a new understanding of what boyhood should be and how caregivers and educators can prepare boys to be good men.

Reichert challenges age-old masculine conventions. He shows that stereotypes are ubiquitous and unconscious and influence how parents and educators regard boys from the youngest age. As an example, by asking growing boys to “toughen up,” conventional boyhood actually causes them to shut down and hide, fostering anger, isolation, and disrespectful or destructive behavior. Overall, the solution is not to force a way of being onto any boy, but instead to offer a safe place for them to grow and connect. Boys must be permitted to have conversations about feelings and emotions and know it is okay to experience pain.

There is much to be said about boyhood in 2018. While not a reaction to the #MeToo movement, political and cultural events make Reichert’s research and perspective even more relevant. Those in charge of boyhood — particularly parents and educators — have a unique opportunity to shift the cultural conversation. The world needs a new paradigm for what it means to raise a boy — one who is kind, respectful, healthy, and fundamentally sound rather than the models of abuse, casualty, and loss that seem to dominate the airwaves today. Boys themselves are eager for a reimagining of what it means to be a man.