UPPER & LOWER SCHOOLS
Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)
& Academic Supports
To promote the development of domain-specific skills, our SEL and academic support specialists meet individually with students — and push into or lead classes (1:1 support or group-led learning, including during lunch and recess) — in order to focus on the social-emotional and cognitive challenges particular to learning differences, giftedness, and twice-exceptionality. Our flexible menu of integrated and 1:1 empirically validated interventions — school psychologists, speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, Orton-Gillingham certified learning specialists, and gifted / special education-trained content area specialists — promote the development of our students' skills both in and beyond the classroom. Twice-exceptional students often display a statistical tendency toward perfectionism, but with the right mix of SEL and academic supports, our students are able to stay motivated about learning and school.
Our integrated and 1:1 empirically validated intervention options in learning therapy, speech, OT, school psychology, guidance counseling, and target academic strengths and challenges, as well as social-emotional learning (SEL), and they evolve, shift, and fade as your child develops self-regulated learning and increased independence.
Supports & Practitioners
SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGISTS
SPEECH THERAPISTS
LEARNING SPECIALISTS
OCCUPATIONAL
THERAPISTS
ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY
IN-SCHOOL TUTORING
SENSORY & MOVEMENT
BREAKS
WHAT IT ALL MEANS
Key Supports & Practices Defined
Lang's values coalesce into two primary frameworks for shaping student thinking and behavior: PBS and CPS (see below). All teachers are trained in both frameworks, so everything students do all day long at Lang are steeped in these growth mindset-oriented values.
POSITIVE BEHAVIORAL SUPPORTS (PBS)
As an instructional and classroom management approach, PBS assumes that children respond more productively and in a more lasting manner to positive reinforcement than to punishment. Practices in the PBS toolkit include targeted praise, planned ignoring, clear routines, teacher proximity, and silent signals between teacher and student.
COLLABORATIVE & PROACTIVE SOLUTIONS (CPS)
CPS is a treatment model and process created by Ross Greene, M.D. to help adults and children articulate and discuss together their concerns about an ongoing challenge, brainstorm potential solutions to this challenge, and agree on an initial approach to solving the "unsolved problem." The CPS framework helps adults see that "children do well when they can," and that challenging behavior has its roots in "lagging skills" rather than, for example, in the desire to seek negative attention. CPS is based on the premise that challenging behavior occurs when the expectations being placed on a child exceed the child’s capacity to respond adaptively. For children, the CPS process gives children a voice and a say in how their challenges are understood and addressed, and it models for them a constructive way to resolve conflict.
ZONES OF REGULATION (LOWER SCHOOL)
The Zones of Regulation is a curriculum geared toward helping students gain skills in consciously identifying their emotions and regulating their actions, which in turn leads to increased self-regulation and problem-solving skills.
DBT STEPS–A (UPPER SCHOOL)
DBT Skills In Schools: Skills Training for Emotional Problem Solving for Adolescents (DBT STEPS–A) is a social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum implemented in our middle and high schools through a weekly "Foundations" class taught by our school psychologists; these skills are reinforced for Upper School students through 1:1 school counseling sessions. DBT is designed to teach adolescents effective emotion regulation, decision making, and problem-solving skills.
ORGANIZATION, TIME MANAGEMENT, AND PLANNING (OTMP)
OTMP is an empirically based training program for students struggling with executive functions in relation to school-based organizational skills across four areas: managing materials, tracking assignments, time management, and long-term planning. Staff members embed elements of OTMP into students’ daily routines and content instruction; tools employed daily are check lists, specialized paper planners, and Google Classroom.
SCHOOL COUNSELING
Students receive at least 30 minutes of formal school counseling each week with one of our school psychologists. This typically is done individually in their assigned school psychologist’s office. However, school counseling can be offered in the classroom with a school psychologist pushing-in to provide individual support within a class setting or recess, or school psychologists may do multiple check-ins daily with certain students.