Stance of Curiosity
Child Psychologists Joelle vanLent and Gillian Boudreau tackle topics related to schooling in our modern times including navigating impossible expectations and the power of curiosity in education, empowering educators to redefine success, overcoming fear and shame and their effects on school communities with open dialogue, and balancing high demands with compassion and understanding.
Episodes
35 episodes
What is the spirit of inclusion and can we sometimes get in our own way of success?
Joelle and Gillian wade into the murky waters of creating a plan for inclusion for students that are not responding to our best and most creative efforts. Belonging, a sense of connection, and authentic engagement in experiences that are ...
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Season 4
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Episode 8
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44:22
Collaborative and Proactive Solutions: Can it work for even our toughest challenges such as truancy?
Gillian and Joelle sit alongside parents and educators to consider how to support a student who is chronically refusing school. What happens when the student realizes we cannot force them to go? What happens when we’ve done everythi...
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Season 4
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Episode 7
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46:55
Accommodation versus agenda in supporting PDA nervous systems and Beyond: A dynamic conversation on supporting our youth in moments of stress and overwhelm.
Is it possible that in our effort to mitigate overwhelm, we sometimes remove growth promoting opportunities and reduce healthy stress tolerance? Joelle and Gillian talk through their decades-long journey of understanding the experience of...
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Season 4
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Episode 6
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43:18
Re-Release: Who's Afraid of What? What to do when team interactions get dicey.
Hello, listeners! So far in season four Joelle and Gillian have experienced some illness and even some getting stuck in the tropics and as such we don't have a new episode for you this week, but we hope you will enjoy the re-release of on...
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48:14
Plans, Plans and More Plans!
Dedicated, creative, and hardworking school teams make all kinds of plans to support students. Those plans are created in hopes of inspiring regulation, engagement, and the development of new skills. Confusion can arise when the int...
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Season 4
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Episode 5
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40:56
What is Alexithymia and how might it be a helpful concept?
Joelle and Gillian explore together the connection between the outward expression of emotion, internal awareness of varied emotional states, and social interactions. How might the capacity to recognize and express emotions vary among thos...
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Season 4
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Episode 4
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41:20
Finding hope in the midst of chronic stress
Gillian and Joelle take a walk down memory lane to recall all of the helpful strategies and insights that we learned during the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic to consider how those approaches may help us now. Overwhelming, d...
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Season 4
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Episode 3
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41:39
"It's Not Your Fault!" What the movie Good Will Hunting has to teach us as far as the toll of offering support.
In today's episode, Joelle reflects on re-watching Good Will Hunting, the 1997 movie classic, on a recent flight. She and Gillian consider the themes highlighted in this film of the real psychological and energetic toll of supporting some...
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Season 4
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Episode 2
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42:32
"Fear Barfing" and "Parallel Process:" Putting words to the difficulty of working with parents.
Joelle and Gillian explore a concept from the world of psychotherapy and how it could play out between a child, their parent, and a school professional. When a child expresses their anxiety related to school demands to their parent, their...
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Season 4
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Episode 1
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40:07
Two wrongs don’t make a right but sometimes they do make us feel better. Why??
Gillian and Joelle do a deep dive into justice seeking behavior, which can present as someone treating others the way they were treated or seeking to make others feel like they are feeling. It turns out there are a lot of reasons why we m...
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Season 3
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Episode 8
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36:19
What really is inclusion and how do we know if we are pulling it off?
Our lovely and talented guest week, Lauren Hough Williams, offers her expertise as an educator and expert in creating inclusive educational experiences for neurodivergent students. Lauren helps us see inclusion as a mindset that can manif...
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Season 3
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Episode 7
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51:40
Productive Venting vs Fear Barfing: Strategies for managing the adult dynamic of working well with kids
Gillian and Joelle talk about the tension that can emerge in professional teams that are in the midst of intense work and limited time for debrief and connection. There are some realistic and practical approaches that can help us effectiv...
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Season 3
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Episode 6
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37:51
A Curious Look At Depression
Joelle and Gillian discuss what they have learned about depression through their clinical practice. How can we be curious about our own responses to gain insights into how a depressed person is feeling without taking those on as our own?...
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Season 3
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Episode 5
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44:59
What Do We Do With All These Anxious Kids At School?
In today's episode Joelle and Gillian discuss the nature of childhood anxiety in general and how powerful it can be in creating physical symptoms and derailing learning. Below is Joelle's amazing one-pager including all we discuss in this...
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Season 3
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Episode 4
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46:07
Break The Break Habit!
This week Joelle and Gillian took a look at a pattern where students might learn how to use breaks out of the room to self regulate (great!) but then might become over-reliant on this one coping strategy, contributing to extra time out of the c...
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Season 3
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Episode 3
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41:36
What do we do about sexualized behaviors and words in schools?
In this week's episode, Joelle and Gillian discuss how we tend to conceptualize, and what we tend to recommend for "breathtakingly inappropriate" behaviors and words that can come up in any classroom, but particularly on the middle school and h...
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Season 3
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Episode 2
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42:57
Is There A Role for Shame in Shaping Student Behavior?
Gillian and Joelle discuss concepts related to healthy identity formation, belonging, and motivating behavior change. There are many nuances in this discussion, such as the difference between feeling ashamed and feeling shame, the role of...
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Season 3
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Episode 1
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46:06
Who's Afraid of What? What to do when team interactions get dicey
Gilian shares her strategy of processing adult interactions that don’t go as expected, including at times conflict and defensiveness. Stepping back to consider how fear may be inspiring our responses and re-approaching the interactions wi...
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48:14
Social Humility: Replacing confusion with curiosity. Featuring Aaron Lanou!
The podcast welcomes our second guest, Aaron Lanou! Aaron is one of Gillian's longtime favorite colleagues and thought partners, and you can read all about his work here:In brief, Aaro...
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Season 2
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Episode 7
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55:18
What do we think about technology use among kids and teens now?
Gillian and Joelle discuss their ever-evolving professional opinions on technology, social media, and video gaming use among elementary, middle, and high school students. While it may seem clear what schools should do in elementary and mi...
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Season 2
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Episode 6
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42:52
Finding Hope in Simplicity and Connection. Featuring our first *guest!*
Joelle and Gillian welcome their first guest to the Podcast! Meet Roger, a teacher in the Maryland/DC area. Roger shares his approaches to supporting students in the context of heightened stress and certainty. He shares a stra...
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52:41
What is PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance/Persistent Drive for Autonomy) and is it a new thing?
Gillian and Joelle talk about the framework of PDA and how it can both reinforce approaches we have long-used very wisely, as well as inspire some new ways of understanding student responses and needs. As with any new concept, we can temp...
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Season 2
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Episode 5
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39:09
Common mistakes to avoid and interpersonal tweaks to try when fostering connection with stressed kids
Gillian and Joelle chat about frequent suggestions that they make to school teams to support students who are strugging to cope effectively. They talk about the specific ways that we can approach a stressed person to help assure their nee...
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Season 2
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Episode 4
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42:07
Staying Curious and Presuming Competence With Non-Speaking Learners
Gillian offers a version of the stance of curiosity that will guide our approaches with students who are non-speaking. Our culture is so reliant on spoken communication that we can have implicit bias that influences our social behavior to...
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Season 2
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Episode 3
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35:24