Head-Heart Program
A pilot program underway at Palm Springs Middle School in Hialeah, Fla., is teaching at-risk youth techniques to calm their spirits and increase their ability to learn. The “Heart Smarts” program, designed by the Institute of HeartMath (Boulder Creek, Calif.), uses games and strategies such as “Freeze-Frame” to help students tap into positive feelings of the heart to redefine a potentially upsetting situation. Children participating in a “Freeze-Frame” session are first taught to “recognize a stressful feeling/experience and take a ‘time out’ — “Freeze-Frame” the feeling,” according to material from the Institute of HeartMath. Students then are encouraged to “shift the attention from the racing mind or disturbed emotions to the area around the heart,” writes the material. Next, they are asked to think about a “warm, pleasant, fun feeling,” which leads to tapping “heart intelligence” to find a better response to the original situation.
For example, one child drew a picture with the caption “Person calling me names.” In the next segment, the child drew a picture titled “My Birthday,” which activated positive feelings. The final picture was of the child walking away from the person calling him names: The caption read — “I can walk away and ignore him.”
“By shifting the focus of attention from the mind to the heart, you balance your perspective and don’t squander your
energy on people and events you can’t control,” explained Amelia Moreno, a Los Angeles public school counselor. “It is a simple, practical self-discipline, and quite spiritual,” she added. The Los Angeles public school system’s migrant education division has been using HeartMath for four years, writes the L.A. TIMES (Clary, 5/16).
Other school districts engaged in HeartMath programs include the Creighton School District (Phoenix, Ariz.), DeKalb County School System (Ga.), and the New Horizons Elementary School in Fremont, Calif. According to HeartMath, the program also has been used by some Fortune 500 Companies and was presented at the recent White House Conference on Early Childhood Development Learning.
The “Heart Smarts” program is based on the Institute’s published research and three HeartMath books: “Teaching Children to Love: 80 Games and Fun Activities for Raising Balanced Children; “The How To Book Of TEEN Self Discovery,” and “A Parenting Manual: Heart Hope for the Family,” all by Doc Lew Children. “Teen Self Discovery is an approved textbook in Calif. At the Palm Springs Middle School, 34 seventh-grade students participated in the pilot program with pre- and post-testing in 19 scales measuring attitude, behavior, achievement and interpersonal skills. According to material from the school, the students, who initially demonstrated risky behavior, depression and lack of motivation, showed dramatic improvement in 18 of the 19 scales after 16 hours of training in coping methods.
Parents of students in the pilot program also were encouraged to participate in training sessions. Over half of the
students brought one or more family members to a training workshop. While a pre-test found that only 40% of students tested said they had adequate family support, the percent of students stating they had adequate family support jumped to 72% after student and parent training in “Heart Smarts” techniques. Middle school students who participated in the program then were asked to help train students in a neighboring elementary school. Eighteen students were trained to teach 55 elementary at-risk students. Plans are underway to expand the cross-age program to 70 mentors and add another feeder school by next year.
From the introduction to “Teaching Children to Love:” “Research shows that the moment we are ‘upset’ emotionally, all neural action, learning, memory, cognition, problem solving, and so on, is adversely affected. Simply put, in a state of anxiety, anger or fear, the brain cannot make an appropriate response. … Developing emotional intelligence, or teaching children to love, is critical to plain survival as well as creative intelligence.”
Several books are cited in “Teaching Children to Love” that serve as resources, including: “Descarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Brain,” by Antonio R. Damasio; “Emotional Intelligence,” by Daniel Goleman; “Frames of Mind,” by Howard Gardner, and “Peak Learning,” by Ronald Gross. For more information on HeartMath seminars and teacher certification or any of the publications produced by HeartMath contact:
The Institute of HeartMath
P.O. Box 1463
14700 West Park Avenue
Boulder Creek; Calif. 95006
800/450-9111
Web site: http://www.heartmath.org
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