Social Emotional Learning (SEL) has become a framework that many schools are using to bolster students' academic achievements as well as their social and emotional skills. Teaching SEL in the context of comprehensive sexuality education can help young people develop the understanding and skills needed to navigate healthy relationships and healthy sexuality throughout their lives.
Far too often, masculine expectations lead those who identify as male to engage in harmful behaviors, including high risk sexual behaviors. Educators, youth workers, and other caring adults frequently see the negative impact of these expectations and struggle to reach male identified folks who are unwilling to seek out and utilize health care services and other support networks.
This full-day training is for educators who are newly tapped to teach sex education to teach them the necessary foundational skills. We will cover group rights, setting the classroom tone, managing potential challenges, establishing appropriate boundaries, and exploring personal values as they relate to teaching about sexuality. Participants will leave this training with an increase in knowledge, skills, and comfort to successfully teach sex ed. Registration link here.
Unplanned pregnancies are challenging for any population, but particularly for adolescents. When dealing with issues like pregnancy and abortion, teens are often denied the tools to make informed and autonomous decisions. This training will work with participants to identify and set aside individual judgments in order to provide unbiased support to pregnant adolescents. The training will also cover mandatory parental involvement laws, judicial bypass, and how to help minors navigate the judicial bypass system.
In this training, participants will:
LGBTQIA+ students have the right to a safe and healthy learning experience in the state of Michigan. Students and educators, however, are often unaware of these rights. In this training, participants will identify and state the implications of key legal and policy issues affecting LGBTQIA+ students and safe school environments in Michigan.
In this training, participants will:
Even within justice-oriented spaces, fatphobia, a system of oppression, is frequently normalized and ignored. Due to diet culture and body surveillance under the guise of public health, we are not often given the space to discuss liberation from fatphobia.
Many LGBTQIA+ youth thrive in school, relationships, and their communities, but it is important to recognize that LGBTQIA+ youth are also at high risk for experiencing violence and bullying and have disproportionately high rates of unintended pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, depression, and substance abuse.
This training will walk participants through current Michigan law and policy as it relates to sex education in K-12 schools. We will review content requirements and spend time on Sex Education Advisory Boards (SEABs), the groups that set goals and objectives and review and recommend curriculum for their local school districts.
Many supportive educators and school staff are asked to be Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) advisors, but don’t know where to start. GSAs (also known as gender and sexuality alliances, queer straight alliances, and other names) are student-driven clubs for LGBTQ+ students and allies. They play a huge role in making schools more safe and supportive.
Since the start of the "Me Too" movement, more teachers are looking for ways to incorporate consent into sex education. This training will help participants recognize language changes and immediate shifts they can make in existing content and identify various tools, resources, materials, and activities that could be used in classroom related to consent. The training will also review best practices and key messages for teaching consent; particularly being intentional about students at different developmental levels.