Connections over Compliance: Rewiring our Perceptions of Discipline with Dr Lori Desautels

Compass Seminars is thrilled to announce this live webinar with influential US educationalist, academic, and author Dr Lori Desautels.

Children who carry chronic behavioral challenges are often responded to with reactive and punitive practices that can potentially reactivate the developing stress response systems. Discipline isn’t only responsive (occurring after a child’s negative behavior) and it’s definitely not punishment. Discipline is developing proactive practices to help children become more connected to themselves, each other, and to adults. The developing brains of our children need to "feel" safe in order to function and perform. When we are dysregulated, our brains can not respond to words, lectures, consequences, or rewards.  

In this presentation Dr Desautels will discuss a new lens for discipline that benefits all students by reaching for sustainable behavioral changes through brain state awareness rather than compliance and obedience, shifting student-focused behavior management protocols to adult regulated brain and body states which are brain aligned, preventive, and relationally based.

Relational discipline is not something we do to children; it is something we want to help create within them. It is effective and supportive of all students as they move away from compliance and obedience towards sustainable well-being. This shift takes leadership and begins with the regulated adult brain and body states of the educators and other professionals who work with and for these young people.

Lori will discuss the differences between traditional ideas of coercive regulation and newer concepts of co-regulation, exploring a range of discipline practices that allow students and staff to move through challenging moments while attending to their emotional, social, and physiological health.

• Exploring how trauma and adversity affect the developing brains and bodies of our children and young people through the lens of social and developmental neurosciences. 
• A range of specific neuroscience informed ideas, practices, and strategies that promote and strengthen regulation through patterned repetitive experiences that can be built into our procedures, routines, and rituals.
• Exploring discipline as a Tier One preventative, nervous system aligned and relational practice that is at the heart of education.

Dr. Lori Desautels has been an Assistant Professor at Butler University, Indianapolis since 2016 where she teaches both undergraduate and graduate programs in the College of Education. She was previously an Assistant Professor at Marian University where she founded the Educational Neuroscience Symposium that has now reached thousands of educators and is in its 15th year. Lori’s passion is engaging young people through the social and relational neurosciences as it applies to education. She is the author of multiple books including the recently released “Intentional Neuroplasticity: Moving our Nervous Systems and Educational systems towards Post-Traumatic Growth” and “How May I Serve You, Revelations in Education”.

She has presented internationally to over 150,000 educators and professionals and is super excited about presenting online to her first New Zealand audience.