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As an educator, you are shouldering a heavy load in helping children and families recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. You are tasked with helping students cope with grief, loss, anxiety, fear, and economic distress, recover learning losses, and re-teach social skills. Additionally, you are doing this while also coping with these same challenges in your personal lives. You can do it by practicing self-care Self-care is about taking deliberate actions to restore and advance your professional and personal wellbeing. By the end of Page five, you will be engaged in the active process of working toward developing your individualized self-care strategies. Each chapter includes an interactive Self-Care Graphic Organizer. Sustainable self-care is the key to a thriving professional career that does not come at the expense of your wellbeing. As you complete this Guide to Educator Self-Care, you will: Complete self-reflection to identify and acknowledge your needs and utilize tools for active stress. Whether you are new to the profession or a veteran educator, this guide will help you create sustainable self-care routines that can protect your wellbeing.
About the author
Dr. Micere Keels is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, and the Founding Director of the Trauma Responsive Educational Practices Project (TREP Project). For over two decades, she has worked to integrate mental health promotion interventions into educational systems and structures, from early childhood centers to high schools. The TREP Project works to develop the individual and organizational capacity of educators and schools serving children growing up in neighborhoods that have high levels of toxic stress, such as violent crime, concentrated poverty, concentrated foster care involvement, and housing instability. Through the TREP Project, she has supported the professional development of over 200,000 educators through school district partnerships in Delaware, Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island, and through work with many individual schools across the U.S.
