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Lower School Student Support
Social-Emotional Learning & Support
In the Lower School, we draw on Responsive Classroom practices, strategies, and language, as well as our training, to shape our classroom communities and inform our approach to personal development in the Lower School. The program's practical strategies foster a caring, respectful, and joyful classroom of learners. Lower School students are also continuously exposed to and learn about the ten Learner Profile traits embedded in their IB studies.
Lower School Counselor's Role
The Lower School Counselor is available to work with students, teachers, and parents. She brings extensive knowledge of human behavior and family and interpersonal relationships. She spends time in our classrooms and is trained to observe and listen.
- The Lower School Counselor works with students in whole groups, small groups, and individually to help them develop strategies for fostering an awareness of their emotions, understanding how emotions influence them, and using this information to make wiser decisions.
- Teachers will turn to the Lower School Counselor to expand their knowledge of child development, to gain clarity about the nature of a particular child’s communication or learning, or for specific strategies to support children’s overall success in the classroom.
- Parents may turn to the Lower School Counselor to discuss children’s typical development: routine (eating, sleeping, dressing, toileting), life events (birthdays, new baby, a trip away from home, illness, death in the family), and family issues (siblings, varying parental styles or expectations, marital discord or dissolution).
- The Lower School Counselor, in an educative role, is also a resource for relevant materials, books, and articles. Particular concerns about a child, whether developmental, emotional, or health-related, beyond the expected, come to the Lower School Counselor’s attention via classroom observations, teachers’ shared experience of the child, or a parent’s direct communication.
- When more information is needed to understand the child’s development, the Lower School Counselor will work with our Lower School Child Study Team, including the Head of Lower School and the Director of Learning Support, to recommend or facilitate an appropriate referral—either to a private clinician or to the NYC Department of Education and its designated evaluation sites. The Lower School Counselor remains available to support the family in this process.
Learning Support and Standardized Testing
