At the heart of The Titusville Academy’s curriculum is a school-wide behavioral and emotional management system, coordinated among all educational staff in all school environments. All educational staff members are trained thoroughly in the program’s theory and practice.
Behavioral expectations are described and explained consistently and regularly, at the beginning of each year, each week, each day, and each new transition. Our School Values and Norms are highly visible in our school environment and reviewed regularly in the context of everyday teaching and events.
Titusville Academy’s approach to managing behavior focuses primarily on each student’s relationship with his/her educational staff, and the effective and positive communication each staff person delivers to each student.
It is within positive and supportive relationships with staff that students learn to manage their decisions, behaviors and emotions in order to meet school-wide expectations, and model and adopt appropriate social norms and values that will help them thrive and succeed.
The Ramapo for Children Model: Promoting Positive Classroom Environments
Titusville Academy utilizes the Ramapo for Children Model. With 100 years of experience in direct service and training programs, Ramapo for Children has developed a unique ability to create inclusive environments that promote positive behavioral change, foster social and emotional skill development, and help support learning and personal growth. The program’s focus on equipping educators, caregivers and youth with the skills they need to build trusting relationships, serve as effective role models, handle challenging behaviors constructively, and improve continuously through reflective practice fits with our school’s long-held belief that positive staff attitudes, behaviors and communications with students are central to each student’s development and success.
The Ramapo for Children Model is grounded in the belief that when students exhibit social and emotional challenges in the classroom, it reflects some combination of unmet needs, lagging skills and social inequities. Ramapo supports young people whose behaviors put them at risk of being marginalized or alienated from their schools and communities; by helping adults see challenging children through a new lens, and by giving them a toolbox of skills and techniques for helping children align their behaviors with their aspirations.
The Ramapo program focuses TTA’s behavior support practices on meeting student needs and teaching students skills. This professional development model supports shifts in disciplinary practices by providing specific tools and strategies for identifying, promoting, and teaching school norms and expectations, and the social and emotional benefits they engender. These tools and strategies are organized into areas of practices: building authentic relationships, restoring connections, and development skills.
- Building Authentic Relationships
Trusting relationships are essential to learning and resilience. They enable us to process information, take risks, and overcome challenges. This area focuses on the crucial role relationships play in learning and resilience and strategies for building rapport, authenticity and partnership with young people. - Restoring Connections
Our challenges, conflicts, and mistakes are opportunities for deepening relationships, addressing harm, developing skills and strengthening our community. This area offers frameworks for reflecting on conflict, strategies for de-escalating modeling and teaching social and emotional skills and disrupting harmful cycles of conflict. In addition, content in this area unpacks recognizing and exploring triggers. - Developing Skills
We are all capable of learning and growing. Together, we identify and develop the social, emotional, academic and life skills needed to thrive in our community and beyond. This area includes social emotional skills for self-management, as well as strategies for supporting learning and skill-building through meeting varied learning needs, modeling intentionally and developing shared goals.