Bridging Youth Divides Through Morning Classroom Conversations (Ep. 25)

Apr 4

Episode Notes

This podcast usually focuses on how adults can have less contentious, more fruitful conversations about schools, but my two guests on this episode have plenty to say about the need to strengthen communication and relationships among young people. In fact, Nina Murphy and Kellie Dromboski (along with Maurice Elias) have written a book on the subject called, Morning Classroom Conversations. They show how devoting just 15 minutes each day for genuine conversation can have significant social, emotional, and academic benefits. By creating “brave spaces” for student conversation, students learn how limiting, even damaging, modern day interactions can be. “Without that perspective, many young people’s view of themselves and their future is at the mercy of how their social media communications are made and responded to. As we know all too well, this can take the extreme form of making adolescents hypersensitive to cyberbullying—even to the point of anxiety, depression, of suicidality,” they write.

And to educators who say, “We have so much to cover, especially with the learning loss from the pandemic, that we don’t have time to add one more thing into our day,” Murphy, a school psychologist, says (around the 25:20 mark), “It takes more time when we don’t do it because of the time it takes to recover from all of the other difficulties students are having.” She says high school teachers at her school frequently tell her, “…they’ve had to stop a lesson because so-and-so was crying or because this one would not stop acting out or wouldn’t get off the phone…When you create that classroom community, you’re going to see less and less of those behaviors.”

Their book contains a wealth of resources to help educators integrate morning conversations into their schools and classrooms.

Featured Guests:

Nina A. Murphy, PsyD, is a practicing school psychologist in Three Village Central School District, adjunct professor at St. Joseph’s College, and Senior Consulting and Field Expert at the Social-Emotional and Character Development (SECD) Lab at Rutgers University. Dr. Murphy has had a commitment to supporting positive youth development since she can remember but learned, during her graduate work at Rutgers Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology and in the SECD Lab that this passion was targeted in helping youth develop positive character and purpose. She worked as a consultant in an urban school, opening her eyes to the intricacies of systems-level work and the importance of collaborative change.

Kellie A. Dombroski (formerly McClain), PsyD, is a practicing school psychologist for the River Edge School District and a Senior Consulting and Field Expert at the Social-Emotional and Character Development (SECD) Lab at Rutgers University. She earned her doctoral and master’s degrees in School Psychology from Fairleigh Dickinson University and a Bachelor’s degree with a dual major in Psychology and Criminal Justice from Rutgers University. It was through these years of study that Dr. Dombroski developed a passion for helping at-risk youth through preventive measures. This passion is what led her to become a curriculum writer and consultant for the MOSAIC program, a social-emotional learning (SEL) program that helped bring Morning Classroom Conversations to life. Over a three-year span, Dr. Dombroski worked closely with students and teachers in multiple MOSAIC pilot schools and consulted around what is now known as Morning Classroom Conversations.

Morning Classroom Conversations

Build Your Students' Social-Emotional, Character, and Communication Skills Every Day

By: Maurice J. Elias, Nina A. Murphy, Kellie A. McClain

Written by expert SEL practitioners, this book provides you with a wealth of tools to guide successful Morning Classroom Conversations (MCCs) from start to finish—in just 10-15 minutes!

VIEW ON AMAZON