Online Course Spotlight: The Emotional Lives of Teenagers with Dr. Lisa Damour

​At the Association for Academic Leaders, we’re committed to helping independent school leaders with top of mind issues and concerns. Paramount for all of us this year is student mental health. That’s why we are so pleased to be able to work with our longtime friend and collaborator, Dr. Lisa Damour, on addressing the topic.

Lisa’s new book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, is powerful and eminently helpful. I had the pleasure of working with Lisa on our exclusive online course that guides educators through the book, and I get to act as a course facilitator. We just completed the first session of the course, and it was awesome.

The course stretches over two weeks. In each week, we take a chapter-by-chapter look at Lisa’s books. Lisa and I talk through the chapter and point educators to key learnings for advisory conversations, parent education, student support, and classroom management. We then ask participants to share a practice that they plan to change as a result of the book, videos, and related resources. Trust me, you want to be a part of those discussion boards — the ideas shared are amazing and will have an immediate positive impact for kids at participants’ schools.

At the end of every course is a live Q&A where we take questions from course participants and ask them live to Lisa. Here’s a look at some of the questions Lisa answered in April:

• How can we give clear guidelines to teachers [and students] to help them differentiate between a valid, appropriate emotional response, an overreaction, and a true signal of crisis?
• Do you have a few ideas for how parents and or a school can help students (and boys in particular) learn how to break the habit of emotional suppression? What are some of the initial steps we can take to help the student redirect his attention away from a virtual world and back to the one that is producing the hard feelings? Is it wise to directly address the avoidance tactic with the student?
• How do we build a community of support for students that encourages seeking adult support for emotional and social concerns for themselves and for friends? In particular, some different language that honors the tension between being a valued friend and getting that friend to help as needed along with teens’ needs to protect their image.
• As a Lower School Director, I’m wondering, what do you see are the most important foundational skills and capacities we can build in younger students to set them up for the greatest emotional success as adolescents?

My guess is that you may want Lisa’s advice on one of those questions too, and/or you may want to get (and share) great ideas for supporting mental health at your school. So, I hope you join us for one of the summer sessions of the course:

June 19 - 30, 2023, live Q&A with Lisa on July 11
July 17 - 28, 2023, live Q&A with Lisa on August 22
August 7 - 18, 2023, live Q&A with Lisa on August 22

Register here!