I study the social and emotional dynamics of educational settings and apply this understanding to develop and test interventions designed to enhance teachers’ capacity to cultivate supportive relationships with their students and provide a supportive and engaging social and emotional context for academic learning. Aligned with this approach, I develop and test social and emotional learning curricula and interventions for preK-12 students. I conduct basic research to better understand these relationships and evaluative, efficacy, effectiveness, and dissemination research to determine whether intervention efforts are effective and sustainable in educational settings. I am particularly focused on applying recent findings on mindfulness-based approaches to reducing teacher and student stress and improving teaching and learning environments. I apply this research to improving pre-service teacher education at the pre-K and elementary levels.
