Speaker: 

Sandra M. Chafouleas, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist with specialty in school psychology. She is a Distinguished Professor in the Neag School of Education and co-director of the Collaboratory on School and Child Health at the University of Connecticut.

About the talk:

How we feel in everyday moments and about life overall has become increasingly recognized as an essential component in overall well-being. Children and the adults who care for them are encountering substantial challenges to experiencing emotional well-being; easy to use, resource efficient, and evidence-informed solutions for learning important life skills in emotion-focused coping are needed. Feel Your Best Self (FYBS: feelyourbestself.org) was developed as one solution, combining the best in educational psychology and puppetry education to offer a freely accessible online toolkit that brings joyful, creative exploration to learning these important life skills. FYBS centers around 12 emotion-focused coping strategies that are well-established by research on self-awareness, self-regulation, social relationships, and emotional well-being. Using Gross’s (2014) seminal process model of emotion regulation, we mapped and selected strategies that could be taught quickly for anyone to use in shifting their feelings in the moment. The award-winning FYBS toolkit features three puppet kids—Nico, Mena, and CJ—who help each other navigate situations using these strategies to calm themselves, catch their feelings, and connect with others. In this presentation, the what, why, and how of FYBS will be presented, along with conversations about its flexibility for use in tiered systems of support and across caregiving settings.

This presentation is relevant to clinicians and educators, offering content at an introductory/intermediate level. Dr. Sandra Chafouleas and Emily Wicks are co-inventors of the Feel Your Best Self (FYBS) intellectual property owned by the University of Connecticut, and are co-Chief Executive Officers with FYBS & Co. They also have an equity (stock) interest in FYBS & Co.

Learning objectives:

• Describe the rationale behind developing Feel Your Best Self (FYBS) as one solution that offers joyful, easy-to-use, evidence-informed learning of emotion coping strategies.
• Identify components of the FYBS toolkit, with understanding of how materials can be flexibly used to facilitate learning emotion coping strategies in fun, creative, and accessible ways.
• Describe options for adapting FYBS to bring joyful exploration of emotion coping in your own settings.

About the speaker:

Sandra M. Chafouleas, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist with specialty in school psychology. She is a Distinguished Professor in the Neag School of Education and co-director of the Collaboratory on School and Child Health at the University of Connecticut. Her work focuses on usable practices that support the whole child, with specific expertise in strategies to support mental health and emotional well-being. She is co-creator of the award-winning Feel Your Best Self toolkit, which offers accessible materials to help kids build emotion-focused coping skills to calm themselves, catch their feelings, and connect with others. Dr. Chafouleas regularly serves as a national presenter and invited speaker, and has received multiple awards for her research, teaching, and service including an American Psychological Association Presidential citation for her work disseminating Feel Your Best Self. Prior to becoming a university trainer, Dr. Chafouleas worked as a school psychologist in a variety of settings supporting children experiencing social, emotional, and behavioral challenges.