Feel Your Best Self, co-led by Sandra Chafouleas, is featured.

“It looks to me like they’ve taken the CDC measure and whittled or changed it to fit the context of what the Florida political structure wants,” explained Dr. Sandra Chafouleas, a professor in educational psychology for the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut.

Chafouleas is not involved in Florida’s survey or the CDC’s YRBS. But she has spent her career studying and creating youth assessments. We asked Dr. Chafouleas to review Florida’s new survey for its strengths and weaknesses.

UConn Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Sandra Chafouleas of the Neag School of Education then got the crowd going with audience volunteers as she led a hands-on discussion of how students can feel their best.

Chris Rock is taking full advantage of Will Smith’s inability to cope with his emotions, demonstrated when he slapped Rock during last year’s Oscars event. Almost a year later, Rock used the incident to both open and close his recent Netflix stand-up special, for which he was reportedly paid 40 million. There were moments of different comedic threads woven throughout the special, but a central focus was on that slap. Will Smith’s mistake may have made him the brunt of a lot of jokes and decreased his popularity in the short-term. This A-list actor, however, is not going to be canceled for life based on his lapse in effective emotion-coping.

Puppets are wonderful teaching tools—they are appealing and accessible, and they can be proxies on sensitive topics, expressing feelings and acting out scenarios the humans around them sometimes can’t. At the University of Connecticut, educators, researchers, and puppeteers made a video series called Feel Your Best Self to teach simple evidence-backed strategies that help elementary school students with self-regulation and emotional intelligence—through puppets.

Sandra Chafouleas, a professor at the UConn Neag School of Education, said she believed the increase in weapons was a signal that students’ “needs aren’t being met” — and specifically the need for connection.

“Belonging, social connection, feeling [a] sense of mastery … kids bring weapons to school because they’re not feeling those things or because they’ve learned it or modeled it as acceptable behavior in other spaces,” she said.

Emily Wicks with UConn’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry noticed the pandemic-era disruptions to kids’ social-emotional learning and development, and reached out to Sandy Chafouleas at the university’s Neag School of Education. Together they developed Feel Your Best Self, a puppet-centered program aimed at helping “strengthen the emotional well-being of elementary-aged children.”

The five-minute video Denoya’s students watch is part of a series produced through a new pilot program called Feel Your Best Self, or FYBS. Each video is built around a simple strategy to help kids recognize and manage their feelings – or to help friends who are struggling.

“It’s taking what we know works,” says Emily Iovino, a trained school psychologist who is part of the FYBS team.

In this forum, Feel Your Best Self creators Sandy Chafouleas and Emily Wicks and script writers Yanniv Frank, Emily Iovino, and Sarah Nolen talk about the development of this unique interdisciplinary collaboration between UConn’s Collaboratory on School and Child Health and Ballard Institute to use puppetry to promote emotional well-being in elementary-aged children.

Chafouleas and her colleagues developed their Feel Your Best Self program to help children aged 3-12 years improve ways of relating to others as they return to the classroom post-pandemic. The program represents a partnership between Chafouleas’ group, the Collaboratory on School and Child Health, and the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, the world’s only graduate program in puppetry, both at the University of Connecticut.