Harvard's Samantha Wettje on "Mitigating the Negative Effects of ACES" with her 16 Strong Project.

<p>Welcome back, we have reached episode #80 on the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast. <a href='https://youtu.be/lhbAKlgm5FM'>You can watch this interview on YouTube here. </a></p> <p> </p> <p>My name is Andrea Samadi,  I’m a former educator who created this podcast to bring the most current neuroscience and educational research, matched with social and emotional skills, with interviews from experts from all different fields, to bring awareness, ideas and strategies to our most pressing issues that we are facing, as educators, or parents, to keep all of us working at our highest levels of productivity. I’ve been interested in understanding why some people reach such high levels of achievement, and others don’t…since the late 1990s, and recent discoveries in neuroscience has accelerated our understanding of this.  I do appreciate the feedback I’ve received through social media. It helps me to know that these topics are helping to bring some new thoughts, ideas and hope when times have never been so uncertain.</p> <p> </p> <p>Today we have Samantha Wettje, the Founder of the 16Strong Project<a href='#_edn1'>[i]</a>, created in 2018 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  If you are in the field of education, you will have heard of the importance of understanding ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences that we did touch on with our last episode) and our next guest is on a serious mission to help our next generation of learners recognize and navigate the challenges they might be facing as a result of ACES in their life.</p> <p> </p> <p>When I received an email from one of Samantha’s colleagues about her 16Strong Project, I remember exactly where I was, because it really is true that when you attach emotion to a memory, it’s something you don’t ever forget. When I read that Samantha had created this project in response to her experience of living with a mentally ill and addicted parent, I literally stopped what I was doing to read more. Is all I needed to see in the email wa