Havenwood Academy Podcast

Andrea Morgan – Assistant Academic Director at Havenwood Academy

Josh Gardner

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0:00 | 8:12

What if the problem isn’t that students can’t learn… but that traditional school systems were never designed for them in the first place?

In this episode, we sit down with Andrea Morgan, Assistant Academic Director at Havenwood Academy, to explore how education changes when emotional safety comes before academic performance.

Andrea shares how Havenwood is redefining what school looks like for students who have experienced trauma, failure, or deep frustration with traditional education. From small class sizes and individualized pacing to integrating therapy with academics, this conversation challenges long-held assumptions about how students learn and succeed.

They dive into what it really means to measure academic success, why confidence often has to come before achievement, and how giving students even small choices can completely shift their relationship with learning.

This episode is a powerful reminder that when students feel safe, supported, and seen, everything else can follow.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Why emotional regulation is the foundation for learning
  • How Havenwood structures school differently to rebuild student confidence
  • What academic success looks like beyond grades and transcripts
  • The role of flexibility, choice, and individualized support
  • Why healing often needs to come before academic progress

Whether you're an educator, parent, or leader in behavioral health, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on what’s possible when we rethink the purpose of school.

SPEAKER_00

How does Havenwood reframe school for students who associate learning with shame or failure? Well, that's a really good question, actually. We just set up a new kind of interview that we do with our students now, so we get a little bit more background from them about their educational experience. We're getting a lot of those kids that were in like middle school or elementary during COVID, and we've had to just flip the script on how we handle school for them. So we reframe the structure of the day. We currently have like A-day, A Day, B day, B day. So they get the same classes two days in a row, and then they get another set of classes for the next two days. And then Fridays are fun days that are often chaotic, but they get to participate in like sports and activities now. So that's a new thing that we've just started. That sounds awesome. Okay. What's different about teaching when emotional safety is prioritized before academic rigor? So you can't teach a kid who's emotionally dysregulated. So we take the time before class to check in with our students, see where they're at emotionally, and if they need a break or they need to put their head down for a minute. What's different is you don't push the whole class to finish everything at once. You're working with individual kids, and since our class sizes are so small, we're able to do that. We can say, okay, that kid needs a minute. I can work with these sometimes only three, and we've got one kid over here, or maybe you might have a full class of like 10 students, and even in that smaller group, you can have your staff working with somebody who's struggling, or you can offer a break to another student, and you can get them caught up a lot easier. All right. How do you measure academic success beyond credits and transcripts? So for me, I look at attitude towards school as academic success because, like you said, these kids were having to reframe academics for them. So we're looking at how do you feel about school? And you can see it in their face when they show up and they're like, I hate school, this is the worst. And then they go from those credits and transcripts, we look at those F's and then we see the A's when they're on their way out, and we see the shift in just their mindset about school, what they're able to accomplish. So for me, academic success is more about do I feel like I can succeed at school? Okay. What adjustments do we make that traditional schools simply can't or won't make? Well, the small class sizes for one, a traditional high school cannot shrink their class sizes. They simply can't. We have two adults in the classroom and ten kids. So that's a one to five ratio. Sometimes we have three adults in the classroom, which is even better. So that's one piece. The other thing is we're a special education school, so we can give accommodations to every single student as much as they need. I always love to think of that picture, that image of three people trying to look over the fence, and one is tall and doesn't need a box at all, but the shorter or tall or medium-sized kid needs a different size box in order to see over the same fence. And that's what we get to do here. That's wonderful. How does the academic program adapt when a student's nervous system isn't ready for traditional learning? We do deal with that a lot, actually. So we can focus on just one class at a time for that kid. We can back off academics completely and just focus on giving them a win in a subject that they love. So maybe if they're really good at art, let's focus on art, let's give them that win, and then we'll start to bring in the other things. We also have combined multiple subjects into more of a project-based learning environment. So you can get science and English and possibly even history credit from the same project because you're working through all of the different things. Okay. What role does choice play in rebuilding a student's confidence as a learner? This is from my own personal background. I homeschooled my kids for a long time. And if you are choosing to learn something, you're gonna love that. You're gonna own it a lot more than if somebody says, Hey, you have to learn this thing. We don't have a lot of options here. We don't get to give them choice in necessarily their elective classes. We don't have very many options, but within each class, we can give them, okay, well, you can choose this way or this way to show me that you've learned something. Maybe it's like an oral presentation versus a written paper. Giving them just that little bit of choice can help them get a little bit more excited and a little bit more inclined to learn that thing to begin with. Awesome. How do you balance structure and flexibility without lowering expectations? The structure is pretty crucial to the school day, and we have to be flexible. This is actually something that we had a meeting about the other day. We're like, okay, where are we rigid? Where can we be flexible? And where do those things butt heads a little bit? Because sometimes a kid just needs to step out of the classroom and they just need to take a break. And we try to be rigid on like, well, your butt is in class right now, so we need you in class, and we understand you need to regulate, nothing's gonna get done in that class. So we get to be flexible with individual student needs and we get to be structured with what the day looks like. So within that structure, we have some flexibility. All right. What's a moment where academic progress followed emotional healing and not the other way around? We had a student recently graduate who we didn't know if she was gonna make it for a really long time. She would just do this with her emotions and her grades, and we knew that she was a really great student. She came in straight A's, and then we were seeing C's and D's and Fs while she worked on her own trauma, while she was doing her own healing. And then we saw as she worked on her relationships and as she worked on herself, she was able to then the academics followed. It's like, okay, I'm good with me. Now I can do this. And she graduated high school, she finished strong, she got those straight A's back, and she did really awesome. That's wonderful. How do teachers collaborate with clinical and residential teams differently here? We have a meeting every week that includes somebody from every department. So we're hearing from the residential side of things, we're hearing from the academics, the teachers, we're hearing from the clinicians, this is what they're working on in therapy. And then we get to integrate that into the school day and into the residential side when they leave school at the end of the day. All right. What's one academic myth about students in residential treatment that Havenwood disapproves of? So something that I hear from the students all the time is you're not a real school. This isn't a real school. We're just in treatment or whatever. And we're very much a real school. We're accredited by cognia, and that means when you leave here, the credits follow you and they mean something. And you can get an actual diploma while you're here, and we're not just biting our time or trying to like hold on to you. You're here to make progress in all of the areas. And the more we have added things like swim team, we get to actually compete with the local high schools with the swim team this next school year, and we're starting a theater troupe, so they'll get to go compete as well. The more we make it feel more like this is a real high school, and also you get to have all these accommodations, and we're gonna individualize it for you, makes the students have more buy in. So they're like, oh, okay, this is actually high school, and it just shifts our mindset of like what a high school actually has to look like.