If you’re a culturally fluid educator working with students who move frequently due to their parents’ jobs, you’ll want to check out the Safe Passage Across Networks organization.
SPAN runs “The Nest,” a free monthly online gathering of transitions-care providers worldwide. Its latest season of sessions is about to begin, with SPAN’s founder, Dr. Doug Ota, as its new host.
The sessions take place on the first Thursday of each month, at 2:00 p.m. CET, where people can connect with others who perceive the importance of addressing transitions well in educational settings.
Additionally, starting with this season (Season 7), if you can’t make the traditional time, The Nest will be available as a podcast.
Season 7 of The Nest continues on Thursday, November 6 (register here), and will afford all interested parties an excellent opportunity to learn about SPAN’s “Seven Bedrock Principles” for positive transitions care. Ota will cover these principles across the remainder of this academic year — and participation is free.
Through a series of mini-lectures and dialogues, some of which will be co-hosted with journalist, TV host and presenter Nikki Muller, Ota will explore the most fundamental problems that led to SPAN’s creation as well as the psychological, clinical and research basis for how SPAN seeks to address transitions. Among them:
- Why did an organization like SPAN need to be created?
- What are the fundamental psychological principles that make transitions so challenging?
- What are fundamental tools a school needs in its “tool box” to best meet such challenges, and what is the clinical and empirical basis for such convictions?
- How must an organization like SPAN grow and evolve to respond to the world today?
This “Bedrock Principles” series is intended to be an exploration of some of the human issues most central to schools that cater to globally mobile kids.
“Given the profound challenges facing the world today, we at SPAN believe these principles are more important now than ever before,” according to the organization.
The schedule is as follows:
1 — November 6, 2025. Introduction, and Bedrock Layer 1: Belonging
2 — December 4, 2025. Layer 2: the Baton
3 — January 8, 2026. Layer 3: Attachment Security (2nd Thursday of the month in January)
4 — February 5, 2026. Layer 4, the Central Layer: the Students
5 — March 5, 2026. Layer 5: Empathy & the CNS
6 — April 2, 2026. Layer 6: Unresolved grief
7 — May 7, 2026. Layer 7: Attachment in school
8 — June 4, 2026. Integrating the 7 Layers: Wrapping Up Season 7
Check out the intro video below.
