Cincinnati, Ohio – February 13, 2017 - Saint Ursula Academy is thrilled to welcome a special guest speaker this February. Rachel Simmons is author of the New York Times bestsellers Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, and The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence. As an educator, Rachel works internationally to empower young women to be more authentic, assertive and self-aware.
Rachel Simmons will visit SUA February 23-24, 2017. Her visit will include a professional development session with faculty and staff, an evening program for parents, and two assemblies with students.
We invite parents of teens to hear Rachel Simmons on February 23 at 7:00 p.m. in the Keller Student Center at Saint Ursula. Simmons will address strategies for how to help your daughter succeed while maintaining her wellbeing. We strongly encourage all parents and guardians to attend. The event is FREE. We ask guests to please RSVP: https://www.saintursulaevents.com/rachel-simmons/
Simmons’ presentation supports the mission of Saint Ursula to empower our students to become confident thinkers and leaders. We help them develop as women of faith, integrity and courage committed to building a better world.
“One of the priorities of Saint Ursula Academy's long range strategic planning process is to help students be involved and engaged while also maintaining a sense of balance,” said Assistant Principal for Student Affairs Kate Durso ’98. “The committee working on this goal did a great deal of research about the wellbeing of high school girls, and one of the best resources we found was the work of author and educator Rachel Simmons. Her work is focused on empowering young women to be authentic, assertive, and resilient.”
The Presentation
“With each audience Simmons will unpack what a "good" girl looks like versus a "real" girl and strategies for helping our girls be real,” said Durso.
Simmons is preparing custom presentations for each audience, so while her message will be similar from group to group, she will specifically address how each group can best help our girls develop courage, confidence, and authenticity.
The Students
Simmons will meet with 11th and 12th graders initially, and later in the day she will meet with 9th and 10th graders. Her message will be tailored to where the girls are in their high school journey. Topics for students will include fixed vs. growth mindset (based on the work of Carol Dweck), naming the need to be perfect and how that can be detrimental, "girl-speak" (self-defeating language and nonverbal communication), and resilience.
Faculty/Staff
Simmons will focus her faculty/staff talk on "developing the inner resume of girls," which includes the complicated relationship girls have with feedback, being brave and effective risk taking, and authenticity.
Parents
The parent talk has similar themes to the faculty/staff talk -- girls and feedback, effective risk taking, the value of failure -- and she'll also address what it means to be a "good" parent versus a "real" parent.
About Rachel Simmons
Although she originally wrote it to heal herself after being targeted as a child, she eventually came to terms with her own bullying behavior as a teen, something she speaks about widely. After nearly a decade teaching leadership skills to girls and interviewing them about the pressure to be perfect, she wrote The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence, also a national bestseller.
Rachel co-founded Girls Leadership, a national nonprofit, because she wanted to teach girls how to give firm handshakes (she has since expanded her understanding of leadership). Along the way, Rachel became a seasoned classroom teacher and curriculum writer. Rachel’s classes and workshops develop students’ emotional intelligence, communication skills, healthy risk taking ability, and confidence. Today, Rachel is a Leadership Development Specialist at Smith College, and was invited to share her cutting edge work with undergraduates with the presidents of the Seven Sisters Colleges. She has since begun working with college-age women around the country. Rachel is honored to serve as Girls’ Research Scholar in Residence at the Hewitt School in New York City, where she gets to live her dream of integrating cutting edge research on girls into work with faculty, students and parents.
After ten years of international public speaking and countless live television appearances, Rachel gave a TEDxWomen talk that made her so nervous she didn’t think she’d survive it. Afterwards, Jane Fonda hugged her. Rachel was the host of the PBS television special, “A Girl’s Life,” and is a regular contributor to Time and Good Morning America. She has been profiled by the New York Times, and her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Time, The Atlantic, Slate and the New York Times.
Rachel has appeared on Oprah twice. She got on the show for the second time because she begged Oprah during a commercial break to let her interview girls on camera, and then worried that Oprah thought she was crazy. The show called 5 days later, and Oprah called 10 years later to invite Rachel to work at her South Africa leadership academy for girls.
Odd Girl Out was adapted into a highly acclaimed Lifetime television movie; if you want to watch it, please ask Rachel’s father, who calls Rachel to let her know every single time it is on. Rachel is passionate about exercise, music, high end television, and cheese. She lives in western Massachusetts with her toddler daughter and rescue dog.
Saint Ursula Academy is a Catholic, college-preparatory, secondary school for young women known for academic excellence and rich tradition. Saint Ursula welcomes students from more than 90 grade schools in the Greater Cincinnati area. The Academy is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a Blue Ribbon School. The campus, located at 1339 E. McMillan Street in East Walnut Hills has been the home of St. Ursula Academy and Convent since 1910. 86% of the Class of 2016 earned college scholarships totaling more than $22-million.