Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey listeners, it's Isabella, producer here at impact in the classroom. This week we are bringing you a recording of a recent panel conversation hosted by Marnetta, featuring Teachstone's Doctor Bridget Hamri, David Adams of the Urban assembly, and Doctor Carol Lee of the collaborative for academic, Social and Emotional learning, also known as Casel. This conversation was originally hosted as a webinar through edweb and covers new research out of CASL that shows how SEl, or social emotional learning, supports literacy development. Along with the teach Jones evidence of meaningful adult child interactions in the classroom, you'll hear from this panel of experts who discusses how SEl can boost literacy skills in early childhood and elementary grades and hear about the strategies that leaders can use to support educators positive impact on their students. We hope you enjoyed.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: I'd love to hear each of your perspectives on why it is important to draw from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, human development, and learning sciences to understand the connection between social emotional learning and literacy development.
Doctor Lee, could you begin by outlining key findings from your research report, the role of SEL in improving literacy development, that was recently published by Casel, the Collaborative for academic, social and Emotional learning.
[00:01:23] Speaker C: Hi. So this report, which was co authored by myself and Doctor Alessandra Ward, is available on the CASL site, and it's the first in a series. There will be two additional reports coming out, one specifically focusing on the early grades and the second on middle and high school. So what we tried to do in this introductory report was to synthesize findings from across fields, the neurosciences, human development, learning sciences, various fields of psychology, that are emerging with very strong empirical evidence of the ways in which emotions, perceptions of the self, relationships, etcetera, are integral to how we learn. Literacy happens to be a particular instance of this phenomenon, but it is, it's basic, and part of its power comes from the fact that these intertwining relationships between how our brain functions and our relationships and interactions with others in the world evolves from our evolution as a species, and therefore we not attend to that complexity at our own risk. We also, in that introductory report, have a section, particularly in terms of thinking about how these issues of social emotional wellbeing and engagement, literacy practices have to also be understood from a developmental perspective. So the needs of young children versus the needs of middle schoolers versus the needs of adolescents. And then finally in the report, we offer some specific illustrations of how issues of social and emotional wellbeing are taken up in terms of the structure of instructions, relationships that children develop in instruction. And, as I said, there will be two additional reports that will follow, and they are available on the Casll website.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: Bridget, much of your work has centered on how daily teacher child interactions support development across the domains of development, especially in the first eight years of a child's life. What does the research reveal about the connection between Sel and early literacy skills?
[00:03:55] Speaker D: Yes. So there was a lot in that question. So I might take a step back before I get to the core of interactions. One is, and we just heard Doctor Lee say this, and I think every educator on this call knows that social emotional learning and literacy are interrelated skills. Right. That is a foundational piece. And I always think of, you know, I have a 17 year old, I have ten year old twin girls. I can recount two exact times when this was so clear to me. The first was, and many of you have had this who have kids. That first moment when a child can actually decode something, this world that has felt like the world of adults is suddenly something that they own and the joy that that brings, and then the way in which that joyous makes them more interested and more invested in learning more. That is one example of that interconnection on a less positive side, having twins, they're always compared. And in kindergarten, one of my girls read really quickly, and the other one didn't. And I really saw how their skill development was influencing their perceptions of who they were and how they existed in the world. It influenced how other people saw them. So I think just this acknowledgement that these skills are highly interdependent is the first. The second is, and I think we do a disservice to educators all the time in this space. We often talk about, like, it's sel time or it's literacy time. The reality is we are teaching children social emotional skills every single moment of every single day. That's true in the classroom. It's true in our homes. And so this idea that we can separate those things is just makes no sense. And again, I think for educators, we know this makeshi no sense. The question is, what are we doing to empower educators to know and understand and be intentional about the ways in which they're supporting social emotional learning in the context of what they've been asked to do, science of reading and literacy. And that's where I'll sort of finally come back to interactions, which you noticed. And for our colleagues on the call who know, teach, don't know class, I say interactions. You know exactly what I mean. But I'll take a moment because hopefully we have some folks who are less familiar.
And we talk about interactions because we know teaching, if you look up the definition is about conveying information. And every teacher, every educator, every coach, every leader on this call knows that's like a very small part of their job. And ultimately, their job is about interactions, about the back and forth exchanges that they have each and every day. And the more that we can empower educators to know and understand how to be intentional about those interactions, the more we empower them to use every moment, every literacy moment to enhance children's literacy development, but also the social emotional skills that are going to be exponential in terms of developing their literacy skills. So I think the work that we've done is really about developing tools that help the field researchers, practitioners actually measure those interactions in ways that have developed lots of research. So there's, you know, over 400 studies on this topic, but much more importantly, to help educators around the country really be able to see these interactions in ways that help them be intentional about improving them. And so if we're effective, we're actually helping teachers do the core job that they've been asked to do, teach literacy, but do so in the context and in ways that are naturally enhancing children's social and emotional learning sort of simultaneous. So there's, you know, lots of people, Dave included, who could speak much more eloquently about that than me.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: That was a great segue. David, given that you are deeply immersed in the daily work of schools, can you tell us how your own training in human development has influenced your approach to leading your teams in this space?
[00:07:45] Speaker E: Thank you. Thank you. I was very excited to be on this call webinar with Doctor Henry, Doctor Lee. I'm very excited to have an opportunity to be back with Bridget. We actually co published a book chapter talking about the role of social and emotional learning in teaching learning processes that drive high quality literacy. So this is a good conversation for today, and we're going to talk about a couple of things here. And the question you ask is how human development has grounded my thinking around how we organize and support schools here at the urban assembly. We have 22 schools that are designed by the urban assembly, and we've designed them around these three, really principles of what it means to be a high quality school. One is social emotional development for young people. Two is high quality instruction, which are not unrelated. And then third is preparing young people for college and career. So college and career readiness, post secondary readiness.
And the question you talked about was grounding in developmental context, and Bridget talked about when students were learning her kids were learning to read. I want to talk about when my young children, Elijah and Isaiah, who are 1112 now, but when they weren't learning to read, they were learning to communicate. This is around, like, age two and three. And if there's parents who are in the audience, they can appreciate there's a thing that happens around the two and three year old timeline in which young people develop intention but don't yet have the communication skills to communicate that effectively. And so if anybody's been around young people in that space, when you have things that you want but don't have communication skills to organize those thoughts with language, you get a lot of tantrums, you get a lot of meltdowns, you get a lot of frustrated young people. And so as young people start to map language onto their intention, we see that as communication. And then when we look at the ability to then translate that language into symbols and decode that, we talk about literacy. But at the foundation of literacy is a notion of being able to communicate effectively. Now, when we talk about social and emotional learning, we talk about the process in which young people understand their intention and the intention of others in order to solve problems, which is, like, navigate the world and themselves and the world around them. So when we're thinking about how we organize our schools at the urban assembly, we're organized around this notion that the social and emotional dimensions of learning are what's going to drive how we think about young people in our context. That means, for teachers, we think about, what are the social emotional dimensions of teaching? How do teachers think about misconceptions? How do they manage their own emotions so that they can attend to students effectively? How do teachers think about learning experiences that engage young people in the task for young people, how do we think about the zone of proximal development from Vygotsky? How do you move through that challenging and frustrating space, not only with the presence of a peer or trusted learner, but also your ability to manage your emotions and be aware of them. And so by being aware of these processes, we recognize that we're not teaching literacy per se. We're teaching young people, and we're teaching them how to enhance their communication through the literacy process and through the teaching and learning process. And that's what we try to do at the urban assembly. You know, I use that word try, because every day we try and get better. We try to really think through what kind of professional development that we need. And I'm just very, very excited to be in partnership with folks like Bridget, who have helped us to do that as the best way that we can.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: Thank you all for those insights.
Now from neuroscience, Doctor Mary Ellen and Mordino Yang tells us that Sel and cognition are deeply intertwined, as some of you touched on already, with thinking and feeling as opposite sides of the same coin. And yet it can be a common practice to view these as separate skills, which Bridget touched on some dividing children's school days up into times for literacy work and a separate time for SEO. So I'm curious about this panel's thoughts on why this persists despite strong evidence to the contrary. Doctor Lee, can we start with your thoughts here?
[00:12:19] Speaker C: Well, one of the reasons that I think the ways in which Sel has been taken up in school settings is typically to presume that there's some separate time and space where you teach social and emotional skills, and that social and emotional skills bear no relationship to thinking, to cognition and learning.
One of the reasons that this is a difficult misconception to overcome is because it's been a longstanding.
There has been a body of research affirming that argument that these are sort of separate processes. And particularly, I think, the current work in the neurosciences, much of which has been led by Doctor Mary Helen Emerdino. Yang disputes this. Part of, for example, what they've done, and she's done in a number of studies, has been to some of the work that Doctor Medina de Yang has done. For example, with having, in this case, these were adolescents, to view a story about a situation that had strong emotional salience to it, around ethics and morality, and asked these young people to respond to what they were seeing. And she found that those that once, she found that the regions of the brain that process emotions, that process language, process, you know, perceptions, etcetera, are always in dialogue and interaction with one another. So even this metaphor of opposite sides of the same coin, they're not opposite sides of the same coin. They are directly, always talking to one another. Right. Emerging and understanding that process is challenging.
I also want to make a kind of a distinction between, in terms of, as we think about this issue in relationship to literacy, one of the reasons we also have this separation is sometimes people are thinking that the goal of SEl is to teach kids to manage their emotions.
This goes to another basic kind of misconception, that as we develop through childhood, adolescence, even into adulthood, that we somehow have some stable set of dispositions around how we manage our emotions. We have all been in situations where, on the one hand, we're working very hard to control our emotions and our responses and others, where we just get absolutely pissed and go off, and we are nothing in control of our emotions. So emotional.
The management of emotions, the displays of emotions are not singular. They're not linear. They are highly, highly contextualized.
And part of what we're asking children to learn in thinking about the management of their emotions. And this gets a part of what David was talking about in terms of what emerges, I think, in the opportunities of literacy, particularly the ways in a variety of literacy practices, particularly around narratives, provide opportunities for readers, in this case, children or adolescents, in terms of population. We're thinking about to examine complex situations in our social and cultural life over time that are difficult to wrestle with. And part of learning how to wrestle with complexity is deeply attached to this issue of emotions. But there's also another important dimension, I think, of how emotions come into play and social relationships come into play in terms of literacy. That literacy, I've argued, is an aspect of what I call ill structured problem solving, that when you're reading a text, whether it's a picture book for a very young child or, you know, a more complex text for older children, I argue it's like a jigsaw puzzle. You don't know the end, you don't even know what the problem is. And you're trying to figure out and piece together the problem sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph in a picture book, you know, image by image. You're trying to put together some sense of the whole of what's going on. And that requires an ability to wrestle with uncertainty, right, to begin to navigate tasks for which you don't really know precisely. And that sense of uncertainty can invoke emotions, of a sense of threat, can invoke emotions of a sense of.
And this is also a place where the issue of the relevance of tasks, the relevance of text come into play as to why should I invest the time and energy from an emotional standpoint to engage with the text? That makes no sense, and I have no sense of any relevance, you know, that it has for me. So I do think that the issue of relationships, you know, in classrooms, micro level interactions in classrooms, all matter deeply. But two other dimensions, I think, have to do with the selection of texts and tasks around the question of how do children see the relevance of engaging with the text and the task, and also how we make problem solving explicit. So I think it's important in this work to deal with both these sort of complex issues of social emotional development, but also the complex issues around literacy itself. So Bridget had spoken about, we all just met. So about invoking this term, the science of reading. And this science of reading has come out a great deal in the public sort of discourse with this importance of attention to the systematic teaching of phonics and fluency and basic decoding skills. There's no question that that's absolutely essential, but it is not sufficient for developing deep literacy and comprehension. And among the other challenges in the field, I think, are that most curriculum around ELA curriculum, at least around issues of comprehension, do not make the problem solving process of making sense of a text explicit, but rather ask kids to read text and give outcomes of comprehension. And when the kid can't answer the question, there's a presumption that, you know, they don't have the capacity or whatever it is, which can, again, reinforces social emotional sense of not well being. Right.
But that task of how we make comprehension problem solving explicit is in whole additional area that I think has to be attached to our conversations about the role of Sel in terms of literacy development.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: David, what might you add from your experience?
[00:20:03] Speaker E: Well, I mean, Doctor Lee just talked about this notion of comprehension as one of the end states of high quality literacy, or literate individual as able to understand through text often, but. But not, not exclusively through text. Right. And so one of the key things that I think that's a misconception in the way we think about learning is this notion that we understand through cognitive processes only.
So psychology went through this cognitive revolution after Freud. They're like, you know, if we can't see it, we can't measure it. And they really started to think that, that the predominant kind of experience of the human, or the predominant lens of the human experience was a cognitive lens.
And I think Doctor Imur Yang and a lot of this research is coming out that really, really, really shows us that, in fact, number one, we engage cognitive processes, often to emotional ends. We call this motivated reasoning, where we spend a lot of time reasoning backwards from a cognitive kind of space or correction, an emotional kind of end state that we're trying to achieve. And then we engage all these cognitive processes to say, and this is why I'm going to use language to describe what I'm feeling, right?
So I just want to sit in this space that if we are trying to understand ourselves in the world, that needs to come through a cognitive and social emotional integrative process. If we're trying to understand folks who are making arguments, that needs to come from a cognitive, social and emotional process. If we think that we can sit around and produce young people who can tear down arguments in a debate and think that's going to change our country, that's going to shift the way that we reason and employ discourse. We only need to look at our current political space to recognize that that is not going to be a sufficient answer. As Doctor Lee is talking about. We need to prepare young people to understand the emotional content of interactions in themselves, as well as the cognitive interactions in themselves, so that they understand themselves and the world, and then can engage in these multi layered conversations around, I hear you're feeling x. I recognize those feelings. I recognize maybe these cognitive arguments may not be logical in sequence, but that there's an emotional content to them, that if we attend to those, can solve problems in the social domain and emotional domain helping us and move forward in society. And so I'll just say that one last piece. When we talk about literacy, yes, we were talking about decoding and phonics and being able to have fluency, but we're talking about more than that. We're talking about our ability to communicate ourselves to the world and receive expressive and receptive communication from those around us. And that's where social emotional, cognitive development are interlinked and need to be intertwined in our education system.
[00:23:06] Speaker D: I might just add one thing, which is the question at some level was about what are the barriers? Because we know this. And I imagine if you were at this webinar, you actually believe this to be true, so why is it so hard to change systems? And I think there is a fear of emotion in this conversation. We're using this word emotion all the time. But I can say as a first year teacher, I was teaching first grade, and we assigned, we were reading the book, I think it's called Alexander and the horrible, very bad day. Something like that. And then we had a little sentence starter. Tell me about a day that, you know, really horrible, really bad day you had. I was going around and David had written, I had a horrible, really bad day. The day my parents told me they were getting a divorce. I, as a 21 year old, was totally unprepared for the emotional content. And I think I hadn't been trained on how to deal with my own emotions, much less how to support students emotions. So I think that that fear of emotion, the lack of training, the lack of recognition, and I'll just give one other example of it. A systems level is, as Marnetta and Dave know, our measure. The classroom assessment scoring system has three domains. One of them is called emotional support. And early on, there was a state who told me they couldn't adopt class unless we changed the name emotional support to social support. Why? Just wait for it? They literally said, because the Department of Social Services owns emotions, and we at the Department of Education are not allowed to talk about them.
[00:24:39] Speaker C: Now.
[00:24:39] Speaker D: That was a decade ago. Right. But I think there's still a lot of that fear of using emotions and acknowledging emotions. And we really, and we'll talk about this later, I think, do a disservice to our educators in training them and making that a core part of how we prepare them for the classroom.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: Amen. So much consensus happening in the chat right now.
Thank you.
[00:25:01] Speaker C: Can I just add one small addition? I think it's very important to recognize that these foundational principles about the ways in which emotions, cognitions, perceptions of self, sense of relevance, operate out of physiological processes, of how our brains work is established not by some single study by Mary Helen and Medino Yang, but the whole field across cognitive, social, and affective neurosciences. And if you want to dispute it, then you can go to the brain imaging, where they're showing how in acts of learning, some of which involve textual stuff, all these little part different regions of the brain are interacting and talking with one another and say, that's false, somebody made it up, and it's AI, therefore, you want to reject it. You can do that if you want, and I'll wait to some of the questions later on. But one of the issues that we address in the Castle report, which gets at some of the issues, I think, that David was raising, and that has to do with the civic dimensions of the importance of developing this integrated sense of a whole self as a critical someone critically engaged in literacy.
[00:26:25] Speaker B: Thank you again, people are telling you all to speak louder.
Everything you're saying is resonating very deeply with our attendees.
Let's shift the discussion a little bit to our teachers and staff, which we started talking about. When we look at SEL, we often focus on teachers capacity to foster children's social and emotional skills. Yet with so much effort focused on the impact of SEL on child outcomes, is there an opportunity to address improving teaching quality as well? Teachers can foster children's SEL through explicit instruction and child centered practices, but let's talk about a more implicit focus, programs that emphasize improving the quality of educator child interactions. So, Bridget, what evidence do we have that professional development focused on teachers interactions with children can support both literacy development and sel skills?
[00:27:17] Speaker D: Yeah, so I'm going to take us back 20 years. It was just about 20 years ago. I had less gray hair then.
And we were actually responding to a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences around supporting literacy development in young children and preschoolers. And Bob Pianta and the sort of research group that I was working with at the time submitted a somewhat radical proposal which was, yes, we want to do a literacy intervention, provide educators with a curriculum, a literacy curriculum, but we want to coach them around interactions, not around the specific literacy instructional practices which we know are important. Right. But it was based on this hypothesis that if we help educators see and improve the ways in which they're connecting, developing relationships, engaging, supporting children's self regulation and helping children think, providing feedback, those are all the components of interactions that we focus on, that we would see improvement in literacy scores above and beyond just providing the curricular materials. And we proved that to be true in our original my teaching partner studies, which is a coaching intervention that we developed again about 20 years ago, and there's probably about 30 different studies now that have used my teaching partner across age levels. Dave has used it in his schools, the urban assembly and secondary school. And I think it really does provide this evidence that, again, I don't want to take away the importance of training teachers around the very specific and important skills they need to teach literacy. Right. There's very specific things. However, there is so much that we can do to support every educator in a common understanding of interactions in ways that support learning and development for children across domains. And I think the final thing I'll say about sort of key ingredient that we've seen in this is you can't change what you can't see. And as we've said, educators haven't been given enough training or expertise to know about these interactions. So a core part of my teaching partner, but a lot of the other professional development work that we've done that has an impact, is just giving teachers opportunities to watch others to watch themselves, but also a framework for understanding what they're doing, because often they're actually doing many of the most important things well. They're just not doing them enough. They're not doing them with all the children all the time in the ways that they could be most intentional. So lots of great evidence on the work of coaching and helping teachers reflect on their practice around changing some of this for students.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: Desperation and frequency.
Doctor Lee, how can teacher preparation programs leverage sel to strengthen teacher quality and create deeper understanding of student learning and more effective classroom management?
[00:30:10] Speaker C: So I would make two points. One, there's a special issue of review of research and education that's out now, and it's available open access so you can download it. But there's an article in there that Mary Helen Amardino Yang Nyla Nazir, Pam Cantor wrote in which they reference a study that was conducted looking at the relationship between teachers emotional states they were engaged in teaching and the perceptions that the students, these were high school students, the students had of their teachers and instruction, and found that there was a positive relationship between when teachers had a sense of positive social emotional well being themselves as they engage with the kinds of, you know, unexpected issues that arise that Bridget, you know, had discussed that it does.
There's a relationship between the students perceptions and sense of both emotional well being and outcomes and teachers emotional experiences of their relationship with their students and their tasks. I think the medical model provides a powerful exemplar of how we can provide supports in teacher preparation programs.
And that is to say, you go to medical, you know, you get your undergraduate degree in biology, go to medical school for four years, but you can't go out and just start practicing. You have to work under the auspices and in relationship, actually not simply with an individual mentor, but with a professional community of practice.
Li Ping Ma, who is a math educator, she's from China. She works here, and she wrote a book, the name of which I always keep forgetting, but her name is Li Ping Ma m a last name. And in it, she worked with teachers in China and the US in elementary school. So for an example, were fifth grade teachers who were given the problem of dividing fractions with unlike denominators, teachers in China and the US could both solve the problem. But then when she said, why do you change the operator from division to multiplication? Invert the numerator and denominator, the second fraction. Not one us teacher could explain why I, but every chinese teacher had multiple mathematical explanations. And I asked her, so what accounts for that? What goes on in teacher training? Right? She said, it's not teacher training. She said, it's when you graduate in China from a teacher preparation program and you go into a school, it's like the first year resident going into the hospital. You're not with kids all day. There's a mentor who is working with you in co teaching and helping you design instruction to look at instruction so that there's a mentoring process in the complexity. Because I don't, while I think there is technical knowledge in human development, we don't do enough in terms of preparation, human development for teacher preparation programs, deep knowledge, deep understanding of the content that you're supposed to be teaching. But that technical knowledge in and of itself is not sufficient to know when you're in the world of practice as a medical doctor, no matter how sophisticated your medical knowledge, every patient that you interact with is an individual, with individual differences along multiple dimensions that you've got to figure out. And I think the issue is how we set that up. Linda Darling Hammond wrote a book called the Flat World in Education back in the 1990s, where she documented the differences in how we prepare, how teachers are prepared in other parts of the world in comparison to the United States. So we certainly have empirical evidence that that kind of model of long term mentoring, and I would also add works, but also would add Japan's use of lesson study. So Japan is, again, a case where it's not just what goes on in the teacher preparation university experience, but once you come into a school, that school is a learning community where teachers are doing what Bridget said, they are examining their own practice. And ironically, this is in a country with a national curriculum, national assessments.
They don't have anything of the range of choices that we have in our decentralized system here. But despite that fact, in every school, it doesn't matter whether you're in a rural school or a school in the middle of Tokyo. Teachers understand that part of the identity in teaching is that you're going to come into a community that is humble enough to study its own practices.
And I want to just also add that this whole dimension of what we're looking at is that the work we're doing involves both deep understanding of human development, but also a deep understanding of how people learn and deep understanding of the disciplines in terms of literacy that we are teaching. And that you can have great interactions, you can have great social relationships with kids. Kids can love you and feel great and learn little or nothing.
And as you progress through the grades, this becomes much more challenging when you particularly get in middle school and high school, where now you're reading in science, you're reading in social studies, you're reading in ELA, and the demands of those tasks become very different.
[00:36:27] Speaker B: Some of the people are really resonating and enjoying these gems that everyone is providing in this session, one question from the chat was regarding around the well being you were talking about. The question is, what do you do if a teacher has a negative sense of well being, which affects not only the children, but most of all, the environment and climate? Who would like to respond to that question?
[00:36:56] Speaker E: Well, I'll turn over to Bridget because this is her expertise as well as Doctor Lee. But if a teacher has a negative sense of well being that's impacting the classroom climate, it's impacting students learning as per the class. Positive climate is one of the dimensions of high quality instruction or part of the teaching learning process. So again, I just think we need to really think about integrating the idea of how students learn and students learn in a cognitive and a social and emotional way. And so to the extent that a teacher is disconnected from a student, she may be less likely to be able to attend to misconceptions. She may be less likely to give students wait time so that the student is able to think through an idea, that teacher may be less likely to be able to give the kind of verbal support that allows students to engage in a difficult task. It's less to me about, like, is a teacher in a good space or a bad space? And it's more to me about, like, how does that space interact with the student space in order to drive learning in the classroom? And so some of this, in terms of emotional regulation is like, how might a teacher who is in a difficult space still engage in the kinds of interactions that help drive learning? And I will say that there are sort relationships between an emotional space and your ability and willingness to do something like take the perspective of a student in order to create kind of feedback loops, build on their response, and redirect effectively back to the objective. So I'll let the experts speak to this, but those are the things that pop out to me, that it's not so much emotional space. It's like what you do with that emotional space in terms of teaching learning.
[00:38:42] Speaker B: Interactions, you sounded pretty much like you understood.
[00:38:47] Speaker D: I think the only thing I might add to it is just, you know, making sure that we enter this space, especially in this moment, with just deep empathy for the hard work of teaching. Right. An acknowledgement that, you know, just as I was talking about sort of educators fears of emotion or policymakers fears of emotions that we often, who intersect, whether we're leaders or coaches, aren't making space for that emotional content well being of the teachers themselves. So I think, you know, some of the interventions, there's a great intervention called care Jennings has developed, which is a mindfulness based intervention. It's not actually, you know, the amazing thing about that intervention is teachers say so. It's mindfulness training for teachers. They say, this is the first time I've ever had any professional learning experience that is just about me, that recognizes if you invest in me as an educator and help me be a better sort of more balanced, that it will have benefit for my practice and student outcomes, which they've proven. So I think just making sure we as a sort of society are better, recognizing how we're supporting the well being of educators is certainly top of my mind.
[00:39:51] Speaker B: I love that, Bridget. Thank you.
So, with that understanding, I'd like to discuss what strategies leaders can use to support educators positive impact on their students, particularly how school leaders can model their own social emotional competencies. How can leaders create school cultures where caring, trusting relationships are embedded in classroom routines, curriculum, and instruction? David, could you share your thoughts and experiences here? What are some examples of how SEl can be modeled throughout the day in the classrooms, staff meetings, and professional learning opportunities?
[00:40:24] Speaker E: That's a great question. And so the first thing that we need to, to recognize, and Bridget talked about this earlier, is that we need to elevate these processes to a space where people can name them and recognize them when they happen. You asked a question earlier. One of the challenges of why social emotional learning is sometimes separated from cognitive learning is because it's such a highly internal process, especially in the emotional space. It's not obvious to a young person that you can distinguish anger from angry in terms of behavior. It's not obvious that unless there's a monologue, including in literature, that a young person can learn the emotional vocabulary that allows them to reason through their emotional state. And Doctor Lee talked about this a little bit earlier. We think in words, we reasoned language. So without a language, it is difficult to reason through your social emotional processes, and you just feel them. And then we go back to being two years old, right. Without a language to communicate, then we just feel and then react to those feelings. So let me just ground the importance of developing specific vocabulary and language is about reasoning through emotional processes, not just watching models of emotional processes that may be destructive or constructive. Right. So that's the first thing I want to speak to that space.
So, secondly, when we're thinking about organizing schools, we need to think about a couple of things. One, as I just mentioned, how are these social and emotional processes being taught to students? And when I say taught, I'm gonna go back to Doctor Lee here. In the developmental states, modeling is also something that young people and most people learn from.
Transfer of skills is one of the ways that we understand how learning happens. So while direct instruction is one of the ways we kind of think about social and emotional learning, if we take learning as its kind of developmental grounding, we know theres modeling, theres feedback, theres facilitation, there are sequences of skill development theres activation, there's automaticity. All these things matter in the ability to access these skills effectively and then demonstrate competence around these skills. So in long story short, schools need to do these things explicitly and intentionally for young people to develop. We need to teach social emotional skills. We need to give students opportunities to activate and practice those social emotional skills. We need to have teachers and adults modeling those social emotional skills with intentionality, which means that they have conscious skill around what they are doing and the processes they're using to do it. We need language to name when these social emotional processes are happening.
The difference between a student hearing from a teacher, I know the assignment might be frustrating, but I'm sure that you can push through it. And a teacher, just like walking away from a student as they are beside themselves in frustration because of a math problem, is a huge difference.
And so when we organize these structures, students will learn better, and they will learn how to understand their own learning better. They will be able to generalize this learning into new content when they're not necessarily facilitated by a guiding or trusting adult.
And our society will be stronger because young people will come from our public schools and all schools with the kind of social emotional cognitive skills that we need them to solve the kinds of problems of the 21st century and beyond.
[00:44:13] Speaker B: Wow. Lots of love for you in the chat.
Yeah, again, really just speaking to everyone in this session, Doctor Lee or Bridget, is there anything else you'd like to add here?
[00:44:27] Speaker C: Well, I think that much of this work is grounded in some foundational principles about human learning and development, not only in relationship to children and adolescents, but adults.
So the extent to which Lee Shulman did some work many years ago on what he called the caring professions, professions in which the essence of the work was about giving to others.
And I think that efforts, in terms of school leadership, of thinking about not just things we do to teachers and with kids, but what does it mean to develop opportunities as a school community for families and teachers to interact with one another and to come to one and know one another on personal basis. You know what I mean? As human beings.
The recognition that when teachers are facing challenges in their classrooms for which they don't feel prepared to respond, that it makes them feel that there's a sense of threat in that experience. Right.
And how do we create a relationships within the school community where teacher learning is socialized as a positive characteristic or trait, rather than you don't know how to do something, and I'm going to tell you how to do it. Right.
And I would also keep wanting to reiterate for me how intimate this issue of making problem solving processes explicit, whether it's on the pedagogical side with we do with children, or pedagogical side in terms of how teachers learn to engage with the multiple problems that are going to emerge every day.
And we do this, you know, that parenting is a form of ill structured problem solving. You can't, you know, you all have kids. I have grandkids, some of whom are grown to you can't control and anticipate, you know, there's no doctor Spock book that you can read as a parent that's going to tell you in every moment what you're supposed to do. You're trying to got to understand the personality of this young person that you have a responsibility for. And if you're a parent, maybe you have two kids, five, maybe you have ten or 15, you don't have 30 or you don't have 250, you know, if you're teaching in high school. So the need for multiple opportunities that the school community, in terms of leadership, organizes to support teachers in understanding the nature of the challenges they have, the supports that are there, but being able, at the same time, of monitoring their own development, their own sense of well being, and even knowing what's as a principal or school leader, and knowing your staff well enough to know when they're facing challenges in their own personal lives out of school that are going to come into play and make them more fragile at some point or another and build what it means to really build a strong school community of adults who love one another as professionals and have support in doing the hard work that they're doing. And my last little comment is, I could be the teacher and say, I know you can do this. I'm absolutely confident you can do it. But if I'm the kid and I know I can't do it, you're telling me and pat me on the back, there's not going to be any help. But if you can show me, this is how you work through the process. Like I tell people all the time, if you want to learn how to make your grandma's or your granddaddy's, you know, pound cake, him or her giving you the recipe is not sufficient, and telling you, I know you follow what I got on this little card, you can make my cake, and my cake don't come out like grandma's or grandpa's cake, but grandma, grandpa's got to be sitting next to you saying they'll touch the butter and see whether or not beat the batter and look for those bubbles. And it's that ability to provide support both for teachers as kids are engaged in complex problem solving, but equally for coaches or whoever's supporting teachers in that same process of seeing, that's where the videotaping and the light becomes so, so important of seeing these little small moments. And I will say, finally, I said anything, I've been in the profession 58 years.
You don't have gray hair. I got gray hair.
I have a room full of videotapes because I've videotaped in lots of work, not only other teachers, but myself teaching. And I can look at these tapes from 20 years ago and every time I look at it, I see something that I didn't see in the moment that I can learn from and that disposition to understand that there are always these complex, wonderful opportunities to learn by studying, practice, and to value that as a fundamental aspect of your identity as an individual professional and as a leader, to be able to create that kind of environment, you know, in a school and a district leader, of being able to create that kind of environment in a district.
[00:50:17] Speaker B: Thank you so much for that.
I do want to tell the attendees, we see all your wonderful questions in the chat. We promise to follow up with resources, research, information and guidance from our panelists, but just for the time that we have, can't get all of those wonderful questions answered today I saw a really good one and I was like, oh, I know that will take us over time just to respond, so know that we will follow up with that. A huge thank you to our esteemed panelists. Thank you again, Bridget, Doctor Lee and David, and thank you to all of you who took the time to attend today. We genuinely appreciated your presence and engagement. I hope you have a great rest of your day.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: We hope you enjoyed hearing from this panel. If you're looking for more ways to support your team of educators, we recommend checking out Teachstone's new new free ebook, three steps to empower an educator workforce. The supportive Leaders guide to building and retaining an energized team, which we've linked in the show notes today. We hope you enjoy and we will see you next time.
