SEL Today - Issue 1

New publication from the American Consortium for Equity in Education, publisher of the Equity & Access PreK-12 Journal

Visit our new website at SELtoday.org IN THIS

ISSUE

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Prioritizing SEL During the Hiring Process Navigating Trauma in a Post-Covid World How SEL Can Transform Alternative Schools Three Predictions for Special Education

10 Questions Principals Should Ask Teachers During the Hiring Process to Prioritize Social-Emotional Learning

By Joshua Bobrow & Brandon Frame

During these challenging times in which gross racial injustice and a pandemic have contributed to our collective trauma, one thing is increasingly clear: high-quality SEL is needed inside our classrooms.

SEL articulates asset-based developmental outcomes central to advancing equity and trauma-informed work when implemented intentionally and through an anti-racist lens.

Therefore, it is critical and prudent for school leaders to ensure that newly hired teachers are

invested in the social-emotional skills they will need in order to grow as educators, can model it themselves, and integrate it in the classroom.

For a number of reasons, many teachers are not formally exposed to SEL (e.g. not every graduate school program for education prioritizes SEL or a teacher might be coming from a school that didn’t prioritize it)- however, teachers must at least have a willingness to learn about SEL and demonstrate the capacity to teach with SEL in mind.

Here are 10 questions that school leaders can ask potential new teachers to ensure that their community fosters resiliency and integrates SEL in all school spaces.

10. How does your pedagogical philosophy relate to our school’s belief that all learning is social and emotional?

Inquiring about a teacher’s pedagogical philosophy will let you better understand their instructional mindsets and to what extent they have integrated SEL into those mindsets.

9. How do you consistently model social and emotional skills in and out of the classroom?

Provide examples in both instructional and non-instructional spaces.

By posing this question, you can gauge the degree to which a teacher sees themselves as a role model and member of the community in all school spaces.

8. How do you center relationships with students in your classroom? Provide examples.

Asking this question can help you see how a teacher prioritizes forming trusting relationships, which is the foundation of learning partnerships.

7. How do you concretely develop social-emotional skills like problem-solving and effective collaboration through your content?

By asking this question, you are better able to gauge the likelihood that higher order thinking and interpersonal skills will be developed in a teacher’s classroom.

6. How do you view the role of social and emotional skills in your classroom?

By asking a teacher about their view of social and emotional skills and how that impacts the classroom, you’re better able to infer what their teaching and interactions will and won’t include.

5. What does social-emotional learning mean to you and your teaching?

You want to learn a teacher’s general grasp of SEL and how past experiences have shaped their understanding of the relationship between social-emotional development, teaching, and academic outcomes.

4. Equity roots more deeply in our school by developing related social-emotional skills like respecting difference and constructive problem-solving. How do social-emotional skills serve equity in your opinion?

Equity and SEL go hand-in-hand, so you should inquire about a teacher’s familiarity with and commitment to equity and SEL, and how the two relate and show up in their classroom.

3. Take a look at the adult layers of these social-emotional indicators. What are your two strengths and which is your greatest area of development? Tell us about them.

Asking a teacher to respond to specific indicators can illuminate their ability to be

reflective and can serve to determine if a teacher’s skills will complement the team’s social-emotional areas of strength and growth.

2. How do you respond to another teacher who says it’s not their job to teach social and emotional skills through their content?

By asking this question, you can gauge a teacher’s interpersonal skills, persuasive abilities, and to what extent a teacher will be an advocate for SEL integration.

1. What is your level of comfort to give and receive feedback around social and emotional strengths and areas for growth? Please provide examples of when you’ve effectively given and received feedback.

Feedback is essential to SEL. By asking about it, you can learn about a teacher’s ability to internalize feedback and provide supportive feedback to others around SEL. School leaders across the country are increasingly prioritizing SEL in the interviewing process. Johanie Hernandez, Principal of the

Brandon Frame is Director of Social-Emotional Learning at the Urban Assembly.

Urban Assembly Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice integrates direct SEL questioning into her interview process to ensure that potential hires have a desire to advance the social-emotional development of students and themselves. Working with the Urban Assembly SEL Team’s Resilient Scholars Program, Principal Hernandez has built a flexible school community where adults genuinely and vulnerably model SEL and harness these skills in young people. This focus has allowed for the school’s climate to flourish and for the law-themed school to advance academic outcomes.

Exploring these 10 questions with potential teacher hires (and adapting them when hiring non-instructional staff) increases your ability to hire someone who is willing to develop their social-emotional skills while implementing them in their classroom.

To advance SEL in schools, school leaders should hire staff that is open to feedback, values collaboration, sees opportunities in and beyond the classroom to nurture relationships and be part of a community, and understands that adults have to be willing to evolve alongside our students. We can’t ask our students to do what we ourselves are not willing to do.

Joshua Bobrow is Deputy Director of Social-Emotional Learning at the Urban Assembly.

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NAVIGATING TRAUMA IN A POST-COVID WORLD How SEL Can Help Students Cope

By Jill McVey, PhD, research scientist, ACT

WHAT IS TRAUMA? Given the disruptions that we have all experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are becoming more aware of the effect that trauma can have on school, work, and home life. Any experience that causes intense physical or psychological stress reactions can be considered trauma. Traumatic events can be isolated, like the loss of a loved one, or things that happen over time, such as bullying or poverty. It’s important to note that while there are certain events that most of us would find to be traumatic, ultimately, it’s the person’s perceptions of the event that matter.

Additionally, it is also possible for a person to experience what’s known as secondary trauma – a reaction from witnessing a traumatic event or learning about it happening to someone else.

TRAUMA-INFORMED PRACTICES As we grapple as a society with systemic racism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and ongoing political unrest, we need to have a way to help our students cope with these events and any other hardships they may be experiencing.

Trauma-informed practices in schools provide a framework for understanding and responding to different types of trauma. Despite the perception that trauma is rare, it is estimated that at least half to two-thirds of children have experienced trauma in their lives.

Past (or present) trauma can affect students by making it more likely for their fight or flight response to be activated, since experiencing trauma has an effect on the brain.

This means that students may often be in a heightened state of watchfulness (“on alert”) without realizing it. In addition to reacting to things that others may not notice, students who are constantly on alert may struggle to focus on schoolwork. Trauma has been associated with difficulties in emotional regulation; difficulty forming or maintaining social relationships; and difficulties in school.

Fortunately, you do not need to know the details about a student’s trauma – or even if they have experienced it – in order to provide a foundation to help them cope. Understanding how trauma can affect students and having strategies to provide a safe and positive environment are important pieces of trauma-informed practices. As part of Mosaic™

by ACT® SEL professional development program, Powerful Educator, we focus on three main tenets of trauma-informed practice: safety, relationships, and coping skills.

SAFETY A safe environment is one in which students can depend upon consistency, which includes a predictable schedule along with adults on whom the student can rely. A feeling of safety at school is important for all students, but additional supports may be needed for students who have experienced trauma, such as advanced warnings about transitions or changes to routines. A focus on positive student behaviors, instead of negative ones, can also help foster a sense of safety.

RELATIONSHIPS Relationships are likewise critical to building a safe environment and helping students who have experienced trauma. Positive and supportive teacher-student relationships are important in myriad student outcomes. To name a few, strong teacher-student relationships are associated with increased student engagement, inclusion, and belonging, as well as increased attendance and achievement. For the student with trauma, strong relationships can help them feel secure and be less likely to be “on alert,” freeing up space for them to focus on learning.

COPING SKILLS Finally, helping students develop coping skills for managing thoughts and emotions can help lay the groundwork for developing healthy behaviors in response to stress. In addition to teaching students healthy coping strategies (which can be as simple as pausing and taking a deep breath, like this song from the TV series “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” introduces), model these behaviors in the classroom. For example, naming feelings and appropriately dealing with them: “I’m feeling really frustrated that I can’t get my computer to connect to the projector! I’m going to take a deep breath, and I’ll try again a little later.”

TRAUMA-INFORMED PRACTICES CAN HELP The COVID-19 pandemic has created a tumultuous time for all of us, and as a result, many of us are considering the role of trauma for the first time. Creating a safe environment, building positive relationships, and equipping students with skills needed to navigate uncomfortable emotions will go a long way toward a healthy learning environment for all students, regardless of their personal experiences with trauma.

For additional resources & information about trauma-informed practices, please visit our website or register to view a recording of our webinar.

SEL Can be Transformational for Alternative Schools

Here’s how our 50-student alternative high school in Wyoming is building trust, graduating more students, and cultivating more collegeand workforce-ready youngsters with the 7 Mindsets SEL curriculum.

By Ceatriss Wall and Elisa Harrison Students come to our school for many differentreasons, but mostly it’s because traditional high school just isn’t a good fit for them. A Title I school (based on socioeconomic status), Pathfinder High School serves about 50 students in grades 9-12 and has four core teachers and one special education teacher.

Our district borders the Wind River Indian Reservation and we have Native American students who attend our school and/or our district.

Five years ago, when we joined the Pathfinder team, we knew we had our work cut out for us.

For many of our students, school has always been thought as something that the law requires—and not something that they really want to do or partake in. Many of these children

think there’s just no good reason to be here.

Knowing this, we spent a year figuring out our school’s goals, who our students were, and what their needs were.

Our students come to school with big shoulders, and a lot of times they're carrying the weight of the world on those shoulders.

Academically speaking, many of them had difficulties functioning and focusing on their work. They just had too much going on in their personal, family, and social lives to be able to concentrate on school and academics took the back burner in their lives.

Wanting to help turn that tide, we learned about the 7 Mindsets social emotional learning (SEL) curriculum at a community event. We

immediately saw it as a resource that could give our kids a chance to not be victims, and to have both voice and choice in their learning and life in general. We started using the 7 Mindsets curriculum that year and started to see instant benefits. Over time, that list of “wins” has only continued to grow.

Here are the top four ways the 7 Mindsets curriculum has changed our school: 1. Higher graduation rates Our graduation rates have gone from 58% to 77% since we started using our SEL curriculum just 30 minutes per week for every student in grades 9-12. The first year that we used 7 Mindsets, we did our surveys and research and learned that students had the most growth with the “Live to Give” mindset, which teaches us that abundance in one’s life is a cycle, and that to get love, respect, and financial security, we must learn to give those things. This year, we’ve seen

the most growth within the “100% Accountable,” mindset, which states that we are not victims of our past, our future is not predetermined, and our lives are what we choose from this moment onward. At the beginning of the school year students take a pretest and then take the same test at the end of the year regarding the 7 Mindsets and how the mindsets apply to their lives. 93% of the students reported that they had a positive experience and 60% said that they absolutely loved it and learned from it. It’s helping our kids assume accountability for their lives, graduate from high school, and go on to be successful in college and/or the workforce.

2. Creating new opportunities for students The payoff for that 30 minutes a week of SEL has been significant. It's led to us being able to do all sorts of very cool things, like building relationships with teachers and project-based learning in the classrooms. Our kids are going to college, attending summer camps, and exploring opportunities that they never would

have dreamed of applying for previously. For our class of 2021, 10 out of our 14 graduates were enrolled in college by graduation. They had their class schedules selected, their FAFSA forms filled out, and they were ready to rock and roll. Another four students were ready to hit the workforce out of a class that previously would have only posted a 58% graduation rate.

3. Building trust in the classroom We use our SEL curriculum for 30 minutes a week with every student. We don’t teach everyone at once. Instead, we break the sessions into classes and allow the kids to build trust with the specific group of students that they're interacting with. This helps them be vulnerable because the conversations that they have after discussing the mindsets can be both tough and emotional. If you have it with a group of 50 students in a gym, it's just not going to have the same impact as having that group of kids you're with each week sharing with each other and being vulnerable. Even the student who initially sat at the back of the class with his

or her arms crossed, determined not to participate, is taking part in those vulnerable, trust-based conversations by the end of the school year.

4. No one thinks of it as a place where the “bad kids” go In our little town, Pathfinder High School was always looked upon as the place where the “bad kids” go when they can no longer attend traditional high schools. That sentiment has totally changed. When we’re out in the community, people say, "Oh, I see that you're from Pathfinder." It's a source of pride and strength for our staff and for the students. This year we've incorporated, "You’ve graduated” to the Main Street banners that we hang for our kids and their families. We're now included in everything the traditional high school does, including a large billboard telling our students how grateful they were that they graduated or congratulating them. These are things that would have never happened just five years ago.

In conjunction with the 7 Mindsets, our students

American Consortium for Equity in Education

are taught how to self-regulate emotions and feelings that can interfere with their daily academic learning. 100% of the students who attend our weekly Brain Change group, report that they understand why they can’t think clearly and how to change that. They use the regulation tools they have been taught, including the regulation room. 71% of the students who use the regulation room are ready to return to class after ten minutes and be productive in their academic classwork.

All students and their families experienced hardships during the COVID-19 pandemic, a traumatic event that made the social emotional welfare of our students more important than ever. With the 7 Mindsets’ focus on positivity and focus in our corner, we were able to keep helping students focus on what they can do and how they can positively change their lives. The fact that 95% have told us that they love the SEL curriculum and think we should keep using it is proof enough for us.

Ceatriss Wall, principal at Pathfinder High School in Lander, Wyoming.

Elisa Harrison, counselor at Pathfinder High School in Lander, Wyoming.

Three Predictions for Special Education Note: A reliable therapy platform (not videoconferencing) is key

The pandemic has catalyzed likes being on the computer, so talking Integrating Technology to me through the computer and using a rethinking of how we do headphones at home really broke down Support into the Classroom school, and some of the pos- those hurdles.”

The online modality can be integrated sibilities bring opportunities seamlessly into the classroom, and Schools will need to diversify their serIRU VWXGHQWV DQG VWD΍ WR JHW vice delivery model in order to meet that matters. Today’s children are digital learners, and technology can open the most out of a school day. students where they are—which includes meeting each individual’s needs up personalized experiences with ΖQ WKH ȴHOG RI VSHFLDO HGXSRZHUIXO EHQHȴWV 5HVHDUFK KDV DOVR and putting in place a sustainable and shown there is stigma associated with cation and related services, nimble solution for school days that “pulling” students for therapy sessions.

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Designing for Today’ s Maine School Administrative District complex puzzle—and many 75 found that a simple video conferWorkforce are embracing it. encing tool was not enough.

“Our skepticism for using an online platform to serve students quickly turned into appreciation,” said Ellen Biller, director of special education for Page County Public Schools in Virginia.

Looking ahead, the needs will be bigger, PRUH YDULHG DQG UHTXLUH JUHDWHU ȵH[Lbility. Here are the three predictions on the future of special education:

Diversifying Services

One of the key learnings during the pandemic was in how technology brings HɝFLHQFLHV :LWK DQ RQOLQH WKHUDS\ solution, some members of the schoolbased team no longer need to travel from home to school or from school to school. Instead they can spend more time working with students.

“Teletherapy can help to ensure that clinicians are “He was always very spending their time in clinically-directed resistant to working activities, which is together in class,” she really the best use of said. “When we started the district’s budget,” said Kristim Martinez, working this year with M.A., CCC-SLP, clinical PresenceLearning, he was director, SLP & OT, able to attend. He likes PresenceLearning.

According to a 2020 RAND Corp study, two in 10 districts have already adopted being on the computer, or are considering a Remote work can virtual school model. so talking to me through also be a solution for Others are embracthe computer and using mitigating personnel ing hybrid learning. shortages, which have headphones at home Among various long plagued special reasons, district really broke down those education programs. leaders cite growing hurdles.” demand—and for “We’ve always good reason. DeboVWUXJJOHG ZLWK VWD΍ rah Daugherty, lead speech-language leaving our rural area to work in the pathologist (SLP) in Chatham County Schools, described some students who metropolitan parts of the state,” said Mike Lowers, executive director of the ȵRXULVKHG XVLQJ RQOLQH WKHUDS\ 2QH Central Kansas Coop in Education. student who has autism spectrum “But having the PresenceLearning disorder (ASD) stood out. therapy platform has allowed us to “He was always very resistant to working retain those clinicians by converting them to remote employees.“ together in class,” she said. “When we

“There is a huge variety of interactive games and tools on the PresenceLearning platform, all of which keep the students eager to participate in therapy,” said Karen Totman, a schoolbased speech-language pathologist (SLP) for the district. $ ȴQDO DUHD WR NHHS DQ H\H RQ LV GHploying technology to bridge public/ private partnerships. With evaluations and equitable services conducted online, a public school team can meet their requirements to support private school students in their district.

“Innovation is happening in special education,” said Kate Eberle Walker, CEO of PresenceLearning. “We’ve talked to a lot of school leaders, and many of them are adding technology into their services with equity and access in mind. Schools have seen clearly how an online therapy solution can personalize WKH H[SHULHQFH IRU VWXGHQWV DQG VWD΍ ȋ

Learn More

If your school district is considering adding online services into your school model, schedule a free consultation today.

started working this year with PresenceLearning, he was able to attend. He

presencelearning.com

We’re excited to announce the launch of

As our equity work has evolved during (and now continuing through) the pandemic, more and more we’re seeing how SEL and equity are tied together. School districts are increasingly requiring every product to take student and faculty SEL needs into consideration, and companies are responding to this important need.

Hence, our new website: SELtoday.org.

Our goals are simple: • To provide a place where thought leaders and researchers in the industry have a voice—a loud one—about the critical work they’re doing in SEL to meet the needs of school districts across the country.

• To continually highlight the good work of PreK-12 educators who are making SEL a key part of a holistic educational process in every subject for every student at every school, every day. s the experts at E said, E is relevant for all students in all schools and affirms diverse cultures and backgrounds. All students bring to school their identities, strengths, values, lived experiences, and culture. SEL ... uplifts and promotes understanding of the assets of diverse individuals and communities."

You just can't have one without the other. Equity and SEL. We will include an SEL Today section in every issue of the journal going forward. We hope you’ll also stop by and visit the new website. And, of course, if you’d like to get involved in any way, we’d love to hear from you!

Thank you, Larry & Maia