NURTURING THE SOCIAL & EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING OF OUR STUDENTS

Between a global pandemic and national unrest, there’s no better time to “choose love.”

By Sarah Wyllie, Kindergarten Teacher

In 2019, a team of Lower School faculty came together to brainstorm the essential components of a strong social-emotional learning (SEL) program with the goal of finding a curriculum that would best meet our students’ needs while aligning with our mission and our Core Values. Through faculty surveys and interviews, we found that teachers wanted common language and practices that could be threaded throughout grade levels with increasing complexity at different ages.

After a thorough search, we landed on Choose Love, founded by Scarlett Lewis, who pursued this work after losing her son in a school shooting. Inspired by a message he had written on a chalkboard, reading “nurturing, healing, love,” she realized that love, connection, and belonging are universal wants and needs that connect all of humanity, and that perhaps, if the shooter had received more of that, there may never have been such a tragedy. Lewis worked with educators, child psychologists, and neuroscientists to build a program rooted in the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) framework of five core competencies: self-awareness, selfmanagement, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Her son’s message of “nurturing, healing, love” led to the creation of the Choose Love formula and drives her mission to provide a no-cost, life span SEL and Character Development program for schools.

Sharing the love with our dedicated cleaning staff.

Choose Love incorporates the latest findings from neuroscience and positive psychology research into lessons that teach mindfulness, character, and emotional intelligence. An essential component that sets Lewis’s program apart from others is how it teaches students about the brain and the science behind their feelings and emotions. This builds self-awareness and metacognitive skills and helps students understand how our emotions and body are connected. Having the whole Lower School focused on the same topic helped to enforce a common language that will only strengthen over the years. It also proved to be a nice way for faculty to connect across grade levels as we devoted staff meetings to reflecting and sharing out at the end of each unit. We already have ideas on how to further these cross-grade connections.

Though our preparations were well underway, we decided to wait until the fall of 2020 to launch the curriculum. The reimagined, pandemic-related learning environment in which we found ourselves prompted us to step back and be more intentional in our instruction and discussion probes. With students assigned to tightly knit cohorts for the 2020-2021 school year, and in and out of remote learning, it was critical to spend ample time building a safe environment and nurturing strong connections.

We started the school year with a special unit, entitled “Brave New World,” which was designed to address the unrest our country and world were facing. These lessons helped students navigate the challenge of making connections across physical distance. After reading While We Can’t Hug by Eoin McLaughlin, Kindergartners brainstormed and practiced ways to show one another care and respect without physical touch. In Grade 4, students were inspired to make Compassion Art after reading The Art of Miss Chew by Patricia Polacco. While some students chose to be more abstract, one student drew her grandfather who died last winter.

Each quarter, we immersed ourselves in a component of the Choose Love formula. The lessons in each unit were guided by four key elements (see below) and comprised thoughtful discussions, meditations, exercises of mindfulness, self-reflective activities such as journaling, and partner and group activities.

Along with Choose Love, the Lower School also implemented Building Blocks, an anti-bias curriculum, this fall. During the first weeks of school, teachers discovered how naturally the two curriculums complemented one another. Both programs began with a strong focus on building a safe and comfortable classroom environment and both led to understanding the concept of courage. We seamlessly made connections to the Building Blocks unit of “Understanding My Strengths, Skills, and Identity.” Grade 1 spent the year exploring courage by incorporating a Building Blocks unit on “Understanding and Appreciating Differences” and bringing it full circle with Choose Love’s unit on compassion. Integrating the two programs is fostering dialogue, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills necessary for the 21st century. The dialogue we have been having in our classrooms is empowering students to be participants in the global community as we take these units and apply them to our social studies curriculum, thus working to build intercultural competencies.

Brimmer PK friends making “worry monsters.”

Brimmer’s student-centered community is one that supports the whole child, thus nurturing the social and emotional well-being of our students. By “Choosing Love” we are strengthening our commitment to our Core Values, which are central to our School’s mission. As our mission statement says, we are a student-centered community that develops learners who are informed, engaged, and ethical citizens in our diverse world. ■

Brimmer PK friends making “worry monsters.”

Choose Love Curriculum: Four Key Elements

Courage

The willingness and ability to work through obstacles despite feeling embarrassment, fear, reluctance, or uncertainty.

Gratitude

Mindful thankfulness and the ability to be thankful even when things in life are challenging.

Forgiveness

Choosing to let go of anger and resentment toward yourself or someone else, to surrender thoughts of revenge, and to move forward with your personal power intact.

Compassion in Action

Both the understanding of a problem or the suffering of another and acting to solve the problem or alleviate the suffering.