SEL Its not about the Solar System
hi
i’m caitlin kaiser and i’m so excited to
talk to you today about social and
emotional learning
during my first year as a teacher i
remember getting a phone call from my
brother luke
luke at the time was attending a
specialized high school for students
with disabilities
and he is the youngest of my six
siblings and the only boy
he’s such a ham he usually opens up
these daily phone calls with
how is my best best sister doing and we
all know he calls each of us his number
one sister
but on this particular day he wasn’t his
chipper and i know he had a bad day at
school
but when i asked him what was going on
to tell me more about it
he didn’t say anything he was silent and
he finally said kate
i hate the solar system i thought what
does science have to do with a rough day
at school
after some questioning i understood that
it wasn’t about the planets or the stars
that he was projecting this frustration
onto
what is more so about a connection he
was missing
with his peers and with the teacher in
the room
it’s something that i’ve kept in mind as
an educator since then
remembering that relationships come
first
working with the youth population is an
incredible and unique profession
whether it’s working in the classroom as
a teacher like i had been
or on a school campus as an
administrator there’s working with the
out-of-school time programs as a
counselor or
coach and there’s folks on an
interdisciplinary team that work to
support the overall health and wellness
of a student
there are so many different roles in
supporting our young people
truly because it does take a village
like with any other profession there are
day-to-day challenges in education
and prior to the pandemic some of those
challenges might have sounded like
where is your homework or what time is
that assembly today
wondering how that lesson just did not
go as planned
and being asked constantly is this for a
grade
it almost always is but there is one
challenge that separates this profession
apart and that is that it’s almost
impossible to separate a student’s
academic needs from that of their social
and emotional needs
it’s interesting because education is
one of those few professions that we go
home
worrying about somebody else’s kid
whether it’s are they going to study for
this test and do their homework in order
to raise their grade
or if you worked with a population like
i did i’m wondering
are they going to eat dinner and
breakfast before i see them again
tomorrow
or do they have some way to wash that
dirty uniform
as a teacher i want to spend the answers
the time on the answers to these
questions because i know that it impacts
how my kids are going to be when they
come through my door
but the reality is other instructional
tasks take precedence
there is a disconnect from the expected
outcome of instruction
and the process in which it takes to
produce those results
this expected outcome of instruction
high test scores
increasing student data outweighs the
process
in which it takes to cultivate all of
the skills our students need to be
successful
from their academic skills to their
social skills
to regulating their emotions and we need
to shift the way that we talk about
student success
to include these social and emotional
skills in order for our students to be
academically successful and personally
successful
teachers are under pressure to maximize
instructional time within the classroom
and to reduce discipline referrals and
to address
major concerns before they become major
tragedies
that we hear about in the news teachers
are under pressure to maintain their own
health and wellness as well as
advocating for that of their students
and now as we enter the new part of the
school year in 2020
there are new learning environments that
we have to navigate all of this
creates pressure and stress on a teacher
and if a student is unable to navigate
their environment
time is taken away from that instruction
further adds to the stress
so the good news is if we make time for
this there is a systematic
research-based way of approaching it
called social and emotional learning
but first one of my daily challenges one
school year was working with a former
student of mine named charles
charles is this little pipsqueak of a
first grader who could not reach the
back of the sink in our classroom
could not find anything in his messy
desk
charles struggled to follow all of our
rules and our procedures in the
classrooms
he was constantly in confrontation with
his peers
and he was performing well below grade
level on all subject areas
for charles when i redirected him he
oftentimes became very upset and
frustrated
would shut down and disrupt all of the
classmates in our environment
for charles if he was unable to navigate
these challenges
and these emotions within the classroom
he was unlikely to show the apt
the academic growth we were looking for
so i asked my mentor of mine to come in
and observe my interactions with charles
in the classroom
and after we debriefed he asked me what
is it that you know about charles
somewhat embarrassed it’s not a whole
lot i shared that he was performing
below grade level
that was important to me as his teacher
but aside from that he also lives with
his mom
and he has a dog or maybe it’s a couple
of dogs
i’m not sure so he recommended using a
strategy called ten times two
for ten consecutive school days i need
to spend two minutes a day getting to
know charles on a personal level
asking him what he likes and what he
dislikes how he feels throughout the day
anything that’s not an academic so on
the first day when i asked charles to
come see me at my back table
he was confused and irritated even
when i asked him to come see me because
he hadn’t even done anything
i asked him i want to get to know you a
little bit better what’s something that
i should know
that’s going on with you he thought for
a moment
and he shared that his dog sammy joe was
sick
he was worried about sammy joe and even
waking up because sam and joe’s been up
in the night so he’s a little bit tired
and hopefully after school they were
gonna be able to play outside on day two
i asked charles when do you feel happy
at school
and he thought again and he said when
the other kids play with me at recess
and i had a lightbulb moment one of our
challenges with charles was conducting a
daily pocket check
to make sure that he wasn’t sneaking in
any captive lizards or insects after
recess
so i noted that but on day three we had
a spelling test
and i asked charles how do you feel
about the spelling test today
he didn’t say anything he just froze up
so we spent a couple minutes talking
about
what anxiety was and how being nervous
felt
taking a few deep breaths in together
before we studied for that spelling test
after that we had a routine charles
would come in we conferenced for a few
minutes every day
and we got so used to it i noticed a
couple things changed
first i had to remember charles is not
giving me a hard time
charles is having a hard time a shift
that changed my frustration level as a
teacher
i also acknowledged that charles was
getting through more of our lessons
and he wasn’t shutting down when i
redirected him
and at recess when i observed him he was
connecting with his peers
teaching them all how to connect or
capture these lizards and insects which
wasn’t ideal but that’s fine i’ll take
it
our 10 days were expired and our two
days our two minutes became five minutes
and became 10 minutes would have been
the whole morning if i let him
so i told charles in order to keep us on
track we got to use one of our sam
timers
when the sand is all gone we have to
continue the next day
okay sound good if i had to observe a
label
an emotion in charles at that time it
would have been
unimpressed he agreed
and i put that sand timer back on my
desk and the next morning
it was no longer there i wasn’t
surprised when it wasn’t the first place
that i looked it was shoved inside
charles’s messy desk
this connection with our students and
between
their peers starts with identifying our
emotions
so emotions aren’t something we talk
about in our academic curriculum
but they are important to talk about
emotions are not good or bad
they just are emotions there are natural
reactions to our experiences
and everybody has them so you and me
and at school the kindergartner the 10th
grader the principal
the bus driver and our parents and
guardians but these emotions
dictate how long a student can attend to
a task
how they connect with their peers and
what their relationship is like with
their teacher
so in order for us to build those skills
we have to
spend intentional time building
relationships that cultivate skills
the good news is if we make this time
that social and emotional learning can
be taught through explicit instruction
or through best practices throughout the
school day but what’s even better
is that these skills are not only for
our students to develop but they’re also
for adults
these help us to be successful
professionally
and also personally students who
participate in this academic instruction
with sel
infused in it or with explicit sel
curriculums
on average score an 11 percentile points
higher than their peers on reading and
math standardized tests
and they also show a decrease in problem
behaviors so
so often these behaviors are functions
of an unmet need
to be seen and heard and valued as a
whole student
aside from their academic behaviors
for our students they want to be able to
connect with each other
and feel safe within their environments
to take risks academic risks
for our students these behavior
challenges on average decrease in eight
percent within
one school year but in the long run
they’re 19
less likely to be arrested which means
they’re using their sel skills to
navigate those uncomfortable emotions
and to make responsible decisions that
impact their future
we need to make this shift to add
success
to include their social and emotional
skills starting with students
and us as adults but since not every one
of us is a teacher can do this in the
context of our classrooms we have to
start within our own environments
and what that looks like is starting
with normalizing our own emotions
identifying what they are and how to
manage them in safe and productive ways
it also means to recognize understand
and respect
the emotions of others in order to be a
little bit more curious
instead of furious if we don’t feel the
same way
it looks like connecting
and making those connections stronger
face to face instead of through an app
and it looks like reflecting on our
current relationships
how often do we have relationships with
challenges like the ones i experience
with charles
ones where we expect a certain level of
outcome when we don’t invest in the time
that it takes to get there
through a relationship so the thing is
whether you have kids and you work with
kids
or you don’t and you only see them in
public or at family gatherings
they’re always watching us kids watch
everything
and we have the responsibility to show
them what positive and productive
relationships look like
through using these social and emotional
skills
what causes change when we all work
together as a community to make this
cultural shift
that will empower our young people to
not only be academically successful
but competent risk takers empathetic
listeners
and courageous leaders of change that we
know that they can be
it’s not always about the solar system
but it is always about their
relationship
thank you