052 - Uncovering the Heartbeat of Social and Emotional Learning: An SEL Day Panel Discussion

Welcome to SEL in EDU.

Where we discuss all things, social and emotional, in education. I'm Krista and I'm Craig and we are your hosts on this journey. And what is going on? Everybody, we are live SEL at EDU. We have all of our fans and family who are here. It is International Women's Day. Give it up for the women. We are live and in action on SEL Day across the entire nation and globe. Krista, how's your heart? How are you feeling today?

I am excited it's so. We haven't had a live in ever. We used to record. I'm super pumped. I'm seeing all these smiling faces of amazing friends, supporters and lovers of SELs. My joy is overflowing. How are you today?

I'm feeling all of the just energy. I feel like a sweet Magnolia honey Just sitting here having good tea with friends. We are so excited to have so many of our friends who are here. I am from New Orleans, just in case you didn't know. But before we go ahead and kick off this wonderful thing, we want our wonderful panelists, our friends from the SEL and EDU family. Why don't you just give a shout out for who you are and if you are representing the organization, share that and to share how's your heart right now? And so, krista, you want to go ahead and call on some folks and call them on into the space.

First up is Dr Shante Garrett, so excited to be here today celebrating International Women's Day and SEL Day.

I am Dr Shante Garrett. I am the CEO and founder of L Education Services, an ASCD faculty member. And how is my heart? My heart is amazingly full. I have on my as strong as the woman next to me shirt, which means so much to me on this day, this International Women's Day. So thank you so very much.

Thank you, shante. Next up we have Heather.

Lagerman Hello, hello. I am super excited to be here. The energy is just palpable in this space. It is wonderful. I'm feeling the sparkles, the joy, the connection, and I'm just thrilled to be able to be a part of this on two, yes, pivotal days SEL Day, women's Day. My heart is full, just like you said, lots of connection, lots of potential, lots of hope and lots of joy, really excited to be in this community and in the space today. Thank you for having me.

Next up we have Dr Lee Alley Hi everybody.

I'm Dr Lee Alley. I'm the former executive director for Maine ASCD. It's great to connect with a lot of ASCD folks this morning. I'm also an assistant professor of education at the University of Maine at Augusta. So good morning. I couldn't have said it better than Shante heart really full this morning and doubly full to be spending it with you, so thanks for having me.

Next up we have the dynamic duo of Maureen Chapman and James Simons.

Hey everyone, so I'm James Simon.

I'm Maureen Chapman.

And I believe it is safe to say this Our hearts are beating, which is always a good sign, and they are very full. We are the co-founders of core, creative partners, and core is Latin for heart. We love school and we love all of the people who interact with school, as family members, as educators, as students. We really want to make school a joyful, heartfelt place for everyone, and so we're just so thrilled to be here with all of you to talk about different strategies for doing so. So thank you, craig and Krista, so much for having us.

Thank you. And last but certainly not least, we have Dr Damien.

Lewis, good morning. Good morning, good morning, fabulous Friday greetings. I'm excited to be here again. Yes, my name is Dr Damien Lewis, actually representing my own newly founded Lou learns company, education, consulting and writing support. Just excited to be here in this space and, like everyone has said, just a beautiful time to be here, celebrating both SEL and International Women's Day. So, again, just happy to be a part of the conversation and then also happy to connect where I don't get to connect very often. I'm a part of the ASCB emerging leaders class of 2020. And I went straight into fatherhood right after that and I think I went into a bubble and I have not had as much of an opportunity to connect with folks. So just happy to be in this space this morning.

Thank you. We are so thrilled to have all of you here, and thank you to our friends, our family, our fellow SEL lovers who are on with us again today. We have several questions that we're going to throw out to you, and Craig is going to kick us off with our first question.

But let's get right on in An incredible celebration today of social, emotional learning and well-being across the entire globe. This is global. This is not like we are not national, we are not even just connected to our zip code. We're connected to hearts and minds across the entire space. So I'm really excited. So first question I'm really curious about an SEL practice or experience that resonates so much that you carry it to conversations with other people, that you are seeing in schools, with the leaders in community that you find to be so profound. It resonates in your spirit and you just want to throw that out here for the SEL and EDU community, who was excited to hear from us.

I remember working with a social studies secondary school teacher who was so passionate about social studies and also so frustrated that the kids weren't also just like exploding with passion themselves in their seats, and part of the problem was they were just kind of sitting there observing his passion. And, in my experience, social and emotional learning is so joyful when you give kids the opportunity to lean into the social part of it. We are social animals. We evolved in tribes. Without an inclination to move towards other people, we would not have survived and passed our genes on, and so those kids in those desks have been designed to interact. Instead of going, stop passing notes, I'm trying to teach. If instead you're like, pass some notes about this cool thing that I'm teaching, suddenly you're going to see a lot more interaction, a lot more joy.

So just working with this one teacher and saying, what if we did a Socratic seminar, what if we had an engaging, essential question and then we set some clear social learning objectives and then we gave kids a chance to practice the specific social skills and then assess themselves and receive feedback from the teacher, who is also assessing them. What do you think would happen? And sure enough, what happened was, turns out those kids like that teacher loves social studies because social studies, because all studies, are super, super interesting. So that is one experience I had of seeing the potential for joy in a classroom and making just a slight shift in terms of how the teacher planned the lesson. That really, really led to a more joyful and connected learning experience.

I love that and that reminds me of something that is just one of those little things that you said. There's so many, just little things you can do that can be really fun and also have that ripple out effect, like you're saying. That can really spark joy and others. One of my favorite things is a place where you got to love the name Happy University. I want to doctor it from there. I'm going to see if they'll give us one one time, right, but they have all these free resources on there.

I do some advising for them and love, love, love everything they have, because it's all about happiness and joy and wellness and social emotional learning. So one of the things they have is something called a joy drop, so literally it is a little card they will send you for free or you can download a template, and the whole idea is about doing something that is really easy but is going to inspire kindness and spread it throughout your community and how it begins with you and it's something you can do with your students. It's something that you can do with friends and colleagues. You can do it in the grocery store, you can do it anywhere you want.

The idea is you take this card and you drop some joy. You decide on the person that might need some joy and it can be someone you know or someone you just I keep them in my purse. You just never know who might need some joy that you don't you know you encounter along the way in a day and then you decide to give them the card and it has on there for them to pay it forward. Basically, and the whole idea is been to have by leaving behind these joy drop cards, you can really start watching that single act of kindness and it has had that waterfall effect in your community. And that's the awesome part you can do it like with a group of people so that everyone that has that little challenge to go out there and find someone or someone can do it individually. So it's something where everyone can do it in a way that makes them feel comfortable. But it has that that energy and that joy that spreads throughout your community and the world. So we love it.

Oh my God, I am so in love with this idea and I'm going to take it because it actually connects to what I wanted to share Thinking about, especially using skills or strategies like this with staff, one of the things I can be honest about. At one point I joined an organization and we started doing what was labeled as inclusion activities. At the opening of a meeting I would roll my eyes, I was just like, oh God, what is this? And slowly but surely I started drinking the Kool-Aid if I could use that as a term and I recognized how different it shifted my emotions, my energy. It helped me find space within that place, within that meeting, and sort of like what James mentioned earlier about the students in the classroom.

I think the same thing holds true for our staff, and so I love being able to embed inclusion activities and meetings that I'm leading and sessions that I'm leading and I always feel weird when I go to a space and there isn't some way that brings everyone together and helps harness that energy and focuses it in a positive way. But then also just to help make those connections. That makes the work a lot easier to do once those connections are made. So definitely still in this activity here to drop some joy in folks' pockets, so to speak, and pay it forward, but just really thinking about the ways that we can do that to connect with other adults, because sometimes we think about what we do with our students but not how powerful it is to do it with each other.

I'm finding one of the ways that cultivates joy is when we create space for students as well as adult learners to build and innovate. And for myself as a leader, one of the ways that I found that happened was when I was vulnerable enough to say I don't know, and lean into that space of self-awareness and being vulnerable enough to be able to say out loud I don't know, and create space to be able to collaborate and build together, and that created space to imagine and that created space to build joy together in what was possible, and so that is a space system structures possibility to begin to cultivate joy and meaning in what's to come, and so that's a tremendous opportunity in SEL and joy for communities.

Thank you so much for sharing what you have, because one of the things that we find is that people are very hesitant to jump into SEL.

I'm not an expert in that. I don't know that and, starting off with Chantay, what you said, we don't need to know all of this. This is human learning and growth. Like James mentioned, it's what we naturally do, and so how can we let go of that idea that we need to know it all and be on this journey together, whether it's pass the nodes in class, like do this, let them, or enjoy, drop and work on those inclusive activities that Damien was talking about? Because I'm also one of those like ugh, I'm not, I'm an introvert. I don't want to come up and start talking to people right away, but once I do, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Look at all these beautiful people I've connected with. And so, thinking about, where are some of these practical strategies we can start to integrate SEL? Our second question is what are some of those simple yet effective strategies that educators, leaders and even our students can use to incorporate SEL into daily activities?

I know James was talking about social dynamics. We can't have SEL without interactive pedagogy, but we also are very emotions forward and, just like we need to give some direct instruction around academic skills, we need to give some kids some direct instruction around emotional literacy. So one of our favorite tools is just to pick an emotional literacy tool like the CMBC feelings inventory or a mood meter or the L ruler tools. Pick a tool a feelings wheel that gives kids words that aren't awkward or boring. You know kids get themselves into trouble because they don't have the words to describe their feelings to their teachers. We hear this from secondary school kids all the time. I tried to talk to my teacher and they told me I was being disrespectful.

So giving them words and then inviting them to share their feelings at different anger routine points, just if you're coming into class, how are you feeling? Or if you've had a discussion afterwards, pause, reflect, how did that feel? How did you feel? And then give them some level of awareness of what to do with those feelings and what they mean. If you're angry, that is your feeling. Validate their emotion and then help them understand. Okay, anger means you feel there's an injustice in the world. So what is the injustice you're seeing and what's an action you want to take about that. So again, just helping them understand what they're feeling. Feel safe to have feelings. We are safe also to have feelings. Just bringing a tool in that gives them some words opens up a lot of opportunities to pause and reflect on our emotions.

And you know that's a skill like any other academic skill. The same effective strategies for other skills works there. When students are English language learners, we know sentence stems are incredibly effective. The same goes for activating and sharing your emotional awareness. I feel blank because blank, so I will blank. You know, it's amazing how having that bank and then just having a little help with forming the sentiment that you want to express takes you from being in a place of not even knowing how you feel, just knowing it doesn't feel great, or it does feel great, and you're responding to that great feeling in a way that is unproductive. You can go from there to a place of real awareness, and then you know how can I use this feeling in order to work towards the goals that I hold individually and that we collectively hold as a community.

I love what you're saying there about that connection and that understanding of yourself and really getting in touch with yourself and how important that is for building relationships and knowing who you want to be in relationships with and who you don't. Right and being able to be aware of yourself, your core values and things like that. One of the things when I think about SCL day I think about how this could be also a call to action for a revival of relationships and a need to be in that connection and community, just like we are here today, and some of the things that have really mattered to me. I like resources, so I always want to share. That's one of my core values is connecting.

So one of the things I don't know if anyone's ever seen Bernadette Brown Square Squad. I love that activity. I put that in the chat. It's literally taking a little one inch by one inch piece of paper and so this does not mean even a post. It smaller than that and really think about who is it that you feel vulnerable with, that you trust that you know has your best interest at heart and that way they're going to be telling you the good things and the not so good things, but they do it with love and with aspiration for you to be your best self, and so you think about who are those people and you write them on that piece of paper and then when you've got a tough situation or you need some coaching or you need some friendship and connection and relationship, those are the people that you go to to ask for support and the honest feedback and then you know they're the ones who are going to help you, help you grow, help you learn and support you, no matter what it is you brought to them. So I just love that for connecting and relationships, you know, as a tool that you can use at any age and to really revisit it periodically, because I've noticed that my Square Squad changes a little bit from year to year and also just from different things that are going on in your life personally and professionally. So really just taking some time, that's one of the things. Instead of making resolutions that I'm probably not going to keep every new year, that's one of the things I do every new year is revisit my Square Squad and then make sure to use that as a reason to reach out to them and then celebrate that we've got a new year together. The other thing I put in the chat really quickly because I don't want to take too much of the time is, if you have not seen Angela Meyers, you Matter Manifesto. That one it was funny.

I was just talking with some young college kids about that yesterday, about just how important it is to really like you were saying Craig, like look inward, realize that you'd matter deeply and own that and really think about how you are a gift to the world, what gifts you bring and how you want to capitalize on them and have them, like I was saying before, ripple out and spread. So one of the activities that you can do with this is and I'm a big fan of Free and publicly available on her website she even has a thing that you can download with postcards. So I've printed out the postcards and then used an activity where you put them around the room and have everybody think about. One of them is you have influence.

One is that you have a gift to give. One is you matter. One is you have genius. So have everybody walk around the room and think about how are they going to do something to exemplify this throughout the day or throughout the week, whatever you would like to do, and then everybody can see all of those ideas and take them with them as to things that they can do to connect and build a stronger, more vibrant and resilient community. Just a few little tidbits.

Well, I love the tidbits that you've shared, heather, about relationships especially, and one of the things that I like to remind people about SEL and it picks up on the thread that Krista began to weave about people's hesitancy to dive in is that there really are no silver bullets when it comes to SEL, and that's why I really ask people to exercise caution when it comes to those programs that people are waiting for, because really our culture and our climate are built in the small moments, and those small moments are when our learners are looking to us to kind of see the way that we're walking our talk too, and so I think that Maureen and James and Chante were sharing some really important elements too.

When Chante was talking about just the ability to give ourselves some grace and say I don't know.

When Maureen and James were talking about how it's okay to have feelings and it's okay to have feelings we can't name, and so one of the things I was thinking about was just the power of introducing, for example, zones of regulation, and how it's important to help our learners to process those big feelings and the value of things like cool down corners and the value of things like calm down jars, and things that you can easily incorporate to help us to kind of get back to places where we can get into our upstairs brain, for example, and make better decisions for ourselves and for our classmates and things like that.

So daily affirmations and tracking our progress, those are things that we can do to make ourselves more accountable and build the kind of community that you're talking about, heather, and I just love the way that all of the work we're talking about just picks up and flows with everything everyone else is saying, and that's what it's really about. It's about the community and it's renewing that commitment that we make to each other and honoring that commitment in the day to day.

I love what everybody has pulled together here.

I keep reflecting on that emotional literacy and the words, because even as a practitioner of SEL for thinking intentionally about it for the last 17 years of my life I still sometimes have trouble figuring out the words or navigating my emotions, and I'm still working on that and we're all working on that and giving ourselves grace. And one of the things that reminds me of is when we talk about those emotions and those feelings and specifically with some secondary teachers in my experience is like, well, we don't wanna talk about that, we wanna work on content. So even thinking about executive functioning and goal setting and self-discipline and management and responsible decision-making and problem-solving these are all social-emotional skills and we don't necessarily have to do the ones that we are not quite comfortable with yet. But as educators we all have to do something. We all owe it to our students to pick a couple of those skills that we can be explicit about in our classrooms, in our learning environments, and I love how you've all touched on different ways that we can do that.

Yeah, I'm over here jamming too. That's the way I like it, kc, you know. You know the sunshine band Y'all can't hear it right now. So some of the things that I think about from a cultural perspective. I look at my mom and my dad were my first teachers, right, our parents and our caregivers are our first teachers. My parents didn't call the time and work that they did SEL, like that wasn't their fancy way of nurturing young people, and I also want to think about the parent lens as well, and just how do we loop our families in our community partners in in ways where they may not have all of the language but they actually are still doing the work?

I know that my parents was actually demonstrating SEL language and literacy and experience is sitting at the kitchen table to talk about how was your day? Oh, this thing came up, let's talk about it. And let's talk about what did you do, what could you've done differently, why do you think that happened? And then having us to facilitate a conversation, or my dad, you know, and he, my dad did this, and I'm in my 40s now. He's still doing SEL stuff to me right now, and so my dad came up to this wonderful house here that I live in, he and you know, like South of Boston, and he decided he was going to dig himself up a little garden. Now, I didn't ask my father to dig a garden, but he did anyway, and so what I found was my dad was saying I heard you say that this is the thing that's important to you, and because you told me, with the intention this is, you want to grow something, you want to nurture something you need, you want to grow something that you can carry with you for endless days on end.

And so I think about this when I think about, well, how do we engage our parents? How, what is the ways, that unconventional ways that SEL shows up? Because a lot of us are talking about wonderful terms and terminology. I think that's great, but us in the school setting, that's what we do, right, but how do we make this accessible for families when I know that Friday nights was time for us to have catfish and play cards, you know, and we're going to sit up here and talk a whole bunch of smack. We're going to have a good time. But that was our way of relating and we talked about some of the things that were important to us. We talked about the shows and things like that Our kids. Today I see more kids on their phones than anything when they're having lunches and meals with parents, but I think that there's still ways that parents can say, all right, we're going to have a digital timeout, because I think it's about that human connection.

So my question for you, which I feel very inspired by, especially since this wonderful crochet rose was right here next to me and I was thinking about the power of blooming, right, which is another podcast in itself. But when you think about whether or not you're upbringing, whether or not you know it's because you're in a faith community, whether or not it's because you belong to a social club or something like that. But I want you to talk about, well, what are some of the unconventional SEL hacks that are part of your toolkit that you extend to families, whether or not it's your own or others, in regards to how do you still get people to engage in SEL activities and work and exploration, but in a way that may not be part of our common academic? You know, diaspora of ABCDEIG, right? So what are some unconventional ways that we're doing that with our families, our educators, our community members?

I really appreciate what you're saying because we think and talk a lot about language. We're in the process of writing a book on integrating social, emotional and academic skills and we're frequently in conversation with our editor about whether we can even put SEL on the title, on the cover, if we want to sell the book in every state. And that is one sad, and two an opportunity for us to think creatively about what are other ways to market this work we are doing. That is ultimately just good teaching, and you know we work with one independent school that has leadership in the mission, and so we're focusing on leadership skills in the classroom. And we're in a conversation yesterday with a colleague who focuses on career readiness and we're talking about it as career skills. And we're in a few Catholic schools and when we're in Catholic schools we're talking about character virtues and one-on-one coaching teachers. The language they are speaking is that kid whom I really care about, or that pain point that's really keeping me up at night and challenging me as I try to reach my goals as an educator. So the good news is, all skills are social and emotional skills. Everything we are doing if we are doing it deliberately is SEL, and so I really appreciate you talking about just shifting the language to meet people where they are. Like we're trying to almost like break into the house of education with SEL and you don't just throw yourself at the wall because you're gonna get a concussion and you don't just jump into a closed window because there's gonna be shards of glass everywhere and the people on the inside are like, no, get out, we don't want this. You're gonna find a crack and you're gonna work slowly to keep opening it based on where the people are. And so I think the same goes for families. You hear from them.

A few months ago we did a workshop for families through DESI where we had them family members, look at the castle wheel and reflect on what are their social and emotional strengths as a family, and it felt really empowering. And I know I started this conversation by saying Maureen and I love school, and I bet everyone here loves school. Well, guess what? A lot of people don't love school. A lot of people don't feel safe, they don't feel like they belong, they don't feel like they can be successful, and of course, that is true of kids. That is also true of many families.

I remember being a principal and there were some family members who came in and maybe the home language they spoke or the level of education they had or the way that their identity markers, aligned with mine, made them carry themselves with a level of comfort and confidence. And there were other family members that it was clear they felt like they were visitors. They weren't home in that space, and so the more that we can just be engaging with family members about this important work and using whatever language feels comfortable to them, the more that we're really fostering a space where everyone belongs and then our kids can leave the classroom and go home and work on those skills even more still deliberately, with other people who care so deeply about them and are committed to that work of supporting them.

And I just have found the all script because you're bringing up your parents, craig. I'm one of seven kids. Most of my learning is coming from being the middle of seven kids. And there's also with the garden analogy there's a lot of weeding we have to do about what happened for us as kids, and then there's a lot of planting new ideas. So it's like unpacking. Your childhood is so rich in terms of how we're bringing ourselves to this field. And then I think about my own kids and I cannot get them to take a breath when they're upset. So I know this is slow work and we need all the teachers to be helping too, because sometimes their kids are not wanting to take it from us. But one of these days I'm gonna get them in the moment to take a breath, but it takes a lot of reps.

I really appreciate this question, craig, and at one time before I was a professor, I worked for something called GEARUP and I'm not sure if any of you are familiar, but GEARUP is a federal program. It's gaining early awareness and readiness for undergraduate programs. It's focused on getting low income first generation students to and through college, and that described me. It's how I came to do the work. I grew up very poor in the poorest county of Maine. Maine is one of the poorest states in America. I grew up in the poorest county and what is America's most rural state by most metrics. Maine is also where the opioid epidemic rages hardest and my county is where it rages hardest. So I was the family engagement strategist for GEARUP.

Lots of folks in Maine only one in five have a post-secondary degree. Most folks in Maine have no idea what the script is for getting their loved ones to and through college. So Craig's question is spot on and some of the things James was sharing are spot on. I think that the fallacy is the idea that a lot of families don't care about whether they're their loved one, their student, their child maybe not their child, because one of the school districts I used to coach in the vast majority of those children were not raised by parents. They were raised by aunts, uncles, grandparents, near kin. The thinking was that those families, those loved ones, did not care. It wasn't true at all, and so part of the strategy is just listening. What are your goals for those children? You don't have the script for what it looks like to even be there, so just helping them to understand what college even looks like or what college means and it's not a four year post-secondary, that it could be trade school, that trade school maybe is a much smarter return on investment for many of those learners, that it could be an apprenticeship model, which was what my husband did. That's how he was successful because, as James was saying, so many of those experiences aren't a right fit and so many of those families didn't have great experiences, and so it's bridging that gap. It's understanding that there are many ways of being intelligent. It's honoring those intelligences, it's honoring those experiences. And then I think that when Craig was saying what does that look like on a Friday night? Around the kitchen table?

Because I was low income in first-gen and I had no one, if I wasn't special in some way academically would have had the conversation with me about college. As a student, I was practicing code switching. At home, the typical main accent is what I sounded like when I was a student. College took it from me and so I don't sound that way anymore. But the way I sounded on Beals Island with my great grandparents was certainly different than I sounded at university.

So I'd go home and talk with them in the evenings, on a Friday night, for example. They had no idea what my life could look like at university, but they did know what it meant to goalset, they did know what it meant to work hard, they did know what self-talk looked like, and they could help me break down what a next step would be like if I wanted to persist in something. And so, craig, I love the question, because all of that love pours into those learners, and we can't have a wrap around when you're talking about community engagement or a real 360 without involving the family as the first and primary and eternal teachers of students. It's so true. So thanks for the question.

It's really allowed us to have this rich dialogue and kind of combining a couple of things that we wanted to speak on around some resistance that we might be feeling with SEL and how we have to connect with our families and our caregivers and our community, because it is not up to us. We have to have that 360 care and, andrea, you had put in the chat that you had an idea that you wanted to share, so we'd love to have you unmute and take a moment to share that.

Thanks for that opportunity. I just love this question. Somebody said something about like the crack, like finding the crack in the window when there's a lot of getting a lot of negativity or pushback from schools or districts. So I work on two grants, and one of them is involved in providing the advocacy for children and youth experiencing state custody, be that DYS or DCF, and so one strategy that I think is effective for our advocates when the family has either lost, temporarily or permanently, the education decision rights for their child is when we have the team. Everyone's in the same room, be it the clinicians, the people from the residential or the group home, hopefully the student themselves, their advocate, perhaps their original family, and teachers. Special education team chair.

And an incident needs to be discussed, an interaction, instead of just reading what's in a report, really digging into that and trying to understand, honoring the experience that the student had as well, and starting with that really core base level of self-awareness, not just for the student but for everybody in the room, right, like what was really going on, what happened, what was felt, who was harmed and what needs to happen to move forward.

And that's, I think, a very innovative approach to these special education team meetings that otherwise can feel very, very hostile and transactional. Another window for opportunity this is more micro, so not so systemic when transitioning and handing the kids off to their caretakers at the end of the day will give the kids some sort of question, like the question the other day is what do you call a 20-sided shape? And of course the caretakers say, like well, I don't know because. Like well, can I tell you, can I tell you right? And so it's an interesting activity because, first, the kids have learned something they didn't know, second, they've taught their parents something and third, we see the reaction and the interaction between child and caretaker. So there's just those two examples.

Yeah, thank you for that, and I love that idea of how can we help facilitate those explicit conversations around what the learning is looking like so that they can carry that on home. And I know, shantay, you've talked about having been a leader within trauma-pervasive schools and communities, and so I know you have thoughts on reaching out to those caregivers so that we really can let them know that we're working together.

Yeah, absolutely. You know one of the things that when we're talking about SEL and even when we're talking about education in general, education is a systemic process, right, it's a process between school, it's a process between home, it's a process between communities. It happens within that system. It doesn't happen in isolation between any of those, because students experience life within all of those pieces. And all of those pieces contribute to everything that students know and who they become. And social-emotional learning contributes to that development process and who that student becomes as an adult and how they process life. That as a social being, as an emotional being, and how they're going to learn and cope. That's how they develop their coping mechanisms. And so when we're talking about their developmental aspects, you can't do that without those pieces. You know, when they're leaving the school building however we describe it and the people and the systems and processes that they engage outside of our purview, and we want to collaborate with those entities. So if, when they leave, they're going to Boys and Girls Club, right, then we want to be able to collaborate with that community partner and say how can we work together Because that's a part of their upbringing in their life. If it's a local church, we want to be able to collaborate with that community partner because that's a part of their upbringing and their life. If they're going to grandmother and grandfather's house, we want to collaborate with that community partner, with that or an uncle, mom and dad, to be able to collaborate and understand those family units. How are we working together and how are we messaging together to be able to say this is our next step, this is what we believe, this is how we are developing, this is who we can become, this is what we see, this is who we are building, these are the possibilities. And how do we do this together so that those possibilities become relevant, are being developed, built, palpable and are achieved with what we are pouring into students every single day?

I think it's understanding that schools do a lot, but we don't do it alone, and so there's resources there. And how do we put our resources with those resources? You know, craig, you spoke a lot about families have resources. It might not be monetary right. It might be the stories that they bring behind, the communities that we can utilize to make learning relevant, to make school live for students, to make it community-driven while they are with us, to make it feel like home while they are with us, so that they understand that they are part of our community and make it a place where they want to be and a place where they want to learn.

Families have stories that make meaning out of school. Families have resources that can be utilized within school In addition to community partners. You know we were able to work with community partners that were able to do restorative circles when we didn't know how to do them within our community, and we're able to train staff to do them that were able to transform lives. Community and schools were able to bring mentoring programs to our schools. Boys and Girls Club brought entrepreneurship to our schools to begin to develop programs. So there are a lot of different developmental programs and pieces that can be utilized to help support those what we call curriculum enhancing and developmental pieces for students that change their directories. As long as we are, you know, making those connections and making those relevancy opportunities live throughout our buildings.

And I was going to say just to, in a sense, put a bow on that. I think there has been so much said, but I go back to both what you were just sharing, dr Garrett, here with thinking about the things that we don't recognize, that families might have access to, the things that they are utilizing, and then going back to what Craig shared earlier about stripping away some of the terminology, some of the phrasing, to make sure that we can better help families and individuals make connection to those skills, to those resources. And so one of the things that I've always thought about, just in practice, is when you go back and you think about, if you remove the terminology, what were those things that helped you, as a learner, feel safe, feel comfortable, want to learn, be engaged and allow you to grow, what sometimes people call good teaching, what sometimes people call having a sound family environment, one that is supportive and aiming there. And I think if we go back to those bases, we can easily make that crosswalk to those different things that we are now naming when we think about SEL competencies or when we think about specific strategies. And I think it's that alignment piece of just stripping back down to the basics, thinking about what it is that the students need, thinking about what it is that's going to be most helpful for bringing in those community partners. I'm quickly reminded back to an article from just a week ago we're talking about right now.

We're continuing to deal with absenteeism in schools since the pandemic, and one of the things that came up was one of the elements that's not necessarily focused on as much is what's the experience of students in the environment?

What are we doing to make the environment conducive? And, like Dr Garrett just noted there, these might be things outside of the academics, those core things that make you want to be there, to want to be a part, that then motivate you to want to learn and want to experience more. So I think it's more along the lines of going back to the basics and stripping it down and then thinking about what is it that I'm going to need to best serve and support students and then thinking about what are those things that people are utilizing to get those supports out in the community and then bridging that back to the school environment to make sure that we're meeting those SEL needs, as we're labeling them now. But we know years ago they didn't have a label. We called it good teaching. We called it having a good family, having a good church, having a good community, a good support system.

Can't believe that we are. We're down to like the last few minutes, but this conversation could go on endlessly, especially when you're in company, good friends, you know it's Friday and it's gonna. The day is gonna be real, real nice, I said, if I said it myself. So let's lean in a little bit more. Sip your tea. I think we might have enough time for one more good question or two. I'm gonna turn it over to Dr Krista for what would feel like our last question.

Yeah. So, as we look ahead and we think about the future of SEL, how do you envision the evolution of SEL in education? A couple of days ago, actually, I heard somebody speak and they do the work that we all do and they're like SEL has been on for years and years and it's not working. And I'm like, oh, hold on a minute, hold on. It does work, but we have not ever been intentional and explicit about it. If we're gonna be honest with ourselves, it has never had the level of importance that academics have had in our schools, and so it has always been here, but we need to start giving it the same emphasis, the same heart, the same soul, the same explicitness and intent. And so, when you think about the future of SEL and providing well-being and joy in our learning environments, where do you see this happening?

When I was reflecting on this. One of the things that comes up for me is that I see SEL evolving in education by being foundational, like you're saying, by a shift to seeing this as a foundational building block of a school, of a learning experience, of a community, and really looking at part of that. Being that, I see with great hope that it'll be a space where we can build the structure where everyone has grace to know themselves, like we were talking about earlier you were talking a little bit before League about the ability to listen and how powerful that is, both around the dinner table as well as in our school buildings and in our communities and social interactions and our ability to connect with others. And see that as a big shift is making those fundamental features of what we do in education and really looking at how we have the potential within us. And that is the building bot, that's the starting place for what we need to do for any academics, because unless we have that connection, unless we have that sense of belonging like you were saying, damien like if people don't wanna be there, we have choices and I think that's another fundamental shift is to look at education as a choice.

It's a choice for educators as well as our students and our parents. So everyone here is making choices and we want to give them the tools and the resources to make choices that are best for them through having an amazing SEL portfolio. So I like to think of it as we were talking a little bit about monetarily earlier. Shantay, you were saying about the financial. We might not all be wealthy, but we all are wealthy in our resources and ourselves and really thinking about how do we look at this as an SEL portfolio, if you will, that we're investing in and that that's what we're building as the future for SEL evolving in education.

One of the things I wanted to just think about as we think about this evolution here.

I'm reminded by James, your earlier notation about both what you and Maureen were sharing about the book you're writing and not being able to potentially put SEL on the cover, and I'm thinking about all the pushback that we've seen in areas and even that earlier notation that we've been doing it and it has never been given the same credence as academics.

But I find it so interesting that when you start looking at things that are now becoming critical when I look at different parts of portraits of a graduate across the country and I see durable skills showing up and then when you dig into durable skills, you look at those core skills that employers are looking for, which have been ratified even more recently in the press, of thinking about things such as being good communicators, having empathy, the things that help make this virtual world that we now live in and work in work are all embedded back in those core social, emotional competencies, those skills that are born from there.

And so I think the evolution is taking time to make sure that we are closely aligning and sometimes even and I don't wanna say giving up, but sometimes not fighting so hard over the terminology or the phrasing, but making sure that we are being able to embed those skills and support people where they are, to be able to acclimate them in, and I think they'll eventually turn around and recognize like, wow, I was pushing back against what I thought was something negative, when I see that it is a vital component, is necessary and I use it in my life. If I am a successful, thriving individual, I'm using these skills to navigate the world, and so I see the evolution of SEL as being something more along the lines of people are gonna recognize that you are going to need it in this new world that students are growing up in, where they're going to be interacting, working and engaging in such a different way than what we even envisioned prior to.

Thank you so much for that. Damien, jessica Holloway is with us and she is the innovation coach in Tennessee, and so you work a lot around the SEL skills and the technical skills.

One thing that we do a lot.

I work with STEM and innovation and project-based learning and, as much as students need technical skills, content skills or content knowledge, they also need social-emotional skills because they have to collaborate with each other, they have to communicate, they have to figure out how to solve problems.

We do a lot of working and getting information and feedback from our community members and I'll tell you, a lot of times employers they look for people who have SEL skills because they can teach them the technical skills. They can teach them that, but what they don't have time to teach or retrain is somebody that can talk to somebody else, Somebody that can ask questions, that are self-starters, that know how to regulate their emotions, and that way they can interact with people in a professional manner. Those are the things that they're looking for and they're like if we can have somebody who can work with other people, we can teach them the things later on that we need them to do. That's specific to our organization, so it's something that's very important but I think often gets overlooked because we're really focused on they have to have this content knowledge base and then they have to have these technical skills to get a job, but to keep that job they have to have the SEL component in there too.

So many wonderful things. It's been so wonderful to be in this joyful community and to see Craig dancing throughout. I think that word integration for me when I think about where SEL started, where we sometimes see the fullness of the traditional schedule and a school getting in the way of innovation and then we try to find boundary space to put new ideas in. So there's an SEL course with a canned curriculum, as has been mentioned, that teachers. Then they think we tried that and it didn't work.

As things evolve, I really want to reframe everyone involved in the life of a school's thinking. We're all doing human work. We are all humans. You don't have to be a counselor to know about how to organize your thoughts around, what gets in the way for you and what do you need and what do you do when that happens. We can center adults and their own learnings that they've had about themselves over years and help them see that that is their role, no matter what their title is. It's everyone's job to be social, to be emotional, to be human with other humans and creating a joyful space. So we know again, education is a choice. We want educators to feel joy. We want them to have enough space and training to feel ready to do that work. We know it's slow, but I guess I see it more as most of kids' minutes are spent in their academic classes and so if we can really have some strategies that embed this through their day, we're going to find a more joyful space that everyone feels more effective in.

I think all of these points are wonderful. I will say it's not true that SEL doesn't work. I think Damien said it so perfectly earlier. We called this good teaching and good teaching is always going to be good teaching. It always will be good teaching, it always has been good teaching, and so those things don't change. What doesn't work is the prepackaged programs that I talked about earlier. It's the fact that there are no silver bullets. If that's disappointing to some people, you're going to have to stay disappointed. I guess it's what Craig talked about earlier. It's the fact that we don't talk the fancy talk. It's because there wasn't the silver bullet to match that fancy talk. I guess it's just the stuff that's the day-to-day that I talked about earlier.

I will say that I think in the future we're going to see a renewed commitment from Departments of Education. I know this because it just sunsetted a really fantastic project with my own DOE. It corresponded with my stepping way from our ASCD after 12 wonderful years, because it was just time After having worked a really intensive project. It seemed like a good time to step away in a safe time, to realize we're on a good trajectory. You finally realize what's important. It's time I can step away knowing I've done good work. I also know that the future is SEL because I just created a master's degree in whole child education for my university. It's not going away anytime soon.

I think the other piece, too is that, heather and Kristen. I just recently hosted a podcast about reclaiming the mantle of SEL. Damian even said it when he was talking about just reframing people's perceptions about SEL. It's up to us to reframe that perception. We've all been doing it here this morning. Craig's great Off the cuff questions have done it. James and Maureen, you've done it. Damian and Shantay, you did it. Our guests who chimed in with their ideas you've done it. It's been just fantastic to share this energy, because even when you're sharing can we put SEL on the cover of our book? It just shows how far a field we've gotten from what SEL really is, and it's up to us to remind people SEL is the mission and we are not backing down from that mission, period.

Ooh, that was like Mike's job.

Mike's job moment there. Yes, we gotta tell this story, I love it.

I think that was just an amazing way of wrapping things up and to show our passion and our commitment to supporting our students and knowing that we're not on this journey alone as we work on wrapping up. Thank you again, all of you, for your time, your insights, On these show notes. We are going to put links to all of your contact information and to encourage us to continue moving forward in supporting students to help them thrive. Craig, do you want to add in our last words and take us home?

I hope your heart is full. I just want you to own that. You are absolutely a diamond in every sky across this entire world. You matter. You are the lighthouse of love and truth and liberation for so many of our young people and we need you to hold on to that. I think about especially just marrying that.

This is SCL Day and International Women's Day. So think about this and this from the words of Andra Day, who I love, and rise up, no matter what you're going through, no matter the challenges we face, no matter the political environment, no matter the societal environment, no matter how tough it may be in your situation, circumstance and zip code. You may be broken down and tired of living life on a merry go round and you can't find the fighter, but I see it in you. So we're going to walk it out and move mountains. We're going to walk it out and move mountains and I'll rise up. I'll rise up like the day. I rise up. I'll rise unafraid. I'll rise up and I'll do it a thousand times again. I'll rise up high like the waves. I'll rise up in spite of the ache. I'll rise up and I'll do it a thousand times again.

We love you, scl and EDU family, for all of our fans, our friends, our guests, for anyone who is seeing us here in the internet sphere. We love you. We want you to hold you in yours near and dear. Hold them real tight and continue to stand strong, confident, 10 toes deep in this SCL light. We love you Y'all, take care.