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Helping students to become learners

30 May

One could say that a teacher’s job is never done, but I would like to politely disagree. I believe this depends on how we define “teaching” and “teacher’s work“. Full confession: I work in higher education, been doing that for more than a decade – and I love is SO much! In that sense I agree that we absolutely need teachers, and we as teachers (in any given level of education) have so much work to do. But…

My very strong educational belief is that our first duty is to help our students to learn how to learn. I know, this is kind of a “teaching philosophy statement”. And it is. But in our current reality it also is so much more! When students are able to support and self-regulate their own learning, the hardest part of out work has been done. Yes, there is still content to cover and assessments to use to measure learning, but equipping people to steer their own learning is the most important quest ever! Simply because the skills of life-long learning [1] carry on years and decades after we have met the student.

Helping every student to have a strong Learner Agency is my favorite tool. I love Bandura’s theory about agency [1] because with the four components it is so relatable: we all need intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness and self-reflectiveness to guide our learning process. Therefore, learning how to help and support our own learning is the crucial quest for all humans.

As teachers, how can we make this happen? We make sure that our students have choices! Apart from classroom teaching (or teaching online or in higher ed) I believe we have ample opportunities to support other people in our everyday encounters and encourage them to learn more. We can choose to support people agency – instead of pushing too rigid rules – and help people to enjoy learning new things! For years I have purposefully used Positive Regard so that I can choose to reframe my perception!

We can choose to volunteer in our communities to help others to learn. My current favorite is volunteering to support local resilience project to increase the awareness of ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) [2] and how to mitigate those with Trauma-Informed Practices [3], helping our local agencies to use the same language to discuss trauma, and foster resiliency of all our residents.

How do you want to use your expertise to support your students and your community?

[1] https://choosinghowtoteach.blogspot.com/2015/09/principles-of-life-long-life-deep-and.html

[2] Bandura, A. (2006). Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on psychological science, 1(2), 164-180.

[3] ACEs – Adverse Childhood Experiences https://www.cdc.gov/aces/about/index.html

[4]  TIP – Carello, J. (2019). Examples of Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning in College Classrooms;

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Make 2025 the Year of Adult SEL

9 Jan

My students are teachers and instructors earning their M.Ed. degrees. I discuss adult SEL every day in my calls with my students to support their learner agency, and also share SEL images in my emails to students. I do this to ensure we are creating a safe learning environment – because we all need that safety to practice responsible decision-making. And truly effective teaching that supports students’ deep learning (not just shallow memorization of facts until passing the test) requires using all three main learning theories – cognitive, constructive and cooperative.

Adult SEL is an integral part of human development – and the day when we stop learning is also the day when we need to stop teaching. Simply because education is an ever-evolving profession, and we need to adjust to the change. I am not talking about “learning a new curriculum”, but how support students’ individual learning. The first part is checking our own assumptions so that we can respond to students’ needs instead of just reacting to their behaviors. This is not always easy to learn! Yet, today when we know so much more about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) [1] we also understand that students need help in managing their need and emotions. This is also why I believe that learning about Trauma-Informed Practices (TIP) [2] is extremely helpful for teachers, instructors, and educators in all capacities.

Learning to use Positive Regard is easier when our Adult SEL competencies increase. While Relationship skills are essential for being a teacher, the two other important competencies for responding to the needs are self-awareness and self-management – because misbehavior can seriously push our buttons, and we all know that sometimes students are (malevolently) smart to do exactly that! It can become almost like a game – we could call it the “who can derail the teacher from teaching the intended lesson” – game.

When teachers’ adult SEL needs are supported, the whole school community gets enhanced. Simply because we cannot support students if we as professionals are not learning about the toolkit we can use – and I am talking about the the “toolkit” in a broad sense, because different environments, different populations and even different curricula may require different tools. This is the situational aspect of teacher PD (and the reason why “canned” solutions seldom work). Teaching is always, ALWAYS situational and contextual.

If your district is not providing Adult SEL as a PD option, please consider focusing on Adult SEL in your PLN (Professional Learning Network) or PLC (Professional Learning Community)! There is a great Linked In group “Teachers who Coach” with a wealth of information about helpful teaching strategies to build connections with students!

[1] ACEs – Adverse Childhood Experiences https://www.cdc.gov/aces/about/index.html

[2] TIP – Carello, J. (2019). Examples of Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning in College Classrooms;

SEL image: https://choosinghowtoteach.blogspot.com/2023/12/social-emotional-learning-responsible.html

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Hopeful Pedagogy

9 Oct

Many educators and education leaders agree that learner-centered education is essential for modern learning. We also acknowledge the importance of Social-Emotional Learning and Trauma-Informed practices and supporting learner agency and resilience. Somehow the traditional top-down models still dominate the educational systems, standards and benchmarks [1].

Supporting learner agency is a single step solution for better learning experiences. Human agency is our highest-order emergent function, it is our ability to choose, not a part of Executive Function or willpower to achieve given goals. Agency can be negative, too, like when a student chooses not to complete all homework because they will be okay earning a C. For their future plans this may not be a great decision, yet it IS an example of students exercising their agency, encompassing many parts of learning and learning process. One part of formal education is helping students to become ready for their lives in modern societies – and that includes agency as self-awareness and degree of freedom.

To support students’ agency in positive ways we need to create learner-centered environments on all levels of education. [2]. Hopeful Pedagogy is a great tool for highlighting the power of positive experiences – not only in academics, but also in building shared understanding and working together to solve other problems that arise in social situations like classroom or recess or study groups. We all can create positive experiences for others in many different situations. And we should.

We all have students from different walks of life – socio-economical, historical, linguistic and many more – which is why we need to offer choices to students for content, engagement and assessments to create opportunities for practicing both agency and resilience in emotionally safe learning environment. Supporting learner resilience means understanding the impact of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and actively choosing how we perceive our students.

Using Hopeful Pedagogy starts from our perceptions and actively choosing our actions to support Learner Agency for every student. To help students choose to make the choice to learn for their own benefit instead just to pass a given assessment or task. To support students’ hopes and help to embark on a learning path for a better future and support the idea of lifelong learning and having meaningful learning experiences.

Hopeful Pedagogy (or Hopeful Andragogy – my students are earning their M.Ed degrees) is an important part of contemporary education. And the bottom line is: “Educating, regardless of age is about leading others in meaningful and hopeful ways.” [3]

[1] Learner-centered https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fspq0000589 SEL: https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-is-the-casel-framework/ Trauma-Informed practices: https://www.nctsn.org/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma-informed_care

[2] Agency defined on p. 443 in Zelazo, P. D. (2020). Executive Function and Psychopathology: A Neurodevelopmental Perspective. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 16.

[3] Prefontaine, I. (2023). Re-imagining Teacher Education as an Andragogy of Hope. an Andragogy of Hope” (2023). International Conference on Hate Studies. 5. https://repository.gonzaga.edu/icohs/2023/seventh/5

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Collaborative Problem Solving

28 May

Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) is an important #SEL relationship skill we start learning during early childhood while learning to play with others and share our toys, and later the same skill is also used in scientific problem-solving. The first step to support collaboration is to help participants self-regulate – just because we cannot use higher-order thinking while upset or distracted. #traumainformed I am sure we all have witnessed some melt-downs in playgrounds.

For us adults the collaborative problem solving often means having to learn how to respond, instead of reacting to the situation or behavior – otherwise we are not collaborating, but directing or explaining. Learning the skill of choosing our responses matches the definition of resilience: “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging situations”[1]. As educators we face these situations every day. To support students’ learning process, it is important to discuss why and how we collaborate and the benefits of learning from each other. The SEL competencies of self-awareness and self-management are priceless skills for anyone who wants to teach.

This is the CASEL definition for Collaborative Problem-Solving as a component of Transformative SEL #tSEL which means adults and students collaborating and learning from each other.

The other parts of Transformative SEL are Identity, Agency, Belonging and Curiosity to build “strong, respectful, and lasting relationships to engage in co-learning” [2] The learning process begins by starting a new path – trying something new or different. Often our curricula dictates the directions and outcomes of learning, yet in an emotionally safe learning environment they can reach the goal. We as educators, embark on learning paths to increase out competencies and to learn something new. And at this point I need to state this very clearly: learning is a different experience from being taught something – it really is a process, not product.

Collaborating and helping others to self-regulate to support their learning process is not always easy. And, quite honestly, learning to help myself to self-regulate has been a long journey, and there are still times when I need to remind myself to take a breath and make sure that I am self-regulated before I respond. Most of the self-management happens outside of our work hours because we all have very personal needs. I have always known that walking on the beach makes me feel better. Now I also know why, and can use it to manage my stress, which then enables me to engage in collaboration with others on the following day.

Collaborating with others to solve a problem is an important 21st century life skill – we are not likely to be successful in our relationships without it. In workplace communication and collaboration skills are important to avoid interpersonal conflicts and keep teams functional. Being able to gather the information related to the problem, use visuals to represent the problem, device a strategy to solve it and complete it together, while reacting appropriately to feedback during the process is one way to measure it. PISA introduced a CPS assessment in 2015 [4].

Fortunately, we often have daily opportunities for honing our CPS skills – these may be present at work, or with family and friends. We just need to choose to start the learning path and see where it takes us.

References:

[1] American Psychological Association. (2020, February 1). Building your resilience. https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience/building-your-resilience

[2] Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. (n.d.). Transformative
SEL as a lever for equity & social justice. https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/how-does-sel-support-educational-equity-and-excellence/transformative-sel/

[3] Jagers, R. J., Skoog-Hoffman, A., Barthelus, B., & Schlund, J. (2021). Transformative social emotional learning: In pursuit of educational equity and excellence. American Educator, 45(2), 12. https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2021/jagers_skoog-hoffman_barthelus_schlund

[4] Mo, J. (2017), “How does PISA measure students’ ability to collaborate?”, PISA in Focus, No. 77, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/f21387f6-en and https://www.oecd.org/pisa/innovation/collaborative-problem-solving/

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The Power of Positive Experiences

26 Mar

Our learning experiences have a huge impact on our future, and on our learning. The good part of this is that teaching is a relationship between the teacher and students, and we can choose to provide those positive learning experiences for our students. The hard part is that we all bring our past experiences and expectations into the classroom, both teachers and students. For some students the classroom environment is the safest and happiest place they have ever experienced. It is very hard to focus on learning if one is scared or hungry. Recent research suggests that 25% or more of students have experienced trauma or ACEs. [1] We can choose how we perceive students and their actions.

How do I perceive my students? Are they lazy or feeling helpless? Are they acting out? Or dysregulated? Are they angry? Or In fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode? Are they disengaged or overwhelmed? My perception - not reality - defines my action.

Understanding the perspectives of other people is an important part of #SEL social awareness, and as teachers we have great opportunities to be examples of this for our students. Learning to respond to the (undesirable) behaviors of others instead of reacting to them is a life skill we all need. By responding instead of reacting we can engage in tSEL – transformative SEL – supporting students identity, agency, belonging, collaborative problem-solving and curiosity!

When we choose to support all students and build safe learning environments, our students can learn to trust teachers and other students and people in general. This is the important first step. The positive experience of knowing the rules and how to ask for help are important building blocks for students’ self-awareness and self-management – two fundamental #SEL skills for understanding and managing our emotions, thoughts and behaviors. We cannot thrive in the society without these skills, but they are equally important for building relationships with other students.

Collaborating successfully with peers is an extremely powerful positive experience in the classroom – we should never underestimate it! Often students can understand a new concept more easily if a classmate explains it, just because they are close to the same level of language development. For us, as professional educators, some concepts are so “clear” that we don’t even consider having to explain its meaning. Peer collaboration helps students to learn the important #SEL relationship and life skills like seeking and offering help and resolving conflicts constructively.

Purposefully designing healthy learning environments by designing these Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) can protect our students against ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), because they build HOPE – Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences [2]. And when we design and provide positive learning experiences, we also help our students to learn to enjoy learning. This has a huge impact for their futures. Learning enjoyment increases the chances for students to engage in transformative life-long learning[3]. How awesome is this?!?

This is exactly WHY education is my chosen life-long career! 🙂

[1] Scott, J., Jaber, L. S., & Rinaldi, C. M. (2021). Trauma-informed school strategies for SEL and ACE concerns during COVID-19. Education Sciences, 11(12), 796.

[2] Sege, R. and Browne, C. Responding to ACEs with HOPE: Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences. Academic Pediatrics 2017; 17:S79-S85. https://positiveexperience.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/The-Four-Building-Blocks-of-HOPE.pdf

[3] Jagers, R. J., Skoog-Hoffman, A., Barthelus, B., & Schlund, J. (2021). Transformative social emotional learning: In pursuit of educational equity and excellence. American Educator, 45(2), 12. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1304336.pdf

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Increasing Learner Resilience

1 Feb

One of my favorite projects since 2020 is mentoring a pre-K-6 school in South Africa. They wanted to “Finnish” their school and make it more learner-centered, so we created a plan to modify their curriculum and focus on implementing instructional changes and embed SEL in small steps throughout the schoolyear. The foundation is in Cooperative, Constructive and Cognitive practices to collaborate with families and students, create individual learning plans for all students and focus on documenting learning when it naturally happens (instead of formally assessing every student and their skills), and marking all the developmental milestones and learning achievements in the end of the day – sometimes by sending a picture to the parents, too, to keep them connected and informed.

We all know that children learn a lot on their own, and we want to empower their explorations as much as possible to help build learner resilience – a fundamental aspect of our development, relateing to agency and self-efficacy. Agency is our ability to make choices and self-efficacy our belief in our abilities to do thing, like learning.

Fortunately, we are born curious and ready to learn. The only thing we need to do is find a way to cooperate with that curiosity and help students preserve their interest in learning and their sense of wonder – because that is where all true learning starts: wondering if, how, when, why….

As having choices helps children to build stronger learner agency and self-efficacy, I built an infographic about learner-centered education, hoping that it would be easy for Early Childhood Educators to view on mobile phones: https://choosinghowtoteach.blogspot.com/2022/04/empower-students-to-learn.html I think we cannot overemphasize the natural learning process and building on children’s play to help them learn more. Simply put, the EMPOWER stands for Environment, Motivation, Process, Ownership, WHY? Empathy & Emotions and Relationships.

Supporting students’ agency and resilience as learners is easy to do by guiding and supporting students’ natural curiosity and offering help when needed, and figuring out together why things happen. These learning experiences are a tad harder to build, as they don’t fit into pre-structured curricula. But learning cannot be restricted into universal format – learning experiences always have individual flavors and take-aways as we are building on things we have already learned.

This is also the best way for supporting adult learning resilience: offering choices for obtaining the information (reading, listening, watching, discussing…) and demonstrating the competencies (both existing and new ones) by producing a plan or presentation or portfolio, and supporting the self-efficacy of adult learners.

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Assessment in Self-Regulated Learning

7 Dec

For online learners, engaging in Self-Regulated Learning is a vital skill today. Often the content to be learned is simply placed into a learning management system – think about MOOCs – rather than spending time to explicitly design it for a great learning experience. And, as learners are individuals with their own preferences, it also makes sense, IF both video and transcript are provided. (My confession: I like to read. And nobody can talk as fast as I can read.)

But learning, especially deep learning, takes much more work than just simply watching the videos and following the discussion prompts. When we learn one of these processes takes place: accumulation, assimilation, accommodation, or (the BEST ever!!) transformation. You know, the amazing A-HA!!! moment when the new information literally shakes our world and makes us think about things in a new way. And then adjust what we already knew to fit in with this new revelation. That’s deep learning at its best. 🙂 The moment when we see the lightbulb lit in our students’ brains. This is the very reason why I am in education.

Now, how do we assess this new, deep learning? Just giving a grade would not cover it, because assigning a grade is an evaluation, not an assessment. Evaluations don’t support our learning processes, they just put an approval (or denial) stamp onto our final product – worksheet, test score, essay, or portfolio. It is just a professional judgment of the output, the product of learning, but doesn’t tell how we got there. It doesn’t address the learning process, which is where learner agency lives.

Assessment and evaluation are two different processes for two different purposes. Student-centered assessment for learning and assessment as learning are to support students’ #deeperlearning process, evaluation is to determine the level of their  performance.  Assessment is for students and teachers, evaluation is for stakeholders. 

Formative assessments that inform (the educator and student about learning process) and summative assessments that sum up the competence are both important and useful, however they require different approaches and interpretations. Both can be designed by the teacher to meet learning objectives. At best assessment is a meaningful and a positive learning experience for students, increasing their interest in learning and boosting growth mindset. Summative assessment is usually a cumulative examination, and can be done as a final project or portfolio. My personal-professional preference is portfolios because they can visualize the learning process and accumulation of ideas and knowledge, as well as the choices where to dig deeper.

Evaluation is making a judgment about an artifact (essay, test score, behavior, teaching practice) against a relevant evaluation criteria, usually a predetermined goal or standard. Evaluation is also interpreting and making decisions about program effectiveness, for example for accreditation purposes and to build capacity. The OECD report is clear: “The point of evaluation and assessment is to improve classroom practice and student learning.”

References:

American Psychological Association (2020). The APA Guide to College Teaching: Essential Tools and Techniques Based on Psychological Science. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/undergrad

American Psychological Association, Coalition for Psychology in
Schools and Education. (2015). Top 20 principles from psychology for preK–12 teaching and learning. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ed/schools/cpse/top-twenty-principles.pdf

OECD (2013), Synergies for Better Learning: An International Perspective on Evaluation and Assessment, OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264190658-en.

Self-care for teachers

30 May

This is the time of the year when I am talking with my teachers who are in a survival mode with all of the end-of-schoolyear-expectations and work. And because they are my students, they are also trying to handle their M.Ed. studies – you can imagine what full-time teaching and full-time studying looks  like during these extremely busy times.

How are you managing your time and stress? How do YOU find time for self-care when work is too busy? And what is your secret for being a resilient teacher to cultivate your students’ learning process, so that it supports the increase of their resilience, too?

I imagine that this might sound like yet another demand for already busy teachers – but, please, hear me out: 

Learning is much more successful when we help our students to become resilient, like the tree in the picture. It doesn’t have much soil, and it has lost some of it’s needles, too. But it bends with the winds and tolerates the salty seawater. And grows. Not as fast as the other trees growing more inland with better soil. It grows on its own pace – like we all do, actually. For growth cannot be hurried

When we discuss learning and metacognition with students, it is important to remember and remind that resilience can be practiced (it is the real growth mindset). Learning to be resilient  helps them to rebuild their confidence and learning skills. Because this is exactly what learner agency is: our capacity to make choices about ourselves and our learning. 

The more we understand the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and use Trauma-Informed Practices, the better we can support our students’ resilience. To me, that is an essential part of being an educator, which is why I want to remind all teachers about engaging in self-care. The easiest ones for me are going outside to enjoy the nature and laughing with friends and colleagues!

Here is a Tiny Survival Guide with great strategies:

What is helpful for you when work gets crazy-busy? How do you take care of yourself?

Meaningful Learning Experiences

18 Jan

What makes a learning experience a great one?

(It is not the visually appealing design or charisma of the teacher/instructor, even though both of these can make learning experiences nicer.)

The answer lies in the “a-ha!!” moment when we realize something new and connect the dots. This is the magical ingredient that makes learning meaningful by combining the cognitive understanding with an emotional awareness (SEL – identifying personal assets and emotions).

Now, how to lead more students into these a-ha!! moments – this is the real question we need to ask. And part of the answer is that one size can never fit all. To me, this makes teaching such a wonderful profession! Every day is a discovery day to understand how to support an individual student. We are trusted with great responsibility! However, being a teacher is not easy. Especially when mandated to “teach to the test” or “cover so and so much of curricula” – because these expectations have very little to do with learning. They are only focusing on teaching – and every teacher knows that what is taught is not necessarily learned!

Learning and teaching are two different things. They are two different processes that are often put into the same frame of reference (education) and sometimes even happen in the same physical or virtual space (classroom). Sometime we think that students are not motivated to learn new things, but this is a huge misconception! Children are natural born learners; it is our ultimate survival skill. But – for a variety of different reasons – we may not enjoy the experience of being taught.

When learning is seen as an in-built force within your students, the teaching job became easier. By becoming a facilitator for learning and guiding students to build their own knowledge, the teacher has taken a huge step towards supporting learners’ agency and autonomy. Starting with learning outcomes (what students will be able to know or do) we choose the information needed and plan for a selection of activities and assessments to help our students to learn what is needed. Then we add support for metacognition and a selection of recommended learning strategies.

Metacognition: The awareness and perceptions we have about ourselves as learners, understanding of the requirements and processes for completing learning tasks, and knowledge of strategies that can be used for learning.

With current technology this can be very easy to do! Lecturing is unnecessary as we have countless (better) ways for providing the information and concepts for students (books, videos, podcasts, walkthroughs, glossaries, wikis, etc.). The most important part of instruction is to share useful frameworks with learners to help them understand the context and connections (within the topic and its’ relations to other learning). These connections are vitally important, because learning process starts with external interactions and is completed with internal elaboration. [1] Learning facilitation means exactly this: supporting each student’s individual learning process and providing choices (within pedagogically/andragogically appropriate boundaries) for constructing their own understanding. Metacognitive skills are crucial tools for everyone because:

  • it really is about reflecting higher order learning (often described as critical thinking and problem solving)
  • we need the ability to monitor and regulate our own learning
  • in information societies learning cannot stop in graduation

Another important part of experiencing a meaningful learning experience comes from getting support when needed – not for finding the correct answers, but for strengthening our individual learning processes. While we all learn in the similar way by interacting with environment and then internally elaborating to make sense of the new information and fit into our own existing knowledge structures, we also have individual differences like the quality and amount of our previous knowledge. Understanding and supporting these personal processes [2] is the key to fostering lifle-long learning, which is why teachers need to be proficient with both SEL and Trauma-Informed Practices.

Making sure that we focus on learning as an individual process makes it possible to keep on supporting students throughout k12 education and beyond. To take this one step further, remember: Truly learner-centered experiences are designed with students, acknowledging their previous knowledge, and providing different learning modalities and assessments to choose from. Here is more about learner-centered design, which obviously makes learning engagement much more meaningful for participants. APA (American Psychological Association) has this great resource about creating meaningful learning experiences!

After SO many years in education, my favorite question still is: “How can I support your learning today?”

[1] Illeris, K. (2003). Towards a contemporary and comprehensive theory of learning.  International journal of lifelong education, 22(4), 396-406.

[2] Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press

 

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Using positive regard to reframe my perception

5 Dec

What is one thing your can change today? You can choose to reframe your perception!

My work gets so much easier when I remember to assume that others have much better intentions than what their actions of behavior seems to suggest. I have blogged about Positive Regard before, and I often discuss it with people. Learning more about resilience and trauma-informed practices is great, and I hope that more teachers would get training or professional development about it, as soon as possible. The easiest way (for me) to start practicing the positive regard is to detach the behavior from the person and do my best to support the person as they are – because then I can respond, instead of reacting to the behavior or situation.

Sometimes we are told – or taught – how to perceive certain things like behaviors. It is important to remember that these perceptions are tightly related to the learning theories we use (behaviorism, constructivism, humanism, etc.). The learner-centered philosophy builds on the humanist worldview emphasizing construction of meaning and knowledge from individual experiences. It also requires showing genuine interest towards learners and practicing unconditional positive regard in teaching-learning interactions, which means that our perception of students’ behavior must stay in the right hand column of the image. Here is more about Learner-centered practices: What learner-centered really means.

Using SEL strategies helps us to reframe our perception. All SEL skills (Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship skills and Responsible Decision-Making) are necessary for successful learning, but too often they are not taught throughout formal education. As children arrive to school with different skillsets of SEL, some will need more help than others.

By embedding the SEL skills to our instruction and classroom management we are helping students to better engage in their own, individual learning process. And this is why embedding SEL is so crucially important! They should not be an additional curriculum, but learned within every school subject and project. Here is another great resource for using SEL in Trauma-Informed Practices.

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