There is a lot of buzz about social emotional learning these days, even though proponents of SEL have been at it for a long time. In light of the additional stress associated with back to school in a normal year, we felt September was a good time to curate resources and share Fellow stories addressing the social emotional needs of students — and teachers.
Mindful Teaching Toolkit
TKU FFT Fellows Lauren Greenspan and Julia Handelman for offering these mindfulness tools for virtual instruction. They used their grant to complete the Children’s Yoga Course at Atma Darshan Yogashram in India and help students cope with stress. Then they founded the Youth Yoga Projectto help thousands of teachers and students across Ohio and beyond. Listen to their story on Fund for Teachers – The Podcast.
SEL for Teachers
To teach social emotional skills, it helps to have them ourselves. Here is a downloadable toolkit for developing SEL as educators.
Making SEL a Laughing Matter
To make a new school-wide learning plan work, Chris Toomey first needed to learn how to help students work the plan. He designed a Fund for Teachers grant to attend the Institute For Social and Emotional Learning summer program in San Mateo, CA, then complete coaching sessions on play-based strategies at Proponent of Play in Storrs, CT, to incorporate playfulness and social emotional learning (SEL) with students at Vinton Elementary in Mansfield Center, CT.
SEL Edutopia Spotlight
What do you think about pairing SEL with literacy? Edutopia profiled this high school that does this daily in advisory meetings helps students build strong positive relationships and listening skills.
Developing SEL Skills in a Prison, Orphanage and Stanford University
Lara Schmidt‘s commitment to students’ social emotional learning took her to an Iowa women’s prison, an Oakland alternative school in neutral gang territory, Rwandan orphanage Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, Stanford Graduate School of Education and back to Bay Area classrooms in San Francisco Unified School District. Hear her talk about this trajectory and her current work with first generation college students and new teachers on this new episode of Fund for Teachers – The Podcast.
Listen
Crafting a Mindset
On her fellowship at Penland School of Craft, Lisa Shafer learned to adopt the mindset of “that badness becomes part of your goodness.” See how Lisa’s ceramics skills and teaching practice grew to make a safe space for Oakland students’ questions and mistakes on this blog post.
Read
When SOS is a Good Thing
This husband & wife Fellow team will look to SOS Children’s Villages and the Reggio Emilio early childhood educatio model in Austria & Italy to strengthen SEL across 2 schools, a district & community.
SEL & COVID
According to this report by XQ Forum: “Social emotional learning isn’t only about relationships and emotions. We also need social emotional skills to tackle rigorous academic content, to puzzle through thorny problems, to build and to make, to learn anything new and challenging, and so much more. Social emotional learning is inextricably tied to academic learning, because all those skills—social, emotional, and academic—must work together for any type of learning to occur.”