Instructional Practices That Integrate Equity-centered Social, Emotional and Academic Learning
Dave Bakker: Welcome to Science is Cool, a free virtual unconference for cool science teachers. My name is Dave and I’m your host today. And we are in the afternoon sessions, and we’re going to have a session on social emotional learning that’s tailored for science teachers, by the way. So I think you’re going to love this. Let’s see if our next guests are ready. We have Dr. Angela Ward and Dr. Nick Yoder. Dr. Yoder is the Senior Director of Research and Professional Learning at Harmony SEL at National University, and Dr. Angela Ward is the Chief Programs Officer at Transforming Education.
Nick Yoder: Thanks so much. Good afternoon, everybody. Dr. Ward and I are here representing the Center for Social Emotional Learning and School Safety at WestEd. And we’re pleased to talk to you today about SEL and academic integration, particularly in science classrooms. As Dave said, I am Nick Yoder. I am a strong SEL advocate. I’ve been in the education space for almost two decades now.
What I’m going to quickly do is define what social emotional learning is, just to start it off. Then talk about why it’s important, and talk a little bit about my own social and emotional learning experience and why I’ve become such a strong SEL advocate.
So first, what is social emotional learning, right? Simply put, it’s really about intentionally helping create environments and activities that help nurture and develop students’ social emotional skills that they’re going to need for academic learning, as well as in the various spaces that they live and work, and even later on in life.
And if you haven’t heard of CASEL, the CASEL, or the Collaborative for Academic, Social Emotional Learning has identified five core competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Which in essence, just means you’re helping kids develop their ability to understand who they are, recognizing their strengths, their assets — both personal and cultural, understanding how to regulate them and redirect their emotions to achieve their self-determined goals, building relationship skills, communication, collaboration, cooperation, problem solving, all the really good things that we want youth to develop as they grow and develop.
And we know that social emotional learning is really important. As the Science of Learning and Development, which is a group of scholars who have really tried to understand what the science has told us about learning and development, has definitely showcased that all of our learning is mediated through our social and emotional experiences and interactions and the world.
So our social and emotional experiences can both activate and accelerate our growth and development. But they also can hinder the way that we’re working, in the way that we’re interacting with others, making it really important to be mindful and intentional about our SEL work, which is what we’re going to talk about today.
So why am I a good social emotional advocate? Or why did I become so, first as a student? So I was a typical nerdy student in school. I didn’t have a ton of friends, I was always only in groups because kids wanted me to do their work for them. I’d cry if I got a C — no joke, that happened. In Algebra 2 class, I just did not have the emotional regulation when it happened. In all of my education, all my teachers — I was from a small rural town, and in Michigan, they all thought, “Hey, you’re going to just be really successful when you go to college. You’re excelling academically, you’ll just be fine.”
But when I got to college, as a first-generation college student, I’d not really been understanding my own sense of self now. Because now I’m around a lot of people who have done the same thing that I have, so I don’t really know who I am, I don’t really know who to go to ask for help, because it’s so big, an urban space, from a rural space. And I didn’t really have a good relationship skills to actually form a good network that I could really connect with.
So all this is to say — and why I say this is because lots of times, we think of SEL as like a behavior management thing, or the first three weeks of school, or something for “those kids.” But it’s not. It really is for everybody. We are constantly evolving on our SEL journey, no matter who we are or where we’re at.
And this goes to my point then as an educator. I wasn’t really familiar with SEL when I was teaching. I taught in Chicago Public Schools. I didn’t really learn about SEL until I was actually in grad school, four years later. After having SEL standards — we were the first state to have SEL standards, after having an SEL curriculum — and when I was really introduced to the term social emotional learning, I was like, “Oh my God, why didn’t I have this when I was an educator?”
Not only did it help me think about how could I nurture the skills and assets within my students, but it made me reflect on my own social emotional growth as an educator. What triggered me in my emotional response with educators, and how did I respond? And I taught at a predominantly black school, and so what was my experience like, versus theirs? With learning and development, I need to think about and test my own assumptions, and reflect on my own biases about what learning looks like, and how people navigate the world. Because there are cultural differences. And so if I have that time, I have that space to really think about it, I’ve been really critical for me to engage with my students. So with that, I’m going to pause. I’m going to pass it over to Dr. Ward to talk a little bit more about SEL and equity, before I go back into some academic integration stuff. Dr. Ward?
Angela Ward: Thanks, Dr. Yoder. Excited to be here with you all today. I am Dr. Angela Ward, and my work centers on equity-centered social emotional learning. I come to you with 25 years of experience in education, working with teachers, working with students, teaching teachers, and joining you from central Texas. My research focused on how to design effective professional learning that’s centered on race. And in that context, we really had to understand our own social emotional skill sets, as professional learning developers and designers and facilitators. So for me, I’m really passionate about creating identity-safe classrooms and workplaces. And I look at equity-centered SEL, as Nick has talked to you about what SEL is. When we think about equity-centered SEL, we’re thinking about the person, we’re thinking about your place, and we’re thinking about your passion and your philosophy of education.
So when I think about the person, I’m thinking about the fact that equity-centered SEL is only successful when the person is really focused on who they are, their own social emotional learning and growth. They’re focused on their own background, their beliefs, and biases. They’re focused on their place of origin and all those things that roll up into who they are as individuals. And it reflects on the impacts of how you show up, versus how your students show up into the classroom space, into the school environment. And it really fuels — when we’re looking at equity-centered SEL, and we’re focused on the person, as well as your place and what you bring, we began to open doors to your passion, your philosophy of education, but also the door to build those trusting relationships. Adult to student, student to adult, student to student.
And we opened the door to students being able to foster self-agency, self-efficacy, and that overall sense of belonging and identity safety that we strive for in our schools. So my first year as a teacher is what I reflected on as we thought about what we might speak with you about. I thought about, as a first-year teacher, how did I engage my students? And a non-negotiable for me, as a reading teacher, was that every student on my watch would be reading by the end of the of first grade, and writing by the end of fourth grade, as a writing teacher.
So what I really focused on was: How do I build trust with my students? How do I honor their individual needs, their personalities that they bring into the classroom space? And really recognizing that I had students who may enter the classroom with mood swings, or I had students who may enter the classroom with a high cognitive level of learning, and they’re prepared to read and write well beyond where I’m deemed to work with them this school year.
So as a teacher, really thinking about social emotional learning, one of the first things I did, one of my early years of teaching, was looked at: How do we develop character? And how do we build a classroom community where each student feels like they’re a contributing member of this classroom community?
I laughed at myself and I thought about the character that I had to introduce how to be in community with each other. We had this character called Uncouth. So all of my first graders learned the meaning of the word “uncouth,” like their first month in first grade. They were going home, telling their parents they were “uncouth,” and I was having to go back and clean up some of those conversations. Like, “I swear, it’s not a bad word.” But really talking to parents about how what we’re really trying to do is create a community where students are able to build their own knowledge, they’re able to build their own agency, and they’re able to help each other learn how to be in community with each other.
So that was the big character lesson that we learned, and we taught each other throughout the years as I taught students, and I brought that with me into the work that I do with teachers and principals and superintendents. Really looking at: How are we creating those learning environments, even in the professional learning spaces, even in the workspaces that we inhabit together as adults? Are we creating those places where people can walk in and know that someone’s got their back? Those are social emotional learning skills.
I’m going to pass it back to Nick to talk to you about the taxonomy that we developed for the brief that we will share with you all after today.
Nick Yoder: Thank you, Dr. Ward. So, as we were introduced, we are part of the Center to Improve Social Emotional Learning and School Safety at WestEd, which really is about providing support at the at a systemic level. So how can we create those structures and processes, and really intentionally focus on supporting the whole person learning? Not just children, but also adults in this space, and how we grow and develop.
It’s been a nice collaboration, as I work for Harmony Social Emotional Learning, which is a no-cost SEL explicit instruction program — social emotional learning program — and with Dr. Ward at Transforming Education. So it’s really been nice to think about this cross-collaboration about integrative practices, taking skills from an SEL program or curriculum, like Harmony, to general pedagogy, and how we can really enhance and support that work.
This work that we’re going to talk about, I started about 10 years ago, when we’re really trying to think about these integrative practices. I recently got to update this work with Dr. Ward and a number of other colleagues, and really thinking about: What does integrative practice mean? As I mentioned, we were part of — or when I was teaching, I had an SEL program, but I didn’t know what it was. So I was like: What motivates teachers to actually pick up an SEL program, or to think that it’s not an add-on?
So we thought about these integrative practices, about how we are intentionally already creating space for kids’ social emotional development. As we updated these practices, we really wanted to be more inclusive of culturally responsive practices, equity, trauma, and adult SEL, within them. So it’s been a nice collaboration. And as we were developing them, we — Dr. Ward, and our other colleagues — were trying to create examples of integrative practices. We were like, “Well, what makes this an integrative practice?”
So what we did was, we created this taxonomy of four approaches of how SEL actually shows up in teaching and learning. I’m going to go through these four approaches and provide you some science-explicit examples. The four approaches are explicit skill alignment, explicit strategy alignment, ways of interacting, and ways of being.
When we think about explicit skill alignment, hopefully, that’s pretty obvious. It’s the same thing, right? There are actually socio-emotional skills within our academic standards. So if you’re teaching an academic standard that has that social emotional competency, hey, you’re doing SEL, right? It’s pretty easy. So for example, if you think about a science standard on understanding your biases, and how you interpret results, or experiments — that is also social emotional skills. You need to understand what your biases and assumptions are, as you interpret the information in the world around you. It is literally the same skill that we are teaching kids about understanding our biases and our assumptions. So that’s number one.
Number two, explicit strategy alignment. This is really thinking about academic standards that require a particular practice or strategy that youth need to engage in. That practice typically requires some level of social emotional skill to engage in that practice. So if you’re thinking about a — you might ask your students to present their ideas about a science finding that they have. Well, to present your ideas, whether verbally or in writing, you actually have to communicate those ideas. You have to provide your perspective, your point of view, but you also have to understand the perspective of the other person, whoever you’re communicating with. Guess what? Both of those are social emotional skills. You are learning how to communicate, get a broader point of view, in a science domain. And then you’re also perspective-taking. Both social emotional skills. So right there, it’s that natural fit of social emotional learning.
Now, ways of interacting is very similar to an explicit strategy alignment, except the goal here is to promote positive interactions, or to prevent negative interactions that might occur within the academic space. For example, a kid might be really stressed out before a science test. So in order to help calm themselves down, re-regulate themselves, you might do a mindful minute, or quick journaling activity, or something that helps kids center themselves that’s prior to the actual event that they’re going in.
Or if you’re having kids collaborate in a science experiment where they have to share resources and materials, you might do a mini lesson on problem-solving or collaboration that helps kids then learn how to use that skill within that setting. So you’re promoting positive interactions and preventing negative interactions once they head into that academic space.
Finally, the last one, ways of being. This is the fourth one. So social emotional skills are contextual in nature. As we think about our person by context, environment, the way we show up and experience the world is different. When we’re presenting, when we’re with colleagues, and with our peers, and with our families. And the same is sort of true in terms of content domains.
So if you’re thinking about a skill, maybe in science, it’s hypothesis testing. Hypothesis testing, you kind of predict what’s going to happen based on the evidence that you know, and then try it out and then interpret your results. Well, that’s the same skill as predicting the consequences of your actions. And so if you’re doing that science experiment, you can say, “Hey, you use this skill in other domains of your life, but it might show up differently.” So you’re helping kids take that meta-sense of what the social emotional skill is, and transfer it out.
Now, we have a lot of examples, and we have an updated brief that we’re actually going to be putting out relatively soon. It’s in design right now, we were hoping it would be done. But it should be available in the next few weeks for you all to get access. We’re super excited to share that with you. Thanks so much. And Dr. Ward, I’m going to pass it back to you.
Angela Ward: Thank you. So yes, we are excited to share with you the SEL brief that’s coming out soon. And all the wonderful things that Nick shared with you about the brief, we feel that it’ll be a great tool for you. If you’ve never implemented social emotional learning within your science curriculum, it’ll be a good starting point for you. We have some good ideas and some practical application tools for you to use within that brief.
At Transforming Education, we have the social emotional learning integration approach that really focuses on that academic social, emotional learning integration. We’re really focused on: How do we teach? How do we model? How do we coach? How do we examine ourselves as educators implementing this work? And how do we cultivate those relationships and those partnerships that are needed as we work with our students?
So as we’re thinking about real world application of social emotional learning, we want to really think about: How do we center student comfort? Often, what we recognize is that adults, we’re the ones making a lot of the decisions. And sometimes we forget that students don’t get to make any of the decisions. We’re the ones that are giving them all the fruits of our own thinking, and we don’t necessarily find ways sometimes to bring their perspectives into the classroom. What social emotional learning does is remind us that we should also be doing that.
One of the things that I did in my former work in Central Texas was, we worked with this group of students, and across our school district, we invited four students from each high school to join us for a Student Equity Council. And we didn’t just convene an equity counsel, like typically engaging with those “teacher-pleaser” types of students, those students who everyone loves to work with. We looked for students on the margins, we looked for students who are natural-born leaders that no one ever thinks to ask: Do you want to do something different in new and exciting? And what we did was, we looked at that, and we brought students together, and we got to see self-efficacy in action.
Our students were on board. They designed their own ways of thinking about schools as liberating spaces. And what lessons it taught us as adults, is that if we just create the opportunity for students to come together and share how they’re experiencing our schools, that’s one way of understanding how their social emotional learning skills are developing. So we create those spaces in our schools. We think about how we can work with students to honor their lived experiences, to honor how they are interacting, to honor how they are experiencing schools.
We recognize that some schools went back right away. Other schools went back within months, within weeks, and some just went back. We’re recognizing how each school and each student is experiencing the return to school very differently. I can think about myself as a mother and my own children. I have one child who was in eighth grade when we were all sent home from school, basically, and he went back to school as a tenth grader. So when I think about the developmental stages that happen, eighth grade, ninth grade, and tenth grade, and the social skills and the social skill development that happens in those different areas, it really makes me pause and think. As a teacher, how might I engage my child in knowing that he didn’t have school face-to-face for an entire school year?
So coming back into school is giving us ideas to really think through — how to work through how to support our students. And so I just want to bring some of those thoughts to your mind, as you’re thinking about, what is this thing called social emotional learning. It’s not a program, it’s way of being, it’s a practice. It’s really being in tune to who you are as an adult, so that you’re creating those opportunities to tap into the lived experiences of students. You’re taking opportunities to tap into who you are, and what you’re passionate about, and bringing that into the workspace with your students. And so I’m going to turn it over to Dave,
Dave Bakker: Thank you so much. There’s a lot of interaction and a lot of questions. Let’s try to answer some. I want to go way back to the top with a really — by the way, thank you. That was really interesting. And I could see a lot of personal heartfelt reactions to this, which is kind of the situation we’re in.
So this is an observation and kind of a question from Matt Mindach — I hope I got that right. We just had a presentation by Dr. Lori Desautels at our school, which was incredible, but also daunting to try and implement everything all the time. So if there if you could condense some ideas for the teachers who are here, going back to class tomorrow, Monday. What are the baby steps that you can do?
Angela Ward: Want me to take that one, Nick? Or you got it?
Nick Yoder: Go for it. Go for it.
Angela Ward: You know, the first thing that comes to mind as a classroom teacher is: Are you creating opportunities to just check in with students, and check out with students? That’s really simple. Check-ins can be as simple as, you do warm-ups, one of your warm-ups could be a check-in. On a scale of 5 to 10, how are you today? How are you showing up? With 1 being — whatever you want to do, 1 being the high, or 5 being the high. But you get a lot of information from students just by doing simple check-ins and check-outs at the end of the day.
Nick Yoder: I 100% agree with that. And I would also say, part of that is, a couple strategies that you could use are community meetings. We call the “meetups” in the Harmony programs. But it’s a nice way to think about and share, and respond, and discuss problems that might be arising within the classroom. We also have this really fun thing called “buddy up,” where you actually provide time for students to connect socially with one another throughout the day. So just small minutes, one or two minutes to have a quick conversation where they can check in with each other, because it is hard for you to check in with everybody. And even kids as young as preschool can learn how to say how they’re feeling, or talk about something that’s interesting to them, when they’re in line or in a transition or something like that. So just getting time and space for it, even if it’s for short amounts of time.
Dave Bakker: It’s more of an observation than a question, but I think this this will go with what you’re saying. This is from Alejandro Vargas. We found in order to create deep, respectful connections, teachers need to present themselves as humans. You could say, “Hey, I don’t know. I’ll have to find out,” to a question. What you’re saying — the teacher has to be vulnerable too.
Angela Ward: Absolutely. One of my favorite things to do with my students, I’ll say, “Hey, I don’t know. Maybe we can find out together.” And they will get a kick out of it. “What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re supposed to be teaching us!” “Well, I don’t know everything. I have to read, just like you.”
Nick Yoder: Yeah, and this also goes back to the idea someone asked about, resiliency. One of the great things about resiliency is how actually having that supportive adult and supportive relationships — even just sharing about yourself and the struggles that you’re having, and letting you be seen as human — is incredibly important to support kids’ social emotional development, supporting their own resiliency, and knowing that other people go through similar problems and struggles, even adults.
Angela Ward: Yeah, one thing that I did with my science lesson — so I taught everything as an elementary school teacher, and my science lessons fed my writing lessons and my math lessons and my history lessons. So we would write about science, and I would give my fourth graders little quizzes just to get an understanding of what how they were grasping the science concepts. I’d have them write me a story from the perspective of a seed or something like that, just to understand how they were really grasping those science concepts.
But then we would also personify the seed and put give it a personality. And that would give me a window into how they were thinking. But I would model those things for them, so they got a window into my sense of humor. Or I would share my writing to talk about how I was engaging with my, then, probably two- or three-year-old son, but really humanizing it, and they would be able to make connections with little sisters, little brothers, or whatever the case may be.
Dave Bakker: I think you said something really important here, a concept. One thing we learned from a STEM Summit we did in August was that integration, particularly for science, is really important —integration with math and reading language arts. One of the things that came up is, well, you can write a story about a science phenomenon. And it’s occurring to me, as you’re talking, that social emotional learning is fantastic for integration. You want to integrate it into the activities in some way, right?
Angela Ward: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Nick Yoder: And finding ways that it connects a student’s interests, energizes kids. Thinking about not only the skill set, but what’s going to energize students. Because when you’re emotionally engaged in something, you’re way more likely to learn it, understand it, retain it, than if you’re passively engaged, or not emotionally engaged within the process at all. So it’s also really trying to understand who your students are, and building those really great relationships with them, to understand what’s going to energize them.
Angela Ward: Yeah. A really good beginning of the social emotional learning integration process is: How are you tapping into who your students are, and getting to understand them? Understanding what they like, what they don’t like, will all go a long way in understanding how to reach them with regards to science.
Dave Bakker: There’s another question here. At first, I thought, oh, maybe it’s not relevant, but then I’m thinking about it again. It seems like it’s pretty important. This is from Melvin — is your last name Din? It says Melvin Din. I think I see you in the chat, Melvin. Thanks for your question. How do you implement SEL during COVID lockdowns, when these skills are needed the most now?
Hopefully we’re not going to go into mass lockdown across the globe. But it occurred to me though, no, we’re here. We’re still doing a lot of remote stuff. It’s stuck in a lot of areas. So you need to be able to practice these skills through Zoom camera sometimes.
Nick Yoder: Yeah. So I think there’s lots of ways that you can do that. Like you can still do meetups within community settings. You can still have some solid level of a talking stick or whatnot, so people can share and discuss it. Still providing that time and space, like doing breakouts where your kids can actually begin to talk with each other. I’ve heard of folks even suggesting going back to writing notes and emails and letters, and understanding how they are connecting and engaging with others.
It’s actually a really great time to understand other folks. So you can connect with other classrooms and schools, as almost virtual buddies across the country or across the world, to actually engage and hear what other people are going through. So you don’t feel so alone and isolated during this time. And particularly how you’re interacting, and then still continuing to help build these relationships, and letting folks know and getting time and space to talk about emotions. Letting them know that emotions are okay, and that we all have them and we’re all experiencing them. And it’s okay for you to feel them.
Angela Ward: One thing I like to do is I use music. I open with music. We create a power song list. We play a little bit of everyone’s song here and there as we’re coming in, or leaving, or taking a break. We use fun games and do little silly things together. We use the Annotate feature on Zoom, just finding different ways to build community.
Definitely using the chat. The “waterfall” is super fun — using the chat as a waterfall with students, giving them a prompt and having them go back and read what everyone else put into the chat. Just, how do you use those different strategies that build community, encourage students to turn their camera on, by not even asking that question?
I interviewed two eighth grade girls, probably about late December 2020, talking to them about their experiences in the virtual world. They compared teachers, and they had one teacher who created the opportunity for what Nick is talking about — those breakout groups where no one’s telling them what they have to talk about, but giving them space to just be and be together. Some of that unstructured time, but then some of that structured time where then you’re given a task as a small group to go into a breakout, and the teacher comes in and checks on you to see how you’re doing. Or you have small on-on-one time with the teacher.
So thinking about those ways you do those things in the classroom, face-to-face. And not trying to figure it all out on your own in a silo, but talking with your colleagues. I think a lot of the time, we get frustrated as adults. We think we have to bear the burden by ourselves. Social emotional learning is all about not trying to do it all. You’re not super people.
Figure out how to be in community with adults, and that will expand your horizons and expand how you think about doing it. And talk to your students: “I’m really at a loss for this. I haven’t really done a lot of this online stuff. And I really want to know what you all feel would be useful. Here are some ideas I have. Let’s talk through what can we do as a classroom community, so we learn what we need to learn. So we create the space for each of you to feel like you can show up to class each day and not be bored.”
My son — I told you he was ninth grade — was all online. And he talked about his math teacher. His math teacher was the one he really enjoyed, and he talked about how she created community. It was in his own words. It wasn’t “she created community,” but it was, the things that she did him made him feel seen and made him feel like a special part of the classroom community.
Dave Bakker: Angela, this is great. Thank you very much. That’s the last word — we have to go to a break. Dr. Nick Yoder and Dr. Angela Ward. We should do a follow up on this, by the way. We will poll the audience for topics, if they want to do follow-up. Happy to do a follow-up. I see a ton of interaction and questions. It’s obviously a current topic that’s on everybody’s minds.
Thank you very much. This is Science is Cool ScIC7, a virtual unconference for cool science teachers. And we’re going to take a break.