Everyday SEL in High School

Integrating Social Emotional Learning and Mindfulness Into Your Classroom

Carla Tantillo Philibert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000402902
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Behavioural Management

With this bestselling book from educational consultant Carla Tantillo Philibert, you'll gain practical strategies for teaching Social Emotional Learning (SEL), mindfulness, and well-being to help improve the human connection between you and your students. You'll find out how to lead students through mindfulness activities, simple yoga poses, and breath-work techniques. Topics include mindful practices, well-being strategies to combat stress and anxiety, giving your students the space to understand their emotions and strengthen peer-to-peer communication, developing the foremost and essential SEL competencies, and engaging in experiential activities to strengthen SEL skills. The new edition reflects the latest CASEL guidelines and includes updated activities, as well as a brand-new directory of terms, and an intentional focus on educators' and students' socio-emotional well-being. Perfect for high school educators at any level of experience, the book will help you develop positive youth identity and promote connectedness so students can deal successfully with life's stressors beyond school doors.

1
An Approach, Not a Program

In my second year of teaching I had a student, Roger, who couldn’t concentrate on my oh-so-fabulous poetry lesson because he was hungry. I didn’t see that. I saw a student that was disrupting the lesson I worked all weekend creating. Each time he fidgeted or talked I thought, “Ugh, he doesn’t appreciate the hard work that went into this lesson. He is disrupting all the students next to him! I worked WAY too hard on this lesson.”

Finally, after trying to redirect multiple times, I disciplined him, as I did the next day and the day after that as his behavior continued. Venting to my colleagues in the faculty lounge later in the week about Roger (in a less-than-compassionate “I don’t know what is wrong with this kid” type of way), I discovered that his younger sister, Brandy, had been caught sneaking food from the school cafeteria. Putting all the pieces together, we figured out that Roger was hungry. His younger siblings were hungry. Their mom was struggling with addiction, had not been home in two weeks, and they were unsure of where their next meal would come from. Of course, my fabulous poetry lesson didn’t matter to him! He was stuck in the panic of meeting his and his siblings’ basic needs with limited resources or support. This was coupled with concern for his mother’s well-being along with hiding the truth so that they would not end up in foster care. Again. Reflecting on the structure of my classroom, I realized that there were no SEL or mindfulness tools to meet Roger’s physical, emotional, or mental health needs. As an educator passionate about her craft, I naively thought that my dynamic lessons were enough to engage my students in learning, regardless of what was happening outside of the schoolhouse doors.

Witnessing many of my students struggle first-hand as an educator, I realized that I was failing them by only focusing on their academic needs. It was my responsibility to teach the whole child, not just the part that I thought should want to learn poetry. I needed to have an SEL-Informed Classroom where I was informed about, sensitive to and making time to practice Social Emotional Learning. An adaptive environment where my students’ Intrapersonal (SELF) and Interpersonal (SOCIAL) needs could be in balance. Even though the best SEL or mindfulness strategies could not have put food in Roger’s stomach or brought his mother home, they could have mitigated the crippling anxiety of the unknown. If my students were not given the tools to be ready to learn amid life’s chaos, their ability to excel in school would be negatively impacted. By not creating space for my students’ emotional needs within my classroom I unknowingly fueled the cycle of dysfunction and uncertainty in which many of them were enmeshed. If students did not walk out of my class at the end of the year with the SEL and mindfulness tools in place to succeed in life—alongside the ability to write a poem—then I didn’t do my job. Especially at my school, which boasted “serving the whole child” and “creating life-long learners” in the mission statement emblazoned in the hallway my students walked every day on their way to my class.

For students to succeed in my classroom, I needed to create space in my instruction for learners to develop an awareness of their physical, emotional, and mental needs so that they would be empowered to move out of survival mode (fight, flight, or freeze) and be present and ready to learn.

What approach is going to best prepare my students to be self-aware and not only ready to learn but ready to build positive relationships with their peers, make healthy choices about their bodies, and tackle life with resiliency and determination? The best approaches are those that:

• frame the “why” behind the work for all adults, school stakeholders, students, and parents
• create space for student voice and agency, regularly!—check in daily with students, in their own words (not teachers observing what they think a student may be thinking or feeling); ask them about their mood and energy; seek actionable insights, like if they need their seat moved or are too close to the door to concentrate
• support the well-being, self-care, and mental health needs of the adults and the students, shame-free, by promoting positive youth (and adult) identity
• provide clear answers to implementation questions for adults and students: Am I being graded on this? Am I being evaluated on this? How do I practice this at home? Who is expected to implement? What time(s) am I expected to implement each day/week and for how many minutes total?
• build the SEC of all adult stakeholders in the school/district with hands-on, experiential training that honors their unique starting points with this work

So, What Is Social Emotional Learning?

CASEL’s definition of Social Emotional Learning is the most widely known:

The process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.

SEL advances educational equity and excellence through authentic school-family-community partnerships to establish learning environments and experiences that feature trusting and collaborative relationships, rigorous and meaningful curriculum and instruction, and ongoing evaluation. SEL can help address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving schools and contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities.

(CASEL, 2020)

While this definition is very useful, it can feel cumbersome if we are new to the discipline. When working with educators across the country, I will ask folx what SEL means to them, as boots-on-the-ground caring adults who teach or work with youth every day; they responded:

SEL is a way to slow and calm the mind in order to be aware of our emotions and to be aware of what really matters so students (and adults!) can be happier, healthier people!

SEL is learning about self and your relationships with others. Students can learn this by: connecting authentically with adults, by getting to know themselves and when I fuse SEL into academic content.

SEL is an on-going process, a journey without end just as self-improvement is never ending. It’s continuous building on previous growth. It’s improving upon each improvement.

As an educator, I use SEL in two ways: to build an interpersonal connection with my students before class starts (non-instructional time) AND to build my students awareness of their own emotions to prevent frustration, stress and/or performance anxiety from negatively impacting their achievement.

SEL is the lifelong process of understanding your emotions and how to manage them.

To me, SEL is an on-going, reciprocal process between students, peers, adults, staff, where everyone learns how to respond (rather than react) to stressful or disturbing situations, creating an atmosphere of safety and empathy.

As explored in these definitions, Figure 1.1 offers a visual representation of SEL emphasizing the balance between the Intrapersonal and the Interpersonal. The process of finding this balance is aligned with the 3 CASEL core competencies, Self-Awareness, Self-Management (or Self-Regulation) and Social Awareness, as well as to the development of Social Emotional Competence (SEC), each defined as:

Social and Emotional Competence (SEC) is the capacity to coordinate cognition, affect, and behaviour that allows individuals to thrive in diverse cultures and contexts and achieve specific tasks and positive developmental outcomes… . These clusters emphasize the importance of developing both intrapersonal competencies that include self-awareness and self-management and interpersonal competencies that include social awareness and relationship skills.

Self-Awareness: The abilities to understand one’s own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior across contexts. This includes capacities to recognize one’s strengths and limitations with a well-grounded sense of confidence and purpose.

Self-Management: The abilities to manage one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations and to achieve goals and aspirations. This includes the capacities to delay gratification, manage stress, and feel motivation and agency to accomplish personal/collective goals.

Social Awareness: The abilities to understand the perspectives of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts. This includes the capacities to feel compassion for others, understand broader historical and social norms for behavior in different settings, and recognize family, school, and community resources and supports.

(CASEL, 2020)

In these terms, the Mindful Practices SEL approach focuses on the following SEC clusters, with an added emphasis on the balance between Self-Efficacy and Social Harmony, as highlighted in the last few practices of both the SELF (Intrapersonal) and SOCIAL (Interpersonal) practices chapters, in activities such as the Community-Based Service Learning Project. When we working with schools and districts, we start with the simplified, learner-focused descriptions of the competencies below. We have found this helps keep the balance between the Intrapersonal and Interpersonal in focus. Also, we use the term Self-Regulation instead of Self-Management, as it resonates with students and adults alike.

Figure 1.1 SEL: The Balance Between Intrapersonal and Interpersonal

Self-Awareness: Empowering the learner to address their mental, emotional, and physical needs.

Self-Regulation: Shifting the learner from impulsivity to intentional navigation of choices.

Social Awareness: Building the learner’s awareness of self and others in social situations. What they bring into the room and how the overall energy and atmosphere impacts the collective.

Self-Efficacy and Social Harmony: When in balance, the learner feels centered, present, and like a valued and contributing member of the world around them. This competency also reflects the learner’s ability to find their voice and to balance the needs of the self with the needs of others, without projection, assumption, or excessive self-sacrifice (see Figure 1.2).

Mindfulness is one of the vehicles or Mindful Practices we use to create space for stillness. Space to cultivate that bedrock, intrapersonal SE competency, Self-Awareness. This book examines the interplay between interpersonal and intrapersonal SEL skill development and how the practices of vocalization, movement, stillness, and teamwork, or what we call Mindful Practices (see Figure 1.2) develop not only one’s Self-Awareness but, in turn, an increased ability for one to form positive human connections with others.

Taking a cue from Precious Jennings’ work at Columbia College in Chicago, “Self-Awareness is cultivated by the union between the body and mind found within these four practices: vocalization, movement, stillness and human connection.” The goal of the POP Chart and the practices housed within is to utilize a mix of Mindful Practices to build Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, and Social Awareness so that students can find the balance between Self-Efficacy and Social Harmony as well as to balance the needs of the self with those of the collective.

• Vocalization: speaking, chanting, singing
• Movement: gross/fine/locomotor, yoga, dance, fitness
• Stillness: reflection, breath work, meditation
• Human Connection: play, collaboration, communication

Each of these four practices is experiential in nature and will resonate differently with each student or adult, as folx all have different entry points to this work based upon myriad, individual factors such as previous traumas, or levels of physical mobility. To meet students and adults at that entry point, the practice is not merely reading about the positive impacts of breath work or movement on the body. Instead, it is paying attention on purpose (mindfulness) and, over time, learning how their bodies respond, cultivating an understanding of what they need and when they need it (Self-A...