Everyday SEL in the Virtual Classroom

Integrating Social Emotional Learning and Mindfulness Into Your Remote and Hybrid Settings

Carla Tantillo Philibert, Allison Slade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032023953
• eBook ISBN: 9781000550894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Behavioural Management

Learn specific strategies for implementing social emotional learning (SEL), mindfulness, and well-being in a virtual classroom. This essential new resource from well-being experts Carla Tantillo Philibert and Allison Slade will help you build students' Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation skills, school connectedness, Social Awareness, voice, and agency in remote or hybrid settings.

Appropriate for teachers of all grade levels, as well as for instructional leaders and parents, the book emphasizes the educator's own self-care and emotional intelligence, so you can become more aware of how the environment affects you along with your students. It also offers ideas for planning collaboratively with colleagues and engaging families in the virtual environment. Throughout, the authors share a variety of activities and practices you can implement immediately, along with sample scripts and educator tips.

With the inspiring advice in this book, you'll be able to help create emotionally healthy classrooms and school environments so that all students and educators can thrive, even during the most uncertain times.

1 Becoming Emotionally Intelligent in a Virtual Teaching Environment

DOI: 10.4324/9781003183204-2

Becoming an emotionally intelligent teacher is a journey and process, with no finality or end point. This is echoed in Theodore Roosevelt’s famous quote, “No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care” (Bishop, 1920). Emotionally intelligent teachers are actively introspective and reflective in their orientation to students, families, the classroom, the school community, and in their own homes and lives. They are resilient in response to negative stress and less likely to overwhelm themselves with pessimism and strong, negative emotions. An ongoing experience in a typical environment, becoming an emotionally intelligent teacher in a virtual teaching environment is even more challenging. This is because this new environment is a new trauma. Perhaps you are a rookie teacher who just got the hang of teaching last fall, and then were upended in the spring. Or, you were moved to teach a new grade level you’ve never taught before. You could even be a veteran teacher, who has been nimble and part of many different grade levels, but not a regular user of technology. The new requirements and expectations in the virtual setting came on immediately and without warning, and acted much like traumatic experiences but can be mitigated by deliberately working on becoming an emotionally intelligent teacher, even in this virtual setting.

Becoming an emotionally intelligent educator in the virtual setting involves the following steps, some of which occur naturally during in-person learning, but must be deliberately planned for, and practiced in the virtual setting for all educators.

1. Creating daily routines and working norms: morning, breaks, work-place, after school, among others.
2. Ensuring weekly connections with other adults: professionally and outside the school environment.
3. Creating and promoting a state of relaxed alertness in yourself to promote cognitive engagement in teaching and learning.

We want to be clear that while the aforementioned steps are also critical for students, this section is specifically focused solely on the needs of educators to become emotionally intelligent and develop and practice teaching competencies and corresponding skills for success.

Figure 1.1 The POP Check

A great first step is to take a sober look at your energetic resources. As Lara Veon discusses in the book, Everyday Self-Care for Educators (2019), creating a Self-Care Wheel can be an effective way to assess “both the energy expenditures and replenishers in the holistic areas of well-being (which) allows one to prioritize needs for optimal well-being to live a balanced life.” (p. 34). By using the wheel and guiding questions that follow as a guide, you can create a list of energy expenditures and energy replenishers for each category. For example, on the list for physical, you might write about walking the dog or practicing yoga. Also we strongly recommend practicing a POP Check when you feel dysregulated.

Routines and Working Norms: Intrapersonal Emotional Intelligence (SELF)

While working in a school setting, our routines and norms develop naturally out of external expectations. For example, as a teacher I was required to “clock in” by 7:50 am, therefore, working backwards, I needed to leave my house by 7:30 am, get in the shower by 7:00 am, and ensure my alarm went off by 6:45 am. The ride in the car often allowed me to “get ready” for my school day mentally and based on what I needed, each day looked different—sometimes a check on NPR to hear the news, sometimes a blasting of upbeat house or latin rock to wake me up, and sometimes my Pandora Sarah McLaughlin channel allowing me to sing my heart out. This routine helped me organize myself for the day ahead, and the flexibility allowed me to be responsive to my own needs, which often differed based on the day, the weather, and my prior night’s sleep. Every educator I know has a similar cadence of routine—a regular time to awake, a morning routine that is predictable and follows a pattern, but some level of customization possible based on need. On a typical day, there were interruptions at times—a car accident delaying my regular route, a realization that I used the last coffee pod and I’d need to stop on my way to caffeinate my journey, or a child waking up with a fever. Due to my ability to recognize how each of these stress-ors impacted me, I was able to, in most cases, think rationally and manage my emotions to accomplish the task of getting to school on times and being ready to teach my students on a daily basis.

However, emergency remote teaching came on suddenly, without warning, and necessitated an immediate paradigm shift in the creation of daily routines as an educator. Again, due to the sudden nature, we were unable to prepare and organize ourselves for success. Because of this disruption and the emergency remote learning period that followed, many educators were unable to develop not only the emotional regulation skills but also the focus and persistence skills required for successful Self-Awareness and Self-Management. Therefore, it is critical that we take time to develop new routines and working norms for ourselves in our new “work” setting, as we experience and become aware of dysregulation. In order to do so, we advocate taking time to answer the following questions and clearly define the new routines and norms required in your home for successful Self-Awareness and Self-Management.

• Do I have a regular wake up and getting ready routine that prepares me for teaching?
• Do I have a consistent work space and place that signals to others in my home that I am “at work”?
• What is my routine for breaks? Who do I engage with and why?
• What is my ending the day routine? How do the others I live with know when I am “off the clock”?
• Do I need transition time between work and home? How can I achieve that when the physical environment overlaps?

We have never been advocates of the term work-life balance as it is impossible to achieve in many cases. However, ensuring that, as educators working in a virtual environment, we look to achieve successful work-life integration depending on the moment is critical to the development of our own intra-personal SEL competencies. Virtual and remote teaching and learning has disrupted our routines. Ensuring we re-establish routines for the virtual environment is critical for success—not just for this space and place of remote learning, but to more easily respond and adapt to the new educational reality awaiting us in the future.

Good teaching is subject to compassion. Whether we are working with a student to tame their crippling fear of failure or if we are struggling to keep our cool when a challenging student pushes our buttons, our level of compassion toward our students can often be predicted by our level of compassion toward ourselves. Educators must model compassion toward themselves and their students. An educator’s ability to be compassionate—toward themselves and their students—is something that is felt immediately upon entering their room—even if this room is a virtual classroom. It is a space where students feel seen with a compassionate lens. Negativity toward one student is often sensed by the rest of the class and erodes the climate and culture of the classroom. One student being unwelcome in a room does not make the others feel inherently more welcome. This can actually be more transparent in a virtual setting, where students can see and feel the emotions of some of the other students in the classroom who have their cameras on in a much deeper way, since the majority of the virtual classroom “environment” is taken up by the faces of the learners. A virtual classroom space that welcomes all, even those that test our patience, creates a consistent, emotionally resilient, and compassionate environment for learning—or, as Charlotte Danielson describes, an environment of respect and rapport in which students will feel they have the space to explore Self-Awareness without shame (Danielson & CPS, 2011).

School is equally a personal and interpersonal pursuit. To be successful, our students must learn to balance the needs of the self with the needs of the collective. The secret here is to explicitly teach the competencies without becoming the domineering narrator inside your students’ heads. As former teachers, we knew many educators whose style was so prescriptive that there was no room for student Self-Awareness to be cultivated. Students never learn to be self-aware or to self-regulate, they simply learn to comply. This becomes even more extreme in a virtual setting, where connection is limited and to be successful, students need even more Self-Awareness and Self-Management than in the past (as do educators!). Therefore, it is clear that the virtual environment has enhanced our need to ensure that both students and staff work on well-being in all forms—now, their success in academics truly depends on it in every single way!

Connecting with Others: Interpersonal Emotional Intelligence (SOCIAL)

As humans, we are wired for connection—despite teaching in a remote setting, we still thrive on personal and professional connections with others. As teachers and professionals, this comes in the form of professional collaboration and socialization, as well as developing relationships with people outside of our homes and connecting with others to ensure accountability for self-care.

The emergency remote learning period also disrupted our regular way of acting and interacting with our colleagues, and developing relationships with others. Communication and ways to collaborate as well as our typical practicing of social skills as adults through regular interactions (think: staff meetings, hallway interactions, lunch in the teachers’ lounge) has not only isolated us as individuals, but taken away many of the avenues by which we continually practiced our relationship skills and social awareness in an in-person setting. In addition to focusing on our Self-Awareness and Self-Management in this new setting, it is critical for us as educators to find new ways to develop these communication skills and attend to the practice of social interactions to continue to grow our perspective-taking, empathy, and recognition of issues of inequality so that we can be effective in our craft. This is what connection means in a virtual setting. Think about the following questions:

• What regular routines can you put in place to discuss student concerns, and collaborate with other staff to accomplish goals related to student learning?
• How do you effectively express your gratitude, needs or concerns in this new environment?
• Do you regularly engage in non-school related conversation with others during the work week both with school-based personnel and outside friends or neighbors?
• How comfortable are you being vulnerable and experiencing a range of emotions (laughing, crying, fear, excitement) with others both in and outside of your inner circle or immediate family?
• How have you shared in the different experiences of others during the pandemic? Have you engaged in self-inquiry or reflected upon your level of empathy and emotional availability?

Creating a plan for connection, both personal and professional, is a key driver of developing and practicing being an emotionally intelligent educator. The key here is recognizing and addressing the unique and inherent challenges that arise out of the physical isolation which occurs during any type of remote or virtual learning and making a plan to continually develop and practice your communication and social skills regardless of location.

Cultivating Relaxed Alertness: Cognitive Engagement in Teaching and Learning

A growing body of scientific research refers to the term relaxed alertness as the optimal state for learning. In order to grow this in our students, we must first learn to identify and cultivate it in ourselves as educators. Relaxed alertness is a state of being that can be temporary, but can also become a defining trait in adults or students. It is characterized by feelings of confidence, competence, and motivation grounded in meaning or purpose (Caine, Caine, McClintic, & Klimek, 2015). Many of these feelings were significantly disrupted as a result of the sudden onset of the emergency remote learning period, but also, have persisted into the virtual learning period we are currently in. In order to successfully navigate our own cognitive engagement in teaching and learning which results in positive decision making around the teaching and learning for our students in our virtual classrooms, we must self-reflect and connect to achieving this state as educators, so that we can effectively identify the diverse needs of our students and use this state to impact their ability to learn in this new setting.

Both children and adults in a state of relaxed alertness experience an environment of low threat and high challenge. In order to cultivate this state in our classrooms, we must first cultivate it in ourselves. Consider the following questions about your own work environment:

• Are you being equally challenged and supported in this new educational setting and with the new educational expectations?
• Do you experience excitement or fear with the new challenges ahead? Why?
• How do you manage uncertainty and ambiguity, with logic, grace, and a sense of inquiry?
• How does your administrator facilitate this state of being as an educator?

The Mindful Practices approach creates a state of relaxed alertness in educators so that they can take on the challenges that lie ahead in teaching and learning. This approach is closely aligned to the CASEL core SE competencies and clusters, defined as: Social and emotional competence (SEC) is the capacity to coordinate cognition, affect, and behavior that allows individuals to thrive in diverse cultures and contexts and achieve specific tasks and positive developmental outcomes (Elias et al., 1994)…. 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 (CASEL, 2020).

• Self-Awareness: The ability to understand one’s own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior across contexts. This includes capacity to recognize one’s strengths and limitations with a well-grounded sense of confidence and purpose.
• Self-Management: The ability to manage one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations and to achieve goals and aspirations. This includes the capacity to delay gratification, manage stress, and feel motivation and agency to accomplish personal/collective goals.
• Social Awareness: The ability to understand the perspectives of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts. This includes the capacity 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.

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 SELF (Intrapersonal) and SOCIAL (Interpersonal) practices:

• Self-Awareness: Building this competency cultivates an awareness of self, empowering the learner with the self-knowledge to better address their mental, emotional, and well-being needs.
• Self-Regulation: Building this competency constructs the bridge from awareness to regulation and can shift the learner from impulsivity to intentional navigation of behavioral choices.
• Social Awareness: Building this competency cultivates an awareness of self in social situations. What we bring into the room and how the energy and atmosphere in the room impacts us. By building this competency the learner can move from a reactive mindset to a more proactive, communal view of their role in the world around them.
• 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 excessiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Meet the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Directory of Terms
• Introduction
• 1 Becoming Emotionally Intelligent in a Virtual Teaching Environment
• 2 Creating the Climate and Conditions for a Socio-Emotionally Healthy Virtual Classroom
• 3 Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation: Activities to Promote Reflection and Self-Management Virtually
• 4 School Connectedness and Teacher Trust
• 5 Social Awareness: Activities to Promote Social Interaction Virtually
• 6 Student Voice and Agency
• 7 Virtual SEL for Collaborative Planning with Colleagues
• 8 Engaging Families in the Virtual Environment
• Conclusion
• References