Improve Every Lesson Plan with SEL

Jeffrey Benson

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781416630043
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

"Good lesson plans have an almost mysterious power; they declare that all information can be interesting, that every skill acquired broadens our potentials to make a better world, and that all impassioned activity leads to learning. Our best teachers have shown us over and over that life is not a struggle against boredom and compliance; it is a wonder to be apprehended. Every bit of SEL you can integrate into your planning will not only begin to heal the wounds of passivity, racism, and inequity, but also give students an experience today, in your classroom, of that better world."

Jeffrey Benson draws from his 40-plus years of experience as a teacher and an administrator to provide explicit, step-by-step guidance on how to incorporate social and emotional learning (SEL) into K–12 lesson planning–without imposing a separate SEL curriculum.

The book identifies SEL skills in three broad categories: skills for self, interpersonal skills, and skills as a community member. It offers research-based strategies for seamlessly integrating these skills into every section of lesson plans, from introducing a topic in a way that sparks students' interest, to accessing prior knowledge, providing direct instruction, allowing time for experimentation and discovery, using formative assessment, and closing a lesson in a purposeful rather than haphazard manner.

In addition to practical advice on lesson planning that can lead to improved student motivation and achievement, Benson offers inspiration, urging both new and veteran teachers to seize every opportunity to develop caring, joyful communities of learners whose experiences and skills can contribute to a better, more equitable world both inside and outside the classroom.

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Chapter 1

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Making SEL Goals Explicit

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I was a suspicious student. From my earliest years in elementary school, I wondered why I was being told to do a lesson. I occasionally asked the teacher why we had to learn something, but after innumerable responses that seemed designed to tamp down my curiosity in favor of moving along, I stopped asking. I did the work to avoid getting in trouble. Every now and then, I found myself enthusiastically engaged, with no more understanding of what triggered that engagement than my distant ancestors had about the appearance of an eclipse: the moment happened and then it passed.

I can only wonder how much more I would have mastered, and how much more I might have contributed to the class, had I been given the opportunity to understand the teacher's goals, and to articulate goals of my own. The adults in school always operated behind an impenetrable wall of authority. I wish my teachers had known that "[a]dopting and strengthening a set of beliefs about mastery can become part of a learner's internal nature" (Frey, Fisher, & Smith, 2019, p. 77). Instead, quiet cooperation with the status quo was enough to get us through the day. My own ideas and those of my peers were deemed worthy only when they fit into a predetermined set of expectations: the lesson plan.

When I became a teacher, like most new to the profession, I wanted my students to have wonderful ideas of their own, and I wanted them to cooperate. I came to realize that when I said, "I need all of you to cooperate," I really wanted them to obey me. That's not an irrational desire—I am no fan of presiding over chaos—but obeying is not cooperating, and cooperating without understanding rarely inspires wonderful ideas. My students would need to know the goals and the roles that they, the students, played in our collective success if I wanted more than passive compliance. I did want more than that; passive compliance was all that had been asked of me when I was a student, and I did not want to replicate that culture in my classroom.

I became an early adherent of posting the agenda and learning goals of a lesson—now a common practice in many schools, the goals often preceded by the abbreviation SWBAT (Students Will Be Able To). By sharing the lesson's SWBATs, I believed I was inviting my students into the inner workings of the classroom machinery. For many students (and for adults too, as I came to realize as a college instructor and a principal), sharing the agenda and goals for our time together is often comforting; participants can reference where we have been, where we are, and what is left to accomplish. Nothing is startling. For the same reasons, most schools let students know when a fire drill or statewide testing is scheduled. With the agenda and goals posted, I could alert the students to our progress and check off the steps we had traveled.

I would read the goals and agenda to the class with a mixture of solemnity, bravado, and enthusiasm: "Today, we will be learning how to add fractions!" Some students would nod their heads, some would smile, others began to pull out their math folders, and a few continued to stare out the window. I am sure the students appreciated my efforts to share my excitement, and they knew, as they had learned early on, their role in passive cooperation.

Then one year, when I was teaching high school, I had a memorable student I'll call B. Almost every day, after my declaration of the goals and agenda, he asked, "Why are we doing this?" My explanations about the beauty of semicolons quickly left him with glazed eyes; my minilecture on the cultural and historic relevance of Shakespeare did the same. He'd sink back into his chair, as disconnected from the commerce of schooling as he had been for years. I took his alienation to heart; he was a lot like I had been, only more worn down.

I talked to a mentor of mine about B., because his persistence in asking why and never being satisfied was turning my empathy for him into annoyance. Maybe he didn't really care why at all and was only enjoying his ability to frustrate an authority. B. was very skilled in that regard. My mentor suggested I ask B. which why he was asking me.

"Maybe he wants to know why this lesson follows yesterday's lesson," she said. "Maybe he wants to know why adults think kids his age have to learn that lesson this year. Maybe he wants to know why it is on the SATs. Maybe he wants to know when and why he may ever apply this lesson in his adult life. Maybe he wants to know why you want him to learn this lesson. Maybe he wants to know why you care so much. Ask him which version of why you should answer."

That's what I did. When B. asked why, I offered a list of responses I could give him (which meant I had to be prepared!). On many days, he did choose one of the options ("Yeah, why do I have to learn this?"), engaging me in a worthwhile dialogue that often gained the attention of everyone else, ultimately helping us all be more purposeful—the active version of cooperating. On many days, when I offered B. the opportunity to choose which why I should address, he would wave me off, as if his questioning that day was more out of habit than need.

What I learned from B. (our most challenging students are often our teachers, inspiring us to gain more tools out of necessity) is that I always held a number of learning objectives in each lesson—some of them part of the "implicit curriculum" (Milner, 2017). More important, I found that the time spent engaging students in understanding all the explicit and implicit SWBATs supported their autonomy, their persistence, and their mastery. The two minutes of conversation paid many dividends.

In the ensuing years, I have seen many school leaders mandate that SWBATs be posted for every lesson. Unfortunately, I have observed only a small handful of teachers who truly make good use of that practice. I don't see anything wrong in the practice, just not much right, and not much understanding. I've seen students be given the chance to read the SWBATs aloud for the class and, more rarely, at the end of the class, to nod yes or no as to whether they have finished the lesson. I've never seen posted, alongside the traditional SWBATs, the SEL goals almost all teachers implicitly hold for their students in every lesson. Teachers' compliance with posting SWBATs is eerily similar to students' compliance with reading the SWBATs and then doing the work. When actions by both children and adults are done merely out of compliance, we aren't motivating for mastery.

How SEL Skills Lead to Mastery

Making explicit and discussing the previously implicit SEL skills in your daily lesson, right from the start, takes you way beyond passive compliance, paving the way to engagement, ownership, and mastery. Engaging students of any age in understanding the SWBATs presents you with a daily opportunity to build their SEL skills, because cognitive and emotional engagement involves overlapping and interwoven brain activity; cognition and emotions happen cooperatively to create understanding in each of us (Immordino-Yang, 2016).

Yes, doing this requires an upfront investment of time. The first day you introduce the activity of understanding the daily SWBATs may take 5 to 10 minutes; once the routine is in place, the activity should take 1 to 2 minutes. There will be days you may skip this step completely because the work is so clearly an extension of the prior day's SWBATs or you are in the midst of a unit that requires only an occasional reflection on the SWBATs. The important notion is that your students will be doing more than nodding in passive compliance; they will be learning about themselves in the very act of understanding the goals of your lesson.

Identifying the SEL Skills You Promote

My colleague John D'Auria asks teachers, "At the end of the year, how would you like your students to be different as learners as a result of their work with you?" Everyone has an answer, and if those answers are distilled into their essential elements, they would resemble the SEL qualities that are the focus of this book. Those answers, the implicit curriculum, are often the reason two teachers can be handed the same required textbooks and work in classrooms of the same size and shape, with the same number of students who come from the same communities, and yet the experiences of the students in those two classes over the course of the year will be significantly different. The students will be randomly encouraged, supported, and given feedback day to day on varied SEL skills.

I am urging you to make explicit and intentional the ways you want your students to develop SEL skills. I am urging you to share your investment in those SEL skills in the same manner you may be sharing the traditional SWBATs.

More than sharing, I am urging you to sell your students on those intentions. Students' SEL skills are obviously important to us as teachers—and essential for our students to be productive members of our classes, the school, and the larger communities in which they will live. The act of intentionally reinforcing those skills improves the likelihood of your students learning them.

Doing so may be particularly important for secondary school teachers. Few middle and high school teachers would say, "My adolescent students are socially skilled and masters of their emotional lives." Even in the midst of our content-laden, required curriculum, we are inevitably helping our students develop their SEL skills, reminding them to use good manners and reprimanding them when their tone is disrespectful to us and others. More than SEL serving simply as a rubric for disciplining poor behavior, our work includes preparing students for far more than the final exam and the standardized tests. We should righteously complain that the size of our classes, the imposed requirements, the pacing guides, and the mandated textbooks undermine our ability to personally know every student, but few of us have given up on being more than machinelike conveyors of SWBATs.

Most secondary school teachers I know long for and cherish the social and emotional connections we can make with even a handful of students each year. This book is a guide to reclaiming our fully human commitments to ourselves and to our students: from kindergarten to 12th grade, we can explicitly teach the whole child.

Essential SEL Skills for All Ages

There are various lists of SEL skills that explicitly support students' development. Some lists are so extensive that many teachers would find them overwhelming; few people could remember all the skills, much less assume responsibility for teaching them. Other lists are more concise but contain abstract skills that require mastery of many specific subskills—for example, "delay gratification." How do you teach a student to do that?

For this book, I've synthesized the lists into a concise set of easily observable SEL skills (see Figure 1.1). These are skills that teachers reinforce through in-the-moment feedback, through occasional coaching sessions, and, most important, by modeling in everyday interactions. These are skills that most teachers already ask their students to demonstrate and randomly support throughout the year. These are skills that are understood by students of all ages but are demonstrated in different ways as children grow up. For example, 1st graders will use a much smaller vocabulary to tell us how they feel than a high school student will use, but we can certainly expect all students to demonstrate age-appropriate ways to talk about their feelings.

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Figure 1.1. Essential SEL Skills

Skills for Self

Emotional Self-Awareness

• Using words to identify feelings
• Identifying triggers
• Developing self-soothing strategies

Personal Goal Setting

• Making short- and long-term goals
• Developing plans to meet goals
• Analyzing progress and making adjustments

Identifying Strengths and Supports

• Identifying your strengths
• Advocating for needs and resources

* * *

Interpersonal Skills

How Others Feel

• Identifying emotions with verbal cues
• Recognizing nonverbal cues

Working with Similarities and Differences

• Identifying varied perspectives
• Communicating understanding of others' perspectives
• Developing solutions that account for varied needs

Communicating with Others

• Asking others how they feel and think
• Expressing your feelings directly and respectfully

* * *

Skills as a Community Member

Having an Impact on Your Community

• Matching your behavior to the setting
• Admitting mistakes, apologizing, making amends
• Assessing the impact of your actions on others

Socially Responsible Decision Making

• Recognizing the needs of others
• Predicting and evaluating outcomes of actions
• Using feedback to adjust behavior

Contributing to the Greater Good

• Identifying opportunities to make a positive impact
• Taking actions to promote positive changes

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This book will support your efforts to intentionally develop those essential SEL skills as your daily lesson plans unfold. It's not a new curriculum; this is the curriculum that almost all adults work on with children they care for.

SWBATs and Racism

Sharing and discussing my agenda and SWBATs as a teacher was another way to account for my ignorance of the lives my students had lived before walking into my classroom. Many of my students of color and other exploited communities had never seen how the goals of schools fit their needs, except as a distant vision of something that, if they were very fortunate, might happen after high school graduation. Better said, too many of my school's goals did not fit their needs; unfortunately, they were seeing the world of school and their world outside of school accurately (Fergus, Noguera, & Martin, 2014).

The lesson plans derived from such far-off goals present a daily motivational hurdle for too many students. Dropping out, as either a passive act of indifference or a physical act of turning away from the entrance to the school, is a process that unfolds over years of alienation. Bringing students into the conversation about SWBATs and the SEL skills that matter to them is a powerful and necessary ritual of inclusion. Schools and classrooms that declare their goals and explicitly manifest them in all their daily business can help our most disregarded and disenfranchised students share in what should be our collective mission (Fergus et al., 2014).

Regarding SEL skills and discipline, there is much evidence that students of color, particularly Black males, are disciplined more often than their peers for such actions as talking back to adults. One teacher may find a Blac...