SEL Professional Development Day, January 28, 2022

Westwind staff worked with Ellen Hsu, District Consultant

Work focused on:

Review of CASEL Wheel

• Self - Awareness - take time to talk about feelings with children everyday. Name your own feelings and ask them to name theirs too
• Self - Management - teach and model positive ways to manage stress, disappointment and anger
• Social Awareness - use story to help develop what learners might do or feel in scenarios of the characters in the story
• Relationship Skills - help  children resolve conflicts by asking them to express through questioning. ie) “What do you think they might feel if you …?”
• Responsible Decision - Making - talk about consequences by asking learners to think about “what happens if you did …?”

We spent time discussing that these, life long learned skills are most effective if we can show these skills in a variety of settings: Classroom, School-wide, community, beyond community

We confirmed that we need a systems approach.

To start:

Staff engaged in a "Social Emotional Learning Classroom Snapshot" (see attached)

• To determine baseline data
• Using proficiency scale language
  • Emerging: SOME of the student demonstrate the ability to...
  • Developing: a FEW of the student demonstrate the ability to...
  • Proficient: MOST of the student demonstrate the ability to...
  • Extending: ALL of the student demonstrate the ability to...
• Using the CASEL Core Competencies:  Self-Awareness and Self-Management

Staff analyzed their results in collaboration with other teachers.  This enabled staff to determine a focus to begin with in context of their class.  They chose one area to focus on and collaborated to create a plan:  What it will look like..., Feel Like..., and Sound Like... to have the chosen CASEL core Competency thriving in their community.  They also found a strategies (see attached) from a curated SEL Resource list help them explicitly teach this focus.   Here is a snap shot of some of the plans:

• Primary classes will use the mood meter to support our more reserved learners have a way to communicate their emotions
• Intermediate classes will confiture to use Growth Mindset lessons to support self-management in the area of positive self-talk, manage stress and taking responsibility for actions
• Resource Teacher teaching Zone's Of Regulation throughout multiple classes
• Intermediate Teachers are going to add time for SEL in the mornings to use mood meter and discuss prior to pressing on into academics. With a focus on slowing down and building in a space for self management
• Early Primary classes will explore emotional literacy - ie.  what is calm?  What is happy?

Ways to integrate SEL in the environment, the culture and the instruction.  In small groups our staff discussed and shared some practices already in place:

• Capitalize each interaction with learners as an opportunity to build the relationship finding  a way to learn about the little person. Who is this little person infront of me? I do not let the behaviour paint the picture. I try to dig under the behaviour and focus on "human" based context
• Class Charter
• ACT lessons
• Growth Mindset lessons
• Self -reflection in relation to our core competencies (personal and social)
• Zones of regulations - Growth Mindsets
• Circle (daily and weekly in various classrooms) 
• Headspace for educators: https://www.headspace.com/educators. (focuses on mindfulness, meditation, breathing, self-reflection etc.)
• Mood Meter

We identified that having a school-wide common language, we are implementing the use of the "Mood Meter" across the school as a tool to help our learners to begin to identify their moods. (See attached)

The Mood Meter tool helps learners build their emotional vocabulary. It also provides the opportunity to describe the reasons they the way they do to build greater insight around the causes of your feelings, and it will help teachers to select strategies to help our learners manage their feelings for well-being. It has many benefits:

• helps teacher know how their learners are doing throughout the day
• Supports students in knowing how they are doing emotionally
• Supports students in knowing how their peers are doing
• Teaches our learners the vocabulary of emotions in context to their experiences.
• Teachable moments

We know it is tough to teach emotions because at some level the concept needs to be simplified but on another level kids need to learn emotions are complex.  Also, we sometimes explain some emotions are more useful at times than others...not good or bad