What was once unclear is now incredibly important…

48 states have ordered or recommended schools not reopen this academic year due to COVID. This response touches nearly every student in the US, but [as you may already know] has more dire consequences for under-resourced communities on several measures.

While the confusion continues to unfold about what all this means and how best to address strategic planning to reopen, we find ourselves waiting for national guidance and a scalable strategy to engage parents across the country on how to manage all this: homeschooling, distance learning, college access dilemmas, working from home and being laid off or furloughed, while retraining, and interviewing all at the same time. This makes me curious, who is best positioned to organize communities to figure out what to do moving forward? Who’s already doing this?

Where We Are Now

Conventional wisdom and some initial spit-balling leads to a “reopening commission” or several across each unique georgraphy. Stacked with educators who offer the smartest recommendations about trauma-informed practices, including but not limited to cultural competency leaders, school redesign creatives, high-achievement culture creators, parent institute trainers, wellness experts, pedagogy ninjas, digital platforms founders and teams, district takeover teams, school turnaround wizards, and summer slip thought leaders. But even if we did this, can we scale these best practices in the communities hardest hit by COVID? Who’s responsible for executing with everything else on their plate? Or are we again asking to add to the plates of our superhero principals, strategists, operating officers, and teachers?

Let’s say we could do it, DeVos and team have already nailed this with 67 links on the Department of Education homepage (yes, I counted). But I’m not sure this helps the nearly 33 million people living without the internet. We’ll leave that here for now.

Assuming progress is the goal, we’re back to school in the fall with the social distancing of kids or a hybrid model of half-week student teleworking. This leads to structural redesign and likely examining other sectors to create more creative theories of change, measurement of progress, engagement, and accountability.

A brief survey of similarly unwieldy systems approach achieving high-stakes outcomes progress coming from unique measures of accountability at the highest levels, while specifically naming change management and innovation. These systems (both public and private) lean into shifting culture to embrace change. Borrowing insight from tech, healthcare, and the gig economy, schools would now function best by harnessing the ubiquitous trait of highly effective teachers — salient pivots, creativity, and leading with empathy, coupled with leadership whose sole job it is to manage innovation.

For example, preCOVID, many of the higher-performing healthcare systems-built innovation centers to experiment while addressing exorbitant costs for patients, complex reimbursement processes, and rising drug prices.

Accepting the Trend

Assuming we accept the analogy and adopt the trend, what we know is that education is going to change indefinitely and the need for innovation has already arrived. Demand has landed. Innovation leaders will show up in the highest performing districts (traditional public and charter) and they will (1) move forward with aggressive technology tracking, (2) figure out how to foster change celebration culture, and (3) conduct regular idea-collection with all staff as part of the fabric of the new normal.

Without this role revisited in every district, we are left with a long list of attributes to recruit dream teams with lofty unprecedented goals. Scrumming nonstop with sparse senior support in a sector simply not designed for innovation.

Coincidentally, some school boards have recently approved schools that are Innovation Networks. One such example is Indianapolis Public Schools, whose Parent Institute has been a regular recommendation in my most recent huddle with SEL directors in the midwest. The school choice movement has offered some solutions to embracing the culture of change with nimble parent engagement and thoughtful pedagogy practices by design. Historically, there is an argument to be made that some measurable gains against the opportunity gap have been achieved in innovation districts — now hit the hardest by the pandemic by going beyond CIO staffing.

All this to say, we are now exposed to the systemic inequities that go beyond public health and our schools remain a critical touchpoint for every family. My hope is that our schools invest in leadership that devotes the necessary resources to embrace the pending change and the increasing change to follow. One thing is certain, change is truly here to stay. How schools shift operations now will affect generations to come that reach far beyond the school day.

Let’s continue the dialogue with your reaction to these thoughts in the comments. Learning from each other is the only way to further this work.

Note* a handful of districts have had CIOs since 2013. I’m curious about your opinion as there have been valid on both sides of this debate. We must all accept that 2020 is different though than anything we could have imagined pre COVID.

https://medium.com/@christopher_20214/the-key-hire-to-revisit-in-school-districts-across-the-country-chief-innovation-officer-54fe0c08b2db 

Growing up can be tough. As young people’s bodies and brains are changing rapidly, they’re also grappling with new ideas and influences that will shape who they become.

Kids today might actually have it worse, thanks to technology. They’re going through their awkward stages—the braces and bad haircuts and first crushes—on Instagram and Snapchat. And they’re trying to make friends while everyone’s noses are buried in their phones.

Research tells us these things are taking their toll. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey of kids aged 13 to 17 found that 7 in 10 teens think anxiety and depression are major problems for their peers. The same survey found that 6 in 10 kids feel pressure to get good grades while nearly 3 in 10 feel pressure to look good and fit in socially.

Dozens of recent studies tell a similar story. Students today are distracted, they’re under a lot of pressure and they’re suffering from mental health issues more than ever before.

The education community is increasingly getting involved in these issues, looping in social workers, licensed therapists and other mental-health services to help students who are struggling. They often talk about these things in the context of “caring for the whole child” or “teaching to the whole learner.” The idea is that, in order for kids to be successful academically, their other needs must be met, too. That includes their social and emotional needs.

In the last few years, terms like “whole child” and “social-emotional learning” have become buzzwords. They’re all over education conference agendas and making headlines in the news. But behind the buzzwords are programs, often led and managed by schools, that take into account all the different things a child needs to be able to learn and grow, even if those things reach outside the traditional roles of a school.

Earlier this year at the SXSW EDU conference in Austin, Texas, EdSurge sat down with Christina Cipriano, the director of research at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a research scientist at the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine. Cipriano thinks about and researches social-emotional learning every day, so she broke down for us what SEL is, where it comes and how it works.

Listen to the discussion on this week’s EdSurge On Air podcast. You can follow the podcast on the Apple Podcast app, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play Music or wherever you listen. Or read a portion of the interview below, lightly edited for clarity.

EdSurge: Social-emotional learning (SEL) has become arguably one of the hottest topics in education in the last couple of years. For those who are still new to this topic, could you explain what SEL is and why it matters?

Christina Cipriano: Social-emotional learning is thinking about the competencies that underscore our ability to be available to learn and available to teach. There are a number of different frameworks that we use. One of the most dominant frameworks in the field is the CASEL five. It's the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Those five competencies are self awareness, self management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision making.

When we think about social-emotional learning, we talk about how social-emotional competencies underscore your ability to learn and your ability to teach. These are skills that all people and all learners across the lifespan need to continuously develop and invest their time and energy in to be able to be positive contributors to their life and those around them.

Is this a new concept? Why does it seem like all of a sudden we're hearing about SEL?

It is certainly not a new concept, and it's been around in literature for over two decades. However, it's recently gotten a lot of more air play as folks are realizing that whether you call it character education, peace building or conflict resolution, they all have foundations in the social-emotional learning frameworks and in that research base.

At our center we use the emotional intelligence science to underscore our framing of social-emotional learning. However, depending upon which research institution you talk to, you will see other ways of thinking about and framing the problem. At the end of the day, we're talking about teaching people how to be better citizens and more positive contributors to their society. We realize it's 2019, and that that is an important skill that everybody needs.

In what ways does SEL set up students for success that directly relates to academic learning—and also doesn't?

A good example of this would be thinking about a student or adult’s ability to regulate your emotions or, as CASEL calls it, in managing yourself. We all have different triggers of stress throughout our life and different emotions that can hijack our body’s ability to be able to process the world meaningfully. If we're not able to regulate or down-regulate in a given situation, we're not able to be available to process the information of what we're being taught.

This week’s podcast sponsor is Emporia State University’s Instructional Design and Technology program: designed for those interested in creating dynamic, interactive learning environments in both public and private sectors, the master’s in IDT from ESU can be completed quickly and entirely online, preparing educators for the new age of the technology-driven learning environment. Learn more here.

So, regardless of how fantastic your teacher may be or how incredible that science curriculum is at engaging and motivating you, if you have a student who's dealing with stress or trauma or unable to kind of get over the interpersonal interaction they had right before they entered that classroom, or the trigger word that the teacher said, like “pop quiz,” that set them off into a spiral, they're not going to be able to process the dynamic curriculum that's being presented to them.

And so social-emotional learning really teaches and targets those skill sets and competencies that underscore your availability to learn. In our case, and in our work at the center, we focus on also thinking about the social-emotional learning of the adults in the room and the educators as the co-constructors of knowledge in that environment.

So if this was the first time that anyone's ever mentioned this concept to me, maybe a question I would have is, "Well, that's great, but it doesn't sound like something you can teach.” How do you teach things like emotional regulation and relationship skills?

My immediate answer is that if you don't think you can teach them, you have a fixed mindset and not a growth mindset. We need to be always open and available to learning through our interactions around us. The ways in which we teach these discrete skills depend upon the cognitive ability and development of the learner, and how they're going to most access them. For instance, when we focus on emotion regulation, we're thinking about students’ cognitive reappraisal abilities and their self-talk strategies.

Now, there's a lot of different ways you can manage your emotions in a given situation. For some of us, like myself, you might want to go for a run to regulate, but not all schools are conducive to that. You can't just get up and do that. When we worked with teachers, we found that they want to know how to teach those skills that they can focus on how students will reappraise the situation to make a situation more positive, problem-focused, challenge-based—so that they think about it as something they can solve, and how they're talking to themselves. Really capture the essence of their self talk strategies in ways that are going to be most meaningful.

This doesn't mean that you're providing a pull-in lesson every week on Tuesdays at 3:00 p.m. to teach them how to reappraise their emotions, but rather that you are modeling those skills in the way that you interact with that student and with that learner before, during and after the situation, so that they're continuously seeing and learning [that].

So it's less about teaching it and more about naming it, addressing it and giving strategies to respond?

I would kind of reframe what you said there. I would say that that is teaching it. It's the ability for us to be able to recognize, understand, label, express and regulate our emotions. That's actually the acronym, RULER, that is our approach at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence for teaching these competencies. Going through that pattern of steps and having developmentally appropriate access points for all of our learners is the gateway in.

What did SEL look like before it kind of became this buzzword—before it was dominating SXSW EDU panels?

If you look back you'll see conversations about character education, moral education in the school, about being a good citizen, conflict resolution programming—all pockets that begin to target social-emotional learning competencies.

When we even talk about SEL as a larger field, there is discrepancy—depending upon what researcher, practitioner or policymaker you speak to—on how they will define what competencies fall within it and where the limits of the skill set lie. That's a bigger conversation in the field right now.

Alongside that discourse is also the conversation of how to adequately assess social-emotional learning. The most popular question that I get asked on a regular basis, weekly I will get an email from someone somewhere in the world who wants to know what the best SEL score is, what the best SEL score is. I set up a call and I have a nice conversation back about how well, you don't want to assess SEL. Having a SEL score is a completely inappropriate way of thinking about it. You want to be thinking about what social-emotional competency you're trying to assess, and what the most meaningful way to do that is.

That's important, because if we're not able to show that children and adults are learning using these programs and have outcomes that are meaningful, then this will unfortunately just become that thing that was and people will move their focus on in 10 to 20 years to the next big thing that comes into the space.

There's an urgency among the SEL community to begin to create those data points and to find that assessment landscape so that this doesn't turn into a conversation like we all unfortunately remember with No Child Left Behind policy, where standardized assessments came into the narrative and started to shift the focus of how programming was being offered in classrooms and created a culture of fear on test taking.

Who does SEL leave behind? What kind of students just aren't being taken into account in these kind of programs?

That's actually the purpose of the panel that I'm here at SXSW EDU giving with my colleagues today. We're looking at all of your traditionally underserved student populations and their inability to access current SEL programming. We're talking about children with specific learning disabilities and diverse learners, ethnic and racial minorities, children who are serviced in therapeutic settings, alternative environments, correctional facilities. So a real wide net of the “other” children in the story and thinking about how there may or may not be access points for them throughout the way our programs are currently structured.

An example I can give you is when we think about how we teach some of the well-known strategies for accessing and instructing social-emotional learning competencies like perspective taking and decision-making involve group discussion. If you have a child who has an auditory disability and you make sure that they have hearing aids, there is a translator, or there is sign language being used, that's only a step in the right direction, because we know that when a classroom of students is talking or when group work is occurring that children can talk over one another and it can be difficult to follow social overtures. Similarly, a student with Autism Spectrum Disorder or emotional behavioral disturbances may not be able to pick up on those social cues, which is the driving force of how the curriculum is originally written. Finding ways to create flexibility within the essence of the program so that it's not just the method of instruction but also how they can engage with the learning content is critical.

Unfortunately, there are few and far between examples of that level of full inclusivity across the kind of mainstream SEL programming to date.

For schools that don't have the resources to build an intentional, aspirational SEL program, what are some things that educators can do that require minimal time and money to improve a school's social-emotional supports?

First is becoming knowledgeable about what we're talking about when we're talking about SEL. I point people to the CASEL website and the wealth of resources that are available there through the national foundation to be able to access information and basic understandings of the frameworks and competencies, as well as how to implement a program in your school.

A second point is that it's important for the leadership to invest in social-emotional learning as something that is important from the top down, not just the bottom up. In order to have students who are increasing in their social-emotional competencies you need to have teachers who feel like they're available to teach, which means you need to focus on their psycho-social health and well being. Which means you need to focus on the leader, and their psycho-social health and well being.

When leaders are not bought in to the importance of it, this just becomes another thing to do that doesn't stick and does not sustain, and that is the complete antithesis of what folks in the SEL field want to happen with social-emotional learning.

Emily Tate (@ByEmilyTate) is a reporter at EdSurge covering K-12 education. Reach her at emily [at] edsurge [dot] com.

Our children are raised by many teachers. Those with formal credentials and without. The best teacher’s I have observed are knowledgable, patient, and skilled in guiding willing students. Willing is important here, especially without the formal confines of a traditional education environment.

A teacher’s influence can be in many settings and need not have the formal title to play the role. Afterschool teachers, tutors, and mentors are in this lane. They take the time to nurture others both intellectually and emotionally. Their work is vital. When done well, this role isn’t taken lightly and complements in school time in a way a team works together towards a goal.

My former teacher coach said it best though, watching a great in-school teacher is like having floor seats to seeing Michael Jordan in his prime in the NBA Finals. Absolutely unstoppable in inspiring anyone who worked with him. He was prepared, practiced, talented, and created a symphony on the court. He’d not only win, but often looked effortless while doing it.

Teaching today is not an effortless career track though. Our formal teachers endure apprenticeships, teacher training, teacher certifications, licensing, background checks, continuing education, parent meetings, parent vetting, principal vetting, in some cases school-founder vetting, and board vetting. On the extreme side, [but also quite normal in the profession] this means 12-hour days, finding their own material for lessons, school turnover, school closure, in many instances uninspiring salaries, unsupportive school cultures (yes, I said it), and excessive pressures to raise test scores.

With all this said, every teacher I’ve met also tells the stories of how students have profoundly impacted them. They’ve grown through the struggle, the wins, and the relationship they’ve made with their students. They often say they wouldn’t trade what they do for anything. Often referring to teaching as more than a job, it is their “calling”. Upon becoming a teacher myself, I felt the same and still do wrapped in creating valuable edtech, mentoring, and supporting behavioral health teachers and counselors.

Teaching is so much more than I can capture here, but I hope you read through this thinking fondly of your teachers who were all the things here, endured the most, and still managed to help make you the person you are today.

While I have you, a great teacher I had the pleasure of working with wrote the below article on equity in teaching and representation in the classroom. Check out the link below and let me know what you think.

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#education #thankyou #todayinequity #teacherappreciation

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/05/04/black-teachers-matter-school-integration-doesnt.html

After-school All-Stars DC (ASAS) has uniquely grounded leadership and listened to families to address inequities in after-school time.

ASAS DC Executive Director Daniela Grigioni and staff Patrick Giblin are meaningfully reaching out to communities of color with their program and doing so thoughtfully with inclusion, equity, and innovation at the forefront. The organization is establishing an auxiliary board to grow community and awareness about quality programming in after-school time for our kids. And I’m getting involved.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-joined-board-christopher-king/