By Dr. Kate Anderson Foley, Dr. Rachael George, Dr. Pamala VanHorn 

Picture this: School starts and everyone is focused on assessing learning loss. Interventions are put in place but students continue to struggle. Schools struggle with lack of engagement, failing grades, and, increased behavioral issues. School teams are confounded and ask why? Why isn’t the learning loss being mitigated by reading and math interventions? The straight truth is because schools siloed social and emotional learning from the total equation. Instead of being the foundation for the reopening plan, many schools across the country attended to the academic side of the house without realizing the actual foundation relies on social emotional learning or SEL. The reality is students have been through a variety of experiences as a result of the pandemic, which means social skills have become rusty, mental health concerns like depressions and anxiety have increased and left students feeling worn down and in a state of ‘neutralness.’ Right now, every school leader, teacher, and staff need to acknowledge and plan for the way students will return post-pandemic. Schools need to see the whole child, connect SEL to the learning, and most importantly, build the competencies of every adult in the system.  

The Whole Child/Whole System 

There are not enough social workers to attend to the needs of students before or post pandemic. Nor should the burden be placed solely on their shoulders. Yet district leaders continually point to them as the singular solution. It is a misplaced view and one that is doomed to fail. Instead, all educators need to possess the skills to respond to the ‘next normal’ way students are coming back to school. The solution is a whole child/whole system framework. Attending to the whole child can actually change a student’s trajectory for life. The efficacy of social emotional learning rests in the deep understanding that the adult who stands before the student has the greatest impact of student success. Thus, it’s imperative to recognize limiting beliefs and biases and learn ways to be a competent facilitator of learning in supportive and responsive ways. But even more so now as students come back to school with heavy invisible backpacks from the pandemic. Some students experienced death of a parent or main caregiver, or food, economic, or housing insecurities. To address these very real needs, district and school leaders need to intentionally develop the SEL competencies needed to equitably meet the needs of their students and families. Teachers, related service personnel, and others need to understand how SEL provides as the foundation for learning that intentionally scaffolds engagement, access to relevant and rigorous content, and equitably responds to the behavioral needs. Here are some practical ways to implement a whole child/whole system solution that connects SEL to learning.  

• Assess where students are now using formal and informal inventories. Keep it simple! 

• View the student’s culture, background, and lived experience as an asset. 

• Acknowledge that SEL is a practice not a program. 

• Integrate SEL deeply as THE way to improve outcomes and the lives of children and youth. 

• Provide deep professional learning centered on: 

• Identifying limiting beliefs and biases  

• Developing perspective-taking skills 

• Building culturally responsive muscle 

• Infusing SEL in lesson design, instruction, assessment, and system of support 

• Integrating SEL into policies and practices (i.e., discipline, system of support) 

Healthy adults, healthy students 

Supporting the whole child through a blend of high academic expectations and social emotional learning doesn’t stop here, we must look further.  In order for a whole child/whole system to be successful, schools need healthy adults.  Healthy adults mean healthy students.  If adults aren’t balanced and stable, we can’t reasonably expect them to teach, model, and support these exact same skills and strategies for students when they themselves struggle.  Educators are responsible for the health and safety of not only their students but of their colleagues too.  Educators must also care all teachers and staff on a daily, weekly, and ongoing basis.  As district and building leaders this starts and ends with us, we set the tone for their teams and what is expected. How educators model self-care, balance, and social emotional awareness for their teams is paramount.  Here is a list of considerations to ensure school will have healthy, balanced, and stable adults from the classroom to the district office.  

• Stop emailing people on the weekends and late into the evening!  If it’s an emergency, pick up the phone and make a call.  Otherwise set a timer and send the email during normal business hours.  Emails sent late in the evening or weekend, increases stress and creates a sense that a response is required immediately.  

• Master the morning! The alarm goes off and the first instinct is to pick up the phone and check work email, scroll through social media, and scan the news.  As tempting and satisfying as this is, it puts people into a reactionary state before the day has even gotten started.  Instead go on the offense by mastering our morning. Before even picking up the phone or jumping onto check work email, build in time for reflection, mindfulness, affirmations, reading, exercising, gratitude, or even some creative work time.     

• Move your body!  In the world of back-to-back meetings or Zoom calls, it is easy to sit all day with little movement.  Instead, build in movement breaks throughout, including before or after work. Need help getting started? Try just getting out of the workspace twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.  You can do it!  

• Find someone to talk to! Educators are often referred to as ‘first responders’ and the job as ‘heart-work’. The stressors of the last two years have taken its toll on every educator so instead of shutting down, using unhealthy coping skills, or blowing up with frustration, find a trusted person to talk to. This might be a colleague, spouse, or counselor.  Whoever it might be, reach out and talk. 

If the COVID-19 Pandemic has taught has anything it is that social-emotional needs of students and the adults that educate them must be intentionally attended to during the learning process. One could argue that this was always true and to some degree ignored until these human needs were completely unmasked during the 20-21 academic year.  

Focused and planned SEL strategies to address the needs of students and educators in a system could and should become part of daily practice in conjunction with the academic strategies implemented in our daily educational practice.  

Join Creative Leadership Solutions next free webinar “Social Emotional Learning and Self-Care: The Connecting Fiber for Addressing Learning Loss.” We will share social emotional learning and self-care strategies for you, your team, and students.  Dr. Douglas Reeves will facilitate a panel discussion. Panelists will be Dr. Kate Anderson Foley, Dr. Pam VanHorn, and Dr. Rachael George.    

Panel topics:  

• Aligning with your why and passion for serving kids.  

• What is caring for students, as well as our colleagues’ social emotional needs as important as our own.  

• Examining your current practice for supporting students and colleagues.  

• Ways to integrate self-care for you and others on a consistent basis.  

• How to ensure that students’ social emotional learning and academic needs are both met. 

Each participant will have a solid understanding of what self-care entails, strategies they can implement immediately, how their time aligns with their why and passion areas, and a personal self-care plan.