For years we thought the primary emphasis in school should be to teach digital technology to our students. The Information Era would solve everything! Mind you, tech skills are absolutely essential. But, this emphasis, at the exclusion of something else, has placed a couple of generations at a major disadvantage! How do you say? Let’s explore in our latest SEL Blog below where Margaret Boersma, an instructional coach and education consultant, writes about the importance of emotional well-being in classrooms. #SocialEmotionalLearning
Read MoreFocusing on academics can create a disempowering context when we are not able to get our students to learn the specific concepts for the grade within the time given. Our stress transfers to our students and causes them to react, setting up a situation in which social and emotional learning (SEL) skills are urgently needed. Then we resign ourselves to reacting to behaviours inconducive to learning. However, the SEL skills we teach don’t go deep enough, in part because they are reactive, rather than pro-active, and therefore, ineffective.
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Analogical Problem-Solving ™ is what I call teaching by living inside a story such as the Us and Them unit. Students have agency/voice to make decisions inside their class story, an analogy of life. As teachers, we carefully follow their suggestions and integrate lessons as we plan strategies that allow them to discover their learning. Students learn real-life lessons without real-life consequences. They realize at a profound level that we have so much in common. We are all connected. Ultimately the students decide war is not worth the enormous human cost. And they internalize that we are all part of the human race.