-by Timothy (Tim) Grivois, Ed.D. Social and emotional learning is not extra. On the contrary, alongside academic mastery, social and emotional skills are essential to becoming successful learners and good human beings. Emotional regulation, in particular, is critical to maintaining good mental health and developing healthy relationships. Like all SEL skills, emotional regulation begins fromContinue reading “Developing emotional vocabulary.“
Tag Archives: SEL
Social and emotional learning: From the inside out.
Social and emotional learning is not extra. On the contrary, alongside academic mastery, social and emotional skills are essential to becoming successful learners and good human beings.
As small as possible: Make professional learning fit.
-by Timothy (Tim) Grivois, Ed.D. The biggest problem with professional learning is that everything about it is too big. The trainer from out of town is pricey, the stuff you need to implement the learning is expensive, and you need to pay for subs so that teachers can go to the Great Big PD duringContinue reading “As small as possible: Make professional learning fit.”
What’s on your mind and on your heart?
Helping students regulate emotions is essential to their social, emotional, and academic achievement. However, supporting and understanding our students’ emotional learning becomes possible when school adults first know how to connect with their own emotions.
Self-care is the cornerstone of a healing-centered school.
Self-care is a journey—and because we’re all in different places on this journey—helping others heal requires some familiarity with the map. Build healing-centered schools by practice self-love, self-awareness, and self-service first towards yourself, and then towards your school community.
Classroom-possible, evidence-based supports for children with ADHD
One of the best researched and most effective interventions for ADHD is medication. However, medication is not an option for every child, and schools can’t require families to seek a diagnosis or a prescription. Since schools generally can’t control whether a family chooses medication as a treatment for ADHD, often the most effective, evidence-based supports for children with ADHD involve “classroom-possible” strategies that are good for all students, yet demonstrate the most benefit for students with ADHD.
- Play-based skills coaching with peers
- Recess at the beginning of the day, and ideally throughout instructional time
- Positive reinforcement paired with clear, predictable expectations for behavior and classroom routines
- Explicit training in organizational skills
Why Social and Emotional Learning has nothing to do with how students behave.
Social and emotional learning makes sense. Knowing who we are, understanding how our emotions function, and being able to establish and maintain healthy interactions with people supports social, emotional, and academic success as well as improves the quality of life for our students in the future. We can support SEL best by emphasizing the learning and deemphasizing behavior.
DIY video on how to build classroom community with digital buddy boards
“Buddy Board” is a framework for ensuring that your school community has frequent opportunities to connect with one another in ways that integrate easily into what you’re already doing. The webinar series on Digital Buddy Boards just finished, and I’ll be working on PBIS for Digital Learning Spaces for while. In the meantime, here is a video to help you get started.
Digital buddy board recipe
-by Tim Grivois-Shah, Ed.D. Digital Buddy Board is a strategy for integrating social and emotional skills practice into academic instruction. To get started, you’ll need: A way to arrange and rearrange a roster into pairs. Something for buddies to do. A time and a place for buddies to do ‘buddy stuff.’ Here are each ofContinue reading “Digital buddy board recipe”
Build classroom community with digital buddy boards
student in your digital classroom will have meaningful opportunities to experience love and belonging, creating a digital buddy board is a great thing to do right now.