Social Emotional Learning Resources for Educators - Santiago

Building Relationships

Building Relationships to Increase Belonging

The exploration of relationships starts with Abraham Maslow, who developed the hierarchy of needs. His work on needs helps us understand why we must prioritize the sense of belonging, particularly as the foundation for achievement. Education, in broad terms, focuses on achievement above all. This leads to inequity, to policies and practices that damage relationships, and to reliance on punitive discipline practices. If education focuses on achievement, then students focus on achievement to belong in education. If a student can’t achieve or has other inequities, we must consider how their physiological need for belonging will be met or acquired, if at all. Focusing on relationships, over achievement is the path to belonging and to increase self-actualization, which is also the overarching category for self-esteem. This last need that Maslow’s work supported is where SEL takes place. Self-actualization is when we identify strengths, overcome adversity or negative situations, engage in positive self-talk, and set personal goals.

So how do we increase belonging? It starts with establishing rapport and developing relationships. Relationships are the core of restorative practices. We must build, feed, and repair relationships and hyper-focus on a sense of belonging for our students. We will focus on building relationships and review three strategies for developing healthy relationships to increase belonging.

This is the foundation to social-emotional learning!

Why Student-Teacher Relationships are Important

The Power of Relationships in Schools

Research shows that students who feel safe and supported by adults at school are better able to learn.

Building positive relationships with students can lead to improved academic results.

This is a big end-goal for many educators, whose jobs include guiding students to fulfilling their academic potentials. Now relationships alone don’t guarantee that a student will perform better—they still need engaging and appropriate content instruction. But research has shown that more positive student-teacher relationships are associated with higher levels of student engagement in the short- and long-term for a variety of factors (attendance, academic grades, fewer disruptive behaviors, etc).

These essential “supports for learning” can be seen as the base of the learning pyramid, necessary precursors to any intellectual rigor in the classroom.

“People won’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” – Teddy Roosevelt

Positive relationships have huge academic benefits for our most vulnerable students.

This means that focusing on relationships promotes equity in your classroom. The students who are most at-risk—those who are racially, socially, or economically marginalized or have learning disabilities—benefit the most from the quality of relationships they form with teachers. When Stanford psychologists used “belonging” interventions on middle school students at the beginning of the school year, a time when students most worry about belonging to their communities, the exercises helped first-generation and minority students find greater academic success.

Three Strategies to Building Relationships

Two-by-Ten Strategy

This strategy is an evidence-based method, developed by Raymond Wlodkowski, to intentionally build up a relationships with a student.

This is simply spending two minutes each day for ten days getting to know a specific student. You want to focus on getting to know them as a person, so the less about school, the better!

Emotionally Charging Interactions

Do you know that memories can sometimes not be real?

Neuroscience tells us if we want to assist with retaining information, we have to emotionally charge it. Sayings like, “You don’t remember what someone said but you will sure remember how they made you feel” and “Excitement is contagious!” are all about the relationship between the amygdala (specialized with processing emotions) and the hippocampus (episodic memory). This relationship is why we sometimes remember more about how we felt than the facts.

So now what? Be positive. Use humor. Have fun! These simple ways of positively emotionally charging interactions will help someone feel more comfortable around us, which will help with building that relationship.

Listening

This sounds simple, but being a better listener is immensely underrated. There is ample evidence around on the transformative power of listening in relationships.

Think about a time when you felt heard. How did you feel? Now reflect on a time that you weren’t heard and how did you feel?

Practice being mindfully in the moment to become a better listener in every interaction.

Relationships can not be built or healthily maintained without good listening.

With these relationship building tactics in mind, let’s keep building on that, and talk emotional intelligence!

Focusing on Building Emotional Intelligence, Starting with Self-Awareness around Empathy

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify and manage our own emotions and understand the emotions of others. We know that a goal of SEL is to increase emotional intelligence, but we have to first understand our own. We understand that emotions become a co-regulation process as educators. We influence how others feel, as others influence how we feel. Emotions, in turn, influence our thinking. So being mindful of our emotions during interactions is important. This is easier said than done. A strategy that helps educators is checking in with yourself often. Understanding how we are feeling and using self-created strategies to be in a more optimal emotion for interacting with students takes practice.

In the self-awareness category of emotional intelligence is empathy. The ability to develop empathy, teach empathy, and use it for decision making is critical for educators and our students.

When we are listening to someone's story and attempting to make connections to find out who's to blame then we are not truly listening with empathy. But empathy, says Brown, is not scripted, it's not something you can write a formula for and then say OK go out and be empathetic by following some sort of decision tree. Empathy is about being present and wholly engaged without your protective armour. There are not hard and fast rules for empathy, but Brown says that there is at least one thing for sure: No empathetic response begins with "at least"

One of the most important sentiments any leader can express to someone in their charge is, “I’ve got your back. There’s nothing you can break that I can’t help put back together. I believe in you even when you no longer believe in yourself.”

Empathy—the ability to recognize and share other people’s feelings—is the most important instrument in a leader’s toolbox. The daily practice of putting the well-being of others first has a compounding and reciprocal effect in relationships, in friendships, in the way we treat our clients and our colleagues.

Empathy is the most important instrument in a leader’s toolbox.
Empathy is being concerned about the human being, not just their output.
The true test of leadership: When you ask someone how they’re doing, do you actually care?

What is the role of character education in the classroom? Educator Jonathan Juravich discusses how we can go beyond teaching empathy as a 'soft skill' and make it actionable.

When you tell a kindergartner to "walk in someone else's shoes" it can be kind of confusing. Why should they put on someone else's shoes? What if they wear a different shoe size? Art educator and 2018 Ohio State Teacher of the Year Jonathan Juravich is interested in finding ways to teach empathy that go beyond catchphrases, and instill an awareness of others that can be expressed through action. Drawing from experiences in his classroom and home, Jonathan describes several exercises he's used to help students identify their emotions and invest in the feelings of others.

Growing Your Empathy - Student Activities

Merriam-Webster.com defines empathy as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.“

Instructions:

Define empathy.
Think of someone you know right now who is suffering in some way.
What can you do to make their day better today? Write them a note, card, or compose a long text to send.

Instructions

Identify something you would like your teacher to know about you, so that she/he may be more empathetic about your circumstances or experiences.
Ask four people that you know to think about a teacher they have now or have had in the past and what they wished their teacher knew about them. Include their first name and their responses.

Instructions:

Write down the first name of someone you know who is having a hard time right now.
What are you going to do today to think about their situation and come up with a simple gesture to show compassion?
Finish this line: When I know someone who is suffering from hurt, sadness, fear, feeling alone, feeling scared, I try to _____________. When I do this, I feel ________________.

Instructions:

What do you think of the “Bystander Effect?”
How would you define the “Diffusion of Responsibility?”
When have you done the “right thing” when you were by yourself? (Helping someone open a door? Defending someone being harassed? Telling someone they dropped something?)
Can you think of a time when you were with a group and forgot to do the right thing?
It takes being brave and not always doing what others do, but doing what you know is right, Inclusion of Responsibility.

Virtual Team Building Resources

Virtual Teambuilding Resources.pdf

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