PAL Classrooms 2.0 Announcement

eMINTS is excited about continuing to collaborate with Dr. Christi Bergin and the Prosocial Development & Educational Research Lab on implementing the PAL Classrooms 2.0 Project! This project takes the research Dr. Bergin has done throughout her career and packages it into a professional learning program that teachers enjoy and is filled with practical, evidence-based strategies that can be implemented with any age group in any content area. The eMINTS National Center is an outreach unit for the University of Missouri’s College of Education and Human Development, and its staff have been providing high-quality professional learning experiences for educators for nearly 25 years. Through the work done by Drs. Bergin and Foster on the original Prosocial and Active Learning (PAL) Classroom grant that was awarded in 2018, the team has been successful in developing a one-year program to help educators implement prosocial education in their classrooms.

Project Director Dr. Jen Foster from the eMINTS National Center stated, “We work with educators to help them refine and build on the amazing things they are already doing in their classrooms.” During the professional learning experiences, educators are immersed in prosocial education experiencing the strategies firsthand as they learn how to implement them with students. Dr. Foster shared that many of our participants have felt isolated or like they were failing because they were encountering a variety of student behavioral issues in the classroom. However, after coming to the professional learning sessions they felt revitalized and hopeful because they had built a network of peers who supported and collaborated and were able to discuss actual situations and how to apply the strategies to the challenges they were facing. 

Dr. Foster shared, “This is a really exciting time. We have evidence that what we are doing has a positive impact on teachers' self-efficacy and students’ prosocial behavior, and as a result, we are seeing an improvement in students’ academic achievement even though we do not work directly with students.” The PAL 2.0 study is building on the success of the original PAL project moving from working with 5th grade math and science teachers to working with the entire teaching team in middle schools. Dr. Foster stated, “We heard loud and clear from our PAL 1.0 participants that they needed all the teachers in their buildings to be trained on this as well as their building administrators, so moving forward, that is exactly what we intend to do!”