Social-Emotional Learning

Our guest, Tracie Chauvin, Coordinator for Social-Emotional Learning for Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools, shares the value of understanding how trauma impacts students and by understanding social-emotional learning we can be better educators.

Climbing Towards Community Circles

Our guest Dr. Cory Gibson, Superintendent of USD 262 Valley Center, as we explore Social Emotional Learning in K-12 settings. He shares about the strategies and areas of emphasis in his school district that have been successful in creating an atmosphere of caring for students.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

College textbooks and course materials costs have increased over 800% in the last three decades, far outpacing inflation, housing, and medical costs, to become the most inflated consumer product.

In this episode Art Gutierrez and Dr. Terri Summey, from Emporia State University's Libraries + Archives, discuss using OER in their courses.

Jumping into Trauma-Informed Practices

Our guest this week is James Moffett Jr., Principal of Faris Elementary in USD 308 Hutchinson. He tells the story of how he began to realize behavior in children often is not a choice, but the result of feelings caused by their environments.

Finding Inspiration for OER

In this episode, Dr. Jasmine Linabary from ESU's Department of Communication and Theatre discusses her motivation for adding an OER textbook into her course and how it inspired her and her department to look at creating an OER for their public speaking course.

An Administrator's Advice for Educators

"If you don't have the SEL piece in place, the instructional component isn't going to be as effective," said this week's guest, John Allison, recently retired superintendent of Olathe USD 233. "We've got to try to address both if we want to actually achieve the results and the have the opportunity for growth in not only the intellectual side, but the emotional and character side of developing students for their future."

OER in Biological Sciences

“As a student, I struggled at times going to the bookstore at the start of the semester and plopping down hundreds and hundreds of dollars for books - at the end, I sell back at one-tenth the price. As a teacher, that concerns me,” said Dr. Stewart Gardner from the Department of Biological Sciences at Emporia State. He shares his experience with using both traditional textbooks and open educational resources and why he prefers one over the other.

Dylan & Jenna -
First-Year Teachers Chat About SEL

Meet these first-year teachers who began teaching during the pandemic: Jenna Pennington (BSE 19) and Dylan Schneider (BSE 20). They share their experiences offering advice from what they have learned. Dylan shares, "An escalated adult cannot de-escalate a child," and Jenna shares, "My motto for the year has been, do what is best for kids."

OER in Creative Writing

In this episode, Dr. Kevin Rabas and Professor Amy Sage Webb-Baza from the Department of English, Modern Languages, and Journalism at Emporia State are our guests. Kevin and Amy discuss ballroom dancing, their reasons for adding OERs into their creative writing courses, and express gratitude for the many resources available to help them with the transition.

Diving into the Importance of Relationships

"This idea of kids need to comply with us because we're the adults and they're the child and they make a poor choice and there has to have a punishment.... quite frankly, those days are over. I had that mindset early on in my career. Looking back on it, when we know better we do better. When I started learning more about the impact of trauma...that's when my life took more of a swing towards to the positive," said Dustin Springer, Principal of Gray Hawk Elementary, USD 458 Basehor-Linwood.

OER During the Pandemic

In this episode, Dr. Jennifer Moss, from Emporia State's Department of Psychology, discusses how she implemented OER into her course while transitioning her courses online due to the COVID pandemic.

Emotional Poverty
Impacts Education

Dr. Ruby Payne, author and expert on education and economic class, explains how students are impacted by social-emotional learning and the importance of understanding that it truly impacts student learning. Her books, A Framework for Understanding Poverty and Emotional Poverty, are tools to better understand where students from poverty are at and how best to reach them in education.

OER in Math with Video Creation

"A lot of my implementation (of OER) comes from using the mathematical community to find some good, open source or free text options. For the classes I'm using it in, I'm making videos to go on top of it. I will look at the material, and I'll (short) create lectures (with captioning)," said Dr. Thomas Mahoney, associate professor in ESU's Mathematics and Economics Department.

Zipping into Teacher and Student Self Care
with Jess and Ryan

From adapting school to be delivered online at the beginning of the COVID pandemic through the continuing process of addressing the social-emotional needs of staff and students, administrators from USD 265 Goddard, Jess Herbig, Executive Director of Instructional Supports, and Ryan Jilka, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources & Student Services, review their work and experiences.