How We Teach This: Season Two

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.

Our guest this week is 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.

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.

"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."

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."

"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.

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. She is the author of the books, A Framework for Understanding Poverty and Emotional Poverty, which are great tools to better understand where students from poverty are at and how best to reach them in education.

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.