Social & Emotional Learning in Professional Learning

Highly engaging, effective and meaningful professional learning experiences are created using three key SEL practices:

INCLUSIVE WELCOME: Setting the Tone, Developing Psychological Safety

ENGAGING STRATEGIES: Sense Making, Transitions, Brain Breaks

INTENTIONAL CLOSURE: Reflections and Looking Forward

Even if you are using these three SEL practices for the first time, they can be effective. When they are carefully chosen, effectively facilitated and thoughtfully debriefed, they create a solid foundation of safety, consistency and joy in adult learning environments. These signature practices create conditions for growth and learning across all five SEL competencies while using culturally responsive teaching strategies.

Establishing these three practices is beneficial for every adult participant, and is absolutely essential for some:

• Adults who walk into our meetings after a day, a week or a lifetime of difficult situations need calming, centering and focusing routines in order to participate fully.
• Humans are internally soothed by sameness – while paradoxically our brains need freshness too. It’s balancing novelty within routines and rituals that allows us to move with confidence through our work days while navigating multiple competing demands on time, energy and attention. These routines provide a solid foundation for our most overextended participants to be engaged as learners and contributors.
• In order for the learning to be purposeful and applicable, adults need direct, concrete experiences to use what they have learned, and they need structures that promote self-direction.
• Productivity and creative thinking result only when our basic human needs have been met and our neocortex is engaged and available.