The winter season is here! The temperatures are cooler, the days are shorter, and we can feel nature slowing down as it prepares for a season of rest. However, this season is often not very restful for us personally or professionally, with the bustle of the holiday season and the demands of mid-year instruction. We hold two opposing ideas: wanting to slow down with the cozy winter season, but also feeling the pressure of epic to-do lists, a full calendar, and a fear of missing out. 

How do we find balance? How do we take care of our people, and ourselves? How do we self-preserve rather than self-deplete? In the last few weeks of the calendar year, we hope you can find moments of self-care and self-reflection. Please know that our Social Emotional Learning and Restorative Practices Department is here to support you! 

In our newsletters, we will focus on one of the 5 SEL core competencies and one of the 10 schoolwide indicators each month. In this edition, we will explore the core competency of self-management and how self-management shows up in our interactions with students, staff, and families. We will explore the schoolwide indicator of authentic family partnerships. We will highlight the State SEL Showcase, WS/FCS 3 Signature Practices Playbook, and Panorama Data. We will explore restorative practices and SEL as a lever for equity.  We will also include updates, announcements, and "SELebrations" so you can stay informed about the wonderful SEL work going on in our district.

We are excited to continue to learn and grow with you.  Thank you for being partners in growing SEL in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools.

The SEL competency for this month is self-management. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) defines self-management as:

The abilities to manage one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations and to achieve goals and aspirations. This includes the capacities to delay gratification, manage stress, and feel motivation and agency to accomplish personal and collective goals.

Examples include:

• Managing one’s emotions

• Identifying and using stress management strategies

• Exhibiting self-discipline and self-motivation

• Setting personal and collective goals

• Using planning and organizational skills

• Showing the courage to take initiative

• Demonstrating personal and collective agency

Strengthening Your Self-Management 

Here are seven ways you can develop your self-management skills (from: 7 Ways to Improve Your Self-Management Skills) :

1. Embrace Your Strengths

Self-managers understand their strengths and play to them. Reflect on what you do best and how you do it. For example, it can be helpful to identify your skills when working in teams. If you are good at keeping your group on task when working on a class project, that is an important strength to recognize. The ability to keep your group focused requires the same skills necessary to keep yourself on track to reaching your goals. Identifying your strengths will allow you to apply them to your personal goals and relationships.

2. Adapt to Challenges

Leaders approach challenges with a healthy attitude. Although self-management involves strategic planning, we can’t anticipate everything that will be thrown at us. But we can control how we tackle things thrown at us. When planning for the future, acknowledge the possibility of challenges arising. Create an action plan for how you can solve potential problems that may pop up. Then, you will be better prepared to face challenges when they do arise by adapting your actions.

3. Nurture Your Relationships With Others

An important part of managing yourself is managing your relationships. Our personal and professional relationships are a part of what makes us who we are and greatly shape our day-to-day lives. We have the responsibility to hold ourselves accountable in our relationships. How you interact with others directly strengthens or hinders your relationships. Making an active effort to spend time with friends and family or getting to know the people you work with will nurture productive relationships.

4. Set Goals for Yourself

Leaders continuously improve themselves. Goal setting is an integral part of self-management. Identify your goals and make a conscious effort to work towards them. For example, leaders skilled in self-management can conceptualize what type of lifestyle they would like to be leading in five years, and they will start working on achieving that lifestyle. Set attainable goals for yourself and invest the time necessary to reach them. It can be easy to put your personal goals aside to focus on projects or assignments, but self-managers consistently work toward bettering themselves by making time for their aspirations.

5. Understand Your Emotions

Good leaders are skilled in regulating their emotions. Being aware of your feelings will help you to maintain healthy relationships and attitudes. For example, leaders are able to recognize when they are frustrated during conflict with another individual and can ask for a break in the conversation. Being able to identify and understand your emotions is essential to interacting with others in a healthy, productive way.

6. Be Patient

Being patient with yourself and others is important to self-management. Leaders have a strong sense of patience. Patience works in tandem with regulating your emotions and often requires practice to develop. Remember that everyone, including yourself, works at their own pace and in their own way. Self-management requires the understanding that we can’t control everything. Reaching our goals takes time and being patient will help you approach them with a healthy attitude.

7. Prioritize Your Well-Being

One of the best things you can do to improve your self-management skills is making time for self-care. In order to maintain a healthy attitude and productive relationships, you need to have a healthy and productive relationship with yourself. Although planning and goal-setting are important, it is also important to take breaks. Set time aside to do the things you enjoy and that make you feel good. Otherwise, you will feel burnt out, and managing yourself will become much more difficult. Taking breaks to put on a face mask, binge your favorite TV show, or do whatever else it is that makes you feel good is healthy.

The 4 minute video below from CASEL gives a quick overview of the importance of exploring self-management as adults and students, both at school and at home.  Watch the video and reflect on the questions below. 

When schools and families form authentic partnerships, they can build strong connections that reinforce students’ social and emotional development. Families and caregivers are children’s first teachers, and bring deep expertise about their development, experiences, culture, and learning needs. These insights and perspectives are critical to informing, supporting, and sustaining SEL efforts. Research suggests that evidence-based SEL programs are more effective when they extend into the home, and families are far more likely to form partnerships with schools when their schools’ norms, values, and cultural representations reflect their own experiences. Schools need inclusive decision-making processes that ensure that families—particularly those from historically marginalized groups—are part of planning, implementing, and continuously improving SEL.

Schools can also create other avenues for family partnership that may include creating ongoing two-way communication with families, helping caregivers understand child development, helping teachers understand family backgrounds and cultures, providing opportunities for families to volunteer in schools, extending learning activities and discussions into homes, and coordinating family services with community partners. These efforts should engage families in understanding, experiencing, informing, and supporting the social and emotional development of their students.

The research says...

• School personnel must reflect on the power dynamics between schools and families that may hinder authentic partnership, then work to recalibrate relationships. It is common for family engagement strategies to be enacted with a deficit lens, especially in communities where many families experience marginalization based on race, class, language, or immigration status (Mapp & Bergman, 2021).

• Research suggests that evidence-based SEL programs are more effective when they include strategies for connecting with students’ families (Albright & Weissberg, 2010). 

• Families can provide educators with key insights about their children, their community, and their values. Schools can build upon and learn from these funds of knowledge and the strategies that families are already using to support SEL (Mapp et al., 2013).

• Families are far more likely to join partnership efforts when the school’s norms, values, and cultural representations reflect their own experiences (Antunez, 2000). 

When educators and families as partners work together to define challenges, develop shared goals, and design plans to promote children’s social and emotional development, the benefits go two ways. Educators enrich their ability to support their students, and families gain an ally in supporting the social and emotional skill-building perspectives they already share with their children.

Learn more: CASEL Guide to Schoolwide SEL – Family Partnerships. Watch this short video below from CASEL that outlines the components of Authentic Family Partnerships.

When we think about the SEL competency of self-management, there are several ways we deal with stressors in our lives. These interruptions to our joy have a connection to what we study in Restorative Practices surrounding Psychiatrist Donald Nathanson work on the Compass of Shame. The Compass of Shame identifies four different types of behavioral responses that we use to cope with interruptions to our joy or happiness. Nathanson sees the Compass of Shame response as a spotlight that focuses on our deficits and failures, which is an uncomfortable spotlight, so we use scripts to avoid what is causing the interruption rather than working to repair or reframe our identity (Nathanson, 1992). The scripts become a set of rules that we hold for ourselves and are how we respond to different scenes in our lives. 

The compass points are:

• Withdrawal: viewing the incident as valid and withdrawing from the situation in an attempt to minimize exposure. Strategies include isolating, running and hiding, drawing into yourself and cutting off connections. This loss of connection is the greatest problem with this strategy. 

• Attack Self: Sees the incident as valid and turns the anger inward. This leads to self-criticism and self-deprecation, contempt, and disgust towards yourself. People who experience this response are motivated to endure the incident for the sake of maintaining relationships. 

  • Both withdrawal and attacking self are internalizing strategies which involve you recognizing (self-awareness) negative emotions and acceptance of those emotions of being valid. 

• Avoidance: Denys the incident’s message and the negative experience of self. This is in direct contrast with withdrawal. People who use avoidance likely use distraction techniques in an attempt to deflect, generate positive feelings, and minimize the conscious experience of shame. This could be distractions such as drug and alcohol abuse, thrill seeking, or things that bring pride. Out of the four points, avoidance scripts are most likely to be unconscious which stops us from learning where the feeling is coming from. 

• Attack Others: Reduces the other person to boost your own self-esteem. This may involve blaming the victim, put-downs, physical or verbal abuse. 

Having our joy or happiness interrupted is inevitable, as we are human and experience a wide range of emotions on a daily basis. Being aware of the Compass of Shame helps us Self-Manage and examine our own reactions and behaviors. We are at our best when we can recognize our responses and minimize the time we spend in our compass reaction. This keeps communities and relationships restorative. For more information on the Compass of Shame watch the video below or come to one of the Restorative Practices training sessions!

The SEL Team, led by Director LaTrayl Adams, hosted a State SEL Showcase on November 21, 2023. This event was one of several across the state to highlight the implementation of systemic SEL in a variety of NC school districts.  Representatives from DPI, local universities, and other school districts were invited guests. In addition to remarks from WS/FCS leaders, 4 WS/FCS district partners presented about how they integrate SEL into their work and collaborate with the SEL Team, and 8 featured schools presented about how they are building systemic SEL in their school community.  

 District leaders Karen Garmon, Karen Morris, Ashley McCormack and Shannon Dobson all shared their work to imbed SEL into their positions to best support the adults they serve. Our featured schools included Piney Grove Elementary School, Rural Hall Elementary School, Wiley Magnet Middle School, Reynolds High School, Walkertown Elementary School, Thomas Jefferson Middle School, The Downtown School and Paisley IB Magnet School. Each of these schools were represented by administration and SEL leads sharing all of the unique ways that they are implementing SEL and Restorative Practices with fidelity for their staff and students. 

A key emphasis of the showcase was to create time for shared learning so after leaders and schools presented, participants of the showcase got to participate in gallery walks where folks could share ideas, supports and contact information to develop collaboration between all of these great SEL champions. 

It was a morning of learning, connection, and celebration.  Thank you to all WS/FCS district and school leaders that collaborated with this event!  As always, thank you to all WS/FCS educators working to grow SEL in our district. It is an honor to serve you!

An Adult SEL Resource compiled by the WS/FCS  SEL Team

Our team's very own LaTrayl Adams and Logan Macon had the incredible opportunity to present alongside our Secondary SEL Curriculum partner, Project Wayfinder, at CASEL's SEL Exchange Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. LaTrayl and Logan spoke on how we are working to support adult capacity not just for curriculum, but for schoolwide SEL implementation in schools across our district. Several districts from around the country and the world were represented in the audience and got to collaborate with LaTrayl and Logan during and after the session to develop ideas for their own SEL implementation.

The SEL Team went to a variety of engaging and informative sessions about systemic SEL, educator well-being, MTSS, and SEL through an equity lens.  This learning opportunity will equip the SEL Team to better serve school communities in WS/FCS.  

Self-management is a lifelong journey that involves managing your thoughts, emotions, and actions. It involves knowing yourself and then acting on that knowledge.  Taking care of yourself helps you achieve goals and well-being, as well as take care of others.  

We hope you gained some insight today about self-management and how managing our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors affects our well-being and our outcomes.  Adult SEL matters! Thank you for learning with us today and everyday. It is an honor to serve and support you. Thank you for all you do for your staff, students, and communities.