Using Explicit Modeling Strategies to Set SEL Goals With Teacher Candidates

Presenter:

Dr. Lisa is an Integrated Education Specialist with a Focus on the Arts as Essential for Creating Engaging Student-Centered experiences steeped in social justice (SJ) and Social Emotional Learning (SEL). There are 2 major components to Lisa’s work.

One is Providing Professional Development for Teachers, Administrators, and Teaching Artists with the goal of expanding the integration of arts across content thinking and experiences as a consultant and professor. The second is Arts Strategic Planning with arts organizations, school districts.

In both roles, Dr. Lisa develops policy and infrastructure. She builds and deepens internal and external partnerships centering on SJ, DEI and Belonging. Dr. Lisa is inspired by her colleagues, creating partnerships, and bridge building the weave organizational missions. She folds into her practice, experiences of living, studying, working, and making for decades in performing arts in the US and abroad.

Transcript:

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

Morning everybody. As so generously shared by our Mr. Morgan, I’m here to talk about the wonderful tool that GoReact is and in alignment with SEL. And the reason I find that very compelling and very useful to my students and myself as a lifelong learner is it allows us to have authentic conversations. It allows us to be together in ways we weren’t able to be for years. And as we come back into the world, we’re finding other ways to do that. And the notion that this is going away and our meeting in this manner is going away, I think isn’t going to happen. And so this is a way to really embrace the tools we have and really embrace the relationships we need to help support and provide critical thinking opportunities and experiences for our students.

So, with that said, I would like to notice with you that on my slide… I live in San Francisco, California, so pronouns are real here and I should have added mine. So they would’ve been she/hers and they would’ve gone right under my name. So I just noticed that. We’ll go on from there. And we’ll go here. And like many of us and like the world we live in an education invites us to be in many languages all the time. I like to use a lot of languages wherever I can. It reflects the students in the classroom, either their own spoken languages or their family and their cultures. So that’s something I like to do. Here’s our agenda and I’m hoping you can see it. Please tell me if that is not accurate.

Pete Morgan:

You look fantastic.

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

Are you not seeing a next slide?

Pete Morgan:

No, we see the next slide. Invite, play, build and trust. Looking great.

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

Great. So I like to layer things because I find we’re dealing with a number of kinds of learners and their comfort. So we want to invite them from where they’re comfortable and then bring them into more practices. So some people really like to know what’s going on time-wise. I’m going to use… So I’ve got that there. I’ve also got what we’re going to cover today, also hoping to be a low risk invitation. We’re going to invite, we’re going to play, we’re going to build some trust, we’re going to gather and reflect. And I’m going to thank you. That’s how that should go.

Alrighty. So I’m going to make a few assumptions and then you’re in a position to tell me I am not doing this correctly. Which is, you have enrolled with GoReact, and if this is not true, that’s not a problem, I just want to set a baseline of understanding. So you’ve enrolled with GoReact, you have watched a student video, you have commented on that video, you’ve discussed it with students in one way or another. And the reason these things are important is our time is precious with our students. Their learning curve is so high and so nuanced that we want to deepen our time with our students. I was really taken with the keynote speaker this morning, in speaking to a set of competencies and a set of dispositions. Well, that’s lifelong practice. So any time we have with our students, we want to make sure we’re making the most of it.

Alrighty, moving on. When we speak to the competencies that are asked of us through SEL, I’m also going to make the assumption that nobody hasn’t heard those three letters smashed together in the last 10 years. I’ll review them because, again, we want to invite everybody where they are. It doesn’t take us much time. We’re front-loading for comfort and clarity. So these are the five that are noted in CASEL. Pete’s not going to open that for us as a website, but it’s there for you should you care to, and you have these slides. So self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and if I were in a class, I would be modeling and asking them to read these to us. Relationship skills and responsible decision-making.

The way that I remember those, because I like acronyms, is its three S’s and two R’s. If that works for you, please have that from me to you to remember those. We talk about them but we don’t always think about the actual words connected to them. Why we care and how they impact our work. This is the data that has been collected, not only by CASEL but other academic institutions, around what the benefit of social-emotional learning is. And if you haven’t had a chance for whatever reasons to take note of the specificity of that, here it is. Academic performance, healthy relationships. And this is the international sign not only for “yay,” but “goes up.”

So self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision making. And if we stop and think about what those things actually mean in our own lives, it’s how we manage to navigate the day. It’s how we manage to navigate our families. It’s how we manage and navigate our work relationships, and it gives us a sense of awareness of what’s around us and belonging. Key to being able through Blim’s taxonomy or anybody else’s, if we aren’t relaxed and in a mood where we can and have a disposition for learning, it’s not going to happen. So again, we don’t want to waste our students’ time or our own.

So academic performance, healthy relationships, mental wellness. I paused and waited on that for a hot second simply because it is a national concern. It is an international question. It is impacting our students in ways we never imagined and are terribly sad is happening. So we want to address that in this. And personal growth. Again, it’s how we manage our days and that’s why it’s important. Not saying anything we aren’t… we’re familiar with. We’re just doing and modeling what we would do in class, which is front loading with shared vocabulary, inviting prior knowledge, contextualizing the day, all of those things. And this is what I want to practice with my teacher candidates as they think about how to use their time with their students in a day.

Alrighty, now here’s the sad part for me, possibly relief for you. I had written this as, one opportunity to model. And it was going to involve the words in front of you. You were going to come off camera, you were going to stand up, you were going to check yourself on camera, you were going to unmute and make noise, say hello. We were going to move it, move it together, do a little dance, and then we were going to turn around and sit down. It was going to happen quickly so that you didn’t have an opportunity to care what anybody else thought. It was going to happen together and it was going to happen to the same song that I played when you were coming in. I’m hoping you had a chance to hear.

So you’re also front loading the music. It’s not new to you. It would’ve just simply been a reminder. So again, all the front loading we can do. Why do we bother and what does this modeling get us? We refer to our TPEs. And they’re here at the bottom, layering with visual and verbal. So, engagement, environment. The organization of our students thinking and our own. Frames for design and assessment, the things we dig. And I really also appreciated this morning conversations about assessment and how we’re going to look at competencies.

And I would suggest to you, with science and love, that social-emotional learning is no small thing. Social-emotional learning and the ability for employed people or people who are looking to learn to have those five to hand, the three S’s and the two R’s, will improve their capacity to learn, will improve their ability to share what they know, and will help us create new demonstrations of understanding as we have competency-based education. Okay? So that’s a tie-in to this morning.

Strategies. So I’m hoping why you joined us today was you too are interested in this bridge between social-emotional learning and GoReact. I find GoReact to be a very useful tool. I find it to be the most well-rounded of the tools I’ve experienced. I’ve found it to be fairly intuitive, because I’m a visual learner and so icons really work for me. It is verbal, it is written, it holds standards. So let’s just think about this for a little minute. And what I’d like to do is share with you a clip. We’re not going to watch a clip for long, of a student of mine. But why I want to share it is it demonstrates the use of some of the tools. It’s that simple. We’re just going to look at that. Then think about the social-emotional learning that’s going on and think about how GoReact supports us. Okay? International for yay.

So I’m going to unshare and share that. Please don’t go anywhere. Thank you so much. Going to do that and share… Where is she? Here she is. This is a current teaching candidate with me. And I’m just showing you this picture, I hope, and Pete, please let me know if that’s not occurring.

Pete Morgan:

I see GoReact right now, it looks fantastic.

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

Brilliant. Okay, so what we… Let’s see if I play it. I have it at a place where I wanted it to be. But let us see if we can hear it and if not, that’s perfectly fine. We’ll talk through what we see. Okay, so sorry. How do we stop me, Pete?

Pete Morgan:

I’ve seen the video pause and play there just a few moments, but there wasn’t any audio that I could hear, particularly.

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

So, really, what we want is to not hear me. GoReact dashboard. Did you take… So how do we get… Yay. All right. So I’m going to take that down, stop share of that and just get the visual, ideally. Oh my gosh, that’s her. That’s her voice. Okay. You don’t have the context for this. Let me share.

They have been to a theater festival. Some of the students went, some did not. So what I appreciated about Denise’s work and how it connected to our conversation today was, if you look here within the screen, you can see my arrow pointing to the vertical column between the image and the text. So at any time, I can start a comment at the bottom here. As we know, that is going to lock in to the second to where it happens in the video. What does that get us with these tools? It gets us the ability for her to see exactly what I was considering in my commentary. It gives us both the chance to look at it individually, in our gym jams, at home. And then when we come together for peer-to-peer.

Below that is rubrics. Within the rubrics opportunity is… TPEs are already set up. There are customizable rubrics. And I would suggest from an SEL point of view that you want to try a customized one and think about the qualities of quality with your students. Once students have engaged in defining what excellence looks like or proficiency looks like, they have the opportunity to talk through what that is, to think through what that is, and to feel invested in what that is. So I find those to be a strengthening tool for students’ participation.

We have analytics, we can look at that another day. That’s another webinar conference. They are useful. Here are visual icons about which of the six TPEs you are correlating with. I can put those in, Denise can put those in. So that’s lovely. What was also spoken about earlier was the notion of self-reflection. Self-learning, learning in your own time. Well, you’re only learning in your own time if you have time to reflect on what it is you’re learning. We know this is how the brain works. So this affords people, I get to self-reflect, she gets to self-reflect, as part of how I run my classes. We come together as groups. They self-reflect together. It’s a cohort of teaching candidates in small groups.

They’re hearing things in language that’s familiar. They’re hearing things in context that’s familiar. It’s not me running the game, it’s them running the game. So this is what I appreciate about it. The other opportunity is I can add, if you’ll notice down here on the right, I can add video, I can add emojis should I feel so inclined. We can open feedback under other options and there’s also a microphone under there. The microphone is really important. The microphone allows for us to avoid the moment we’ve all had with email where you’ve said, “Oh, this is great, I was just invited to this thing. Let me reread that. Oh, my god, I’m not invited. Everybody there is mad at me. And I’ve read the same words.”

So what we’re doing is we’re allowing for nuance, we’re allowing for tone, we’re allowing for practice of how we speak to our teacher candidates is how those teacher candidates in their classrooms will speak to their students. We’ve all had moments where we’ve said things in class, where we’re like, “Really? I’m the grownup in the room. That just came out of my mouth.” So the more we practice with our students about how they envision themselves speaking, the more muscularity they have when they leave us. So please, microphone. Awesome for social-emotional learning. Okay, I’m going to let this go. Also up here you can see, I don’t want to dawdle, but many toys to share with. Those are the ones that I find very useful in my work.

Stopping sharing. And now we want to go back to our slides. And so meow, here we are. Pete, please tell me if we have not done that. I think we are sharing screens again and I think I’m looking at… Oh no, maybe it’s me just looking at…

Pete Morgan:

Yeah, so far I’m not seeing a shared screen.

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

No, that would have been me. Going bigger here, going shared here and getting slide there. Now we should be back, in a little bit more accordance. Better?

Pete Morgan:

Now we’re back. Yep. Perfect.

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

Great, thank you. These are strategies with which to excel with social-emotional learning while you’re using this tool, that is very user-friendly and very holistic in terms of how you address your students. That’s that. I think GoReact is a great invitation to learners. I love that. And we just saw, and you saw, her practice with some of the tools. She had written to me, I had written to her, all the things. She also did a very good job within her class of getting… Rather than have the kids who went and talked and the kids who didn’t, she put them in pairs in small groups with somebody who went and who didn’t. And then she had the kids who didn’t go ask questions of the kids who did go. It was very clever.

The other thing is time. And we hit on this a little bit. We talked about, we get to watch when we can. We get to reflect when we can. And we get to do, we get to have verbs about how we respond to our students that are dynamic. And Lord knows the one thing they’re headed for is a dynamic environment. Things will be happening in real time. Things will be happening out of their control. In their control, they’ll have their controlled chaos, they’ll have their very measured sessions. All of that will be true. But the doing is important. So a ways aways. That’s where we are there. Moving on. And we are at 10:55. Brilliant.

So what I see in front of me, and I’m hoping you’re seeing the same, is a slide that says “practice required for transformation.” The link that I have in here discusses transformation. That’s for another day. We don’t have that kind of time together today. What is under that are simply the words “chat drop.” So my question to you is simply, and I’ll go over these first just to give some words in the air and start it. These are not the words I’m looking for. They are not correct. There is no wrong. We are simply brainstorming together, because transformational education is right up there with “blueberries are good for you and I love you,” as, “oh no, no, the one none of us want to do anymore, pivot.” So no right answer. Want your thinking. If you please could drop it in… I think you said question and answer is where you wanted it. Pete? Is that true? Or chat?

Pete Morgan:

We can use it in the chat. Probably for this sort of chat drop we could utilize the chat function and we’ll leave the Q and A for any deliberate questions that way.

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

Thank you so much. So chat function for drop chat, and Q and A for deliberate questions at the end. Thank you for that. So the words I threw up here were reimagine. Some of the things you could do, some of the practices for that are reimagining, revising, tightening the work you had, maybe cutting out some of the words you had. Maybe updating some of the words you had because you have new information. Those are just some of the verbs of how I think about some of the ways in which we practice our way to transformation.

Pete Morgan:

Lisa, through the chat, I’m also seeing that Anne, Doctor Anne Katona Lin agrees with you on reimagine. That was the first thing that she popped up with. Also seeing my own answer of revamp, just thinking that same thing. Change is good, but positive change, right? Something that is exciting and brings in new energy.

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

I like that. I like that. Thank you for that. That brings in new energy. So that can happen in all of these iterations. A revamping. Okay, first of all, that goes to jazz, it goes to music, it also goes to stages. And now you’re making me think of drag queens and being vampy. I love that. So I don’t know what better energy one could have other than RuPaul. So yeah, I think revamping is a great way to think about it.

Anybody else want to share? Last call. Last call for our chat drop for transformation. What does it mean for you? Or what comes to mind for you? For the practices that are required. Just as it stays here, practiced required for transformation. What comes to mind for you?

Pete Morgan:

Also, Dr. Anne through the chat just said, “Sometimes I see in working with teachers that they’re too close to the problem, which sometimes blocks their thinking. That’s why I chose reimagine.”

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

I love that. So what I just heard you say was, back it up. Because when you zoom out, you come away from your own habits and your own threads of connection. So sometimes it isn’t the idea that’s holding you to it, it’s literally your behaviors and your mindset about it that makes you too close to the problem. So those are some things to consider. I love that. And how we deal with professional development with teachers. It’s like, “No, I’m there. I’m dug in.” So how do we help them get undug? And sometimes that invites these and revamping. Love that. Okay, we’ll move on. Thank you for playing.

The question, if we’re going to bother to have transformation, is what does it get you? Why would you bother to want to transform? For those of us who work providing professional development with teachers or work collegially with other teachers, and we have community spaces of learning. This is the kind of question that comes up that we want to chew on. And there’s, again, no right answer. Transformation. What does it get you?

Again, there’s a link here. We’re not opening it. It’s there for you to reflect with and think on later, should that be interesting to you. I would suggest these things at the bottom are what I personally have noted, what science has shown us, what much qualitative research has shown us. Authentic participation. And I’m just going to read, and again, if I were in class and modeling, and when I mean class, I mean professional development with teachers as well as with students, and student teachers. Authentic participation, they would read vulnerability, empathy, expression. And what that gets us, as well, is what I think the goals that we heard this morning in the keynote speaker… I did not write this today. Are here. With that trust, with those practice muscles, who we trust first is ourselves.

So when we’re having competence, we are having confidence. When we are having competence, we are engaging critical thinking. When we are growing into confidence, we are revisiting our critical thinking. And once we’re able to do that, we’re able to trust. Ourselves and then others, which allow us to continue to learn. So in the chat drop, it’s not as good as what’s love got to do with it. But I like the question. Transformation, what does it get you? You as a human, you as a teacher, you as a learner, you as a family member? Does it get you anything? What would be the positive thing it could get you?

Pete Morgan:

While people are answering here, Lisa, the first thing that popped into my head that I put into there was deliberate practice. I feel like the positive end of being able to practice and deliberately practice is just that a transformation, for me, from my perspective, is my ability to look from a new perspective or look inwardly, and understand what I would like to be working on, or changing in that aspect. Rather than just what’s in front and what has to be tasked. What I have to be doing. So I like the idea of transformation. What it gives me is an opportunity to deliberately practice what I would like to be invested in.

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

I love that. When you say deliberately, I hear two things. Intentionality and freedom. When you see the opportunity to be deliberate, I hear intentionality and freedom. And that’s huge in our thinking. Tall four-year-old right here. So visually what I saw was an arrow taking shape and getting tighter. So a honing of your thinking. It goes from deliberate to intentional. Like, “I know what I want to do, I know how I want to get it done. Oh, let me think more deeply about how I’m going to get it done. How’s it landing?” All those wonderful questions. Thank you. I like that. The opportunity to be deliberate.

Yay. Okay. And ideally, these are some of the byproducts of that muscle growing. We’re getting authentic participation, vulnerability, empathy, expression. The other thing that was touched on this morning, and in regard to assessment, is expression. How are we going to tell people, how are we going to demonstrate our understanding, as learners, taking on new skills? How are we going to do that? So the more our students and our students’ students have opportunities for demonstration of expression, demonstrations of understanding, whether they be physical or verbal or through art or through programming, the better off we all are and the more juicy the learning is for students. They’re in. If they can get all that, they’re in.

Okay, so this notion of what is a practice we could use when we want to think about the building of trust? And again, when I work in GoReact, I work online a majority of the time these days and will continue to do so. And this is a way to help build some of this trust that feeds your students’ curiosity and desire to learn. Share your story. I grew up at a time when, we came in, we spoke, we went away, we tested. It’s like it’s changed, it’s changing. That is welcome in terms of how students learn, how students come into the world and what they use to navigate the world.

Initially, I think for a number of people, myself included some days, I have a 27-year-old. Years ago, the dismissiveness of the idea that somebody knew something you could get access to was, I’ll start with infuriating and I won’t go further. And it was shocking. It was shocking. It was infuriating, it was demoralizing, it was ego wounding. It was all the things. But now we know, this is how we get data. I don’t need to think somebody’s shrugging off a thought, a task or how I’m trying to share because they Googled, this is the way of the world. Or as the Mandalorian would say, this is the way. I didn’t vote for this way. It is the way.

So share your story but keep it short and sweet. The idea is we’ve come off the podium. Share your story, keep it short and sweet. Listen to student stories. And I appreciate it in a session I was in earlier that the presenter was making the distinction between times for feedback and times for listening. This is listening time. There’s no commentary. There’s no commentary. And they’re timed sessions, so that that student can enjoy the time and doesn’t have to worry. So be clear. You’ve got two minutes, you’ve got three minutes, we’re going to share in small groups for four, for 10 minutes. And then I’m going to hear from each of you for whatever. However it works in your life. But it’s active listening. It’s deep listening. It is without a reaction listening. Active listening.

And when we’re listening, we’re listening and we’re noticing people noticing regarding their goals. And what that means, in my experience, is students will tell you where they want to go and what they want to learn in numerous ways. If we could all, first of all, know what we felt, articulate what we felt, ask for wanted and name our goals, the world would be in a different place. It’s not where we are. That’s also a different day. So notice how you hear their goals. Notice how they demonstrate their understanding to you. So that you can dig into that fertile methodology of sharing they have and deepen it. And when you then name that with them for them, they understand they’re going to have to do that with their students.

It’s not an easy ask with all of those faces in front of you every day in a classroom, but without these skills and without front loading in this way, the other end gets longer and more painful. Okay. Community differences in alignment. So once you’ve noticed what their goals are, as we just said, let’s listen for that and then let’s figure out how to make it happen. By naming buckets, we can then invite collaboration. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t ask for help. I am sure people have said that to me since I took my first step. It lands differently now. I’ll just say it that way. You cannot ask for help if you don’t know what you want.

So, working in small groups, attending to either the TPEs or particular kind of, this group works in an urban setting, this group works in a rural setting. What are the needs? What are the communities and their resources? And then we can talk about creating collaboration within your grade level, within your school, within your community, within your district. Name your buckets, people. What do you need? Okay. And then you name the steps together. That was also mentioned in a session earlier today.

If I tell you what the steps are, you haven’t had to think about it. You haven’t had to reflect about it. You haven’t had to engage in GoReact or social-emotional learning. It’s not very useful to you as a learner. Okay? So that’s what that covers. Building trust. Work. Nothing I send you ever, should we ever meet again, will be long. You’re busy. I know that. So that’s what that is.

And then we were going to think about doing small groups and we know, and this is one of the beauties of GoReact, in the future when this conference is a GoReact conference, built in GoReact, we can do small group work. We’re on Zoom, we’re not doing that. So this is not small group work. We would do this as small group work, you would do with your groups. Co-creator rubric. There’s a link there. Peer session reviews. If it’s not your practice, I invite you to investigate the possibility. That’s there. Front loading a focus on the elements of what you’re looking for. Again, either a short blog, a short website, a short report or article. And building in consistent reflection.

And with that said, we have five minutes left, so I’m going to zip through here. Oh, how lovely, I’m to the last slide. Just saying this again because I did that rather quickly, for your practice, in this dynamic, in this world we live in, small group work is crucial. That is how your students get to know each other, hear their own thoughts, have to work through their own thinking, and come up with things that will allow them to revamp. So with your students, I would co-create a rubric. I would look into how to run and facilitate peer group sessions. Saying, “you four, go do that.” That’s how I learned collaboration. Not a very helpful strategy.

Front load the focus on elements. Let students attend to particular things. It helps keep conversations objective. They’re not either praising only three people and or gunning for four other people. They are literally looking at the objective elements that they’re reviewing in this session. Whatever that session is with you. And the reason that’s important is what we know about brain science, is on average we can hold about seven thoughts, AKA your phone number.

So that allows you to focus where they’re thinking and to dig deep. And then the last is build consistency. Excuse me, not last, second to last. In reflection and front load your vocabulary. Four words, not a glossary. Four words. Allow them to invest in understanding the words and figuring out what they don’t know about them and how to practice them better and more deeply, and think about them.

Okay, there we are. Then what we were going to do was we were all going to unmute and wave at each other because that’s important. It is sound, it is sight, it is connection, it is a bridge. It’s important. So I invite you to do that. So this is what we did today and I would love any questions you’d care to share. Pete will share them with me. Around tools, time, and transformation.

Were there any particular questions that stood out to you in these three categories of things we looked at today? Tools which were GoReact, SEL. Time. How it becomes flexible when you use GoReact. And transformation. How once we have allocated for participation, that we have invited, we have witnessed and had seen demonstrated competence and witnessed the confidence of our students. Then we get to where we all want to be. Joy with learning. And now if I had that kind of fun thing, it would do the hearts on your phone where they all come out. The joy of learning. Just imagine all the hearts. Alrighty, I’ll stop sharing.

Pete Morgan:

Lisa, absolutely, absolutely. Fantastic. Which I think, I mean only appropriate that, since it’s just the two of us, we need to wave to each other and build the bridge.

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi

Pete Morgan:

Hi there.

Lisa Edsall Giglio:

Absolutely.

Pete Morgan:

There aren’t any particular questions that have popped up in the Q&A, but for everyone that’s here, my thoughts are buzzing around what’s been shown here, the vernacular, the topics of discussion. Just a few thoughts of mine as you’re thinking about questions that may finish up or wrap up the session for us.

One of the first things you said, Lisa, that really pointed out to me was talking about front loading for comfort and clarity. In my world, especially as GoReact thinks about large enterprise scalability, accessible learning for everybody, any skill, SEL, durable skills, personal upscaling, we’ve seen that they succeed at their very best when there are clear expectations, the clarity portion of that, that are set for the learner, and the learner is comfortable and confident in what’s going to go forward. Helping learners become invested, that’s a big portion of that comfortability and confidence. Deliberate practice and gaining the freedom to just do, is such an important topic and everything that you discuss is within that phase. So personally, I really appreciated all of that. That was really incredible.