 In this next little while, I have a couple of things I'm going to do. So first of all, I should let you know. So at UBC, I do research on children's social-emotional learning, but I also teach courses on this. We now have a master's program with a concentration in social and emotional learning that started at UBC last year. So I teach courses on it, so on just social-emotional learning, social and emotional learning programs and practices, and so I was trying to think about how I can get all of the courses that I teach down to one hour. So I really tried, but I guess I can't. So I want to do a couple of things. One thing would I like you to do if you can, maybe you could just email me, but take out a piece of paper and while I'm speaking, if there are certain things that I mention, articles or resources, please write them down at the end of my talk or sometime during the day, just hand me your slip of paper. Because what I'll make sure to do is Irene over here is setting up that website, that incredible website, and what I can do is I could, on the website, in addition to having these resources, I can upload those resources for you. So I want to see, and I guess, Laurie, am I starting a Twitter account? Laurie wants me to start tweeting about social and emotional learning. So I really want you to, you know, as I'm talking about things, just otherwise if you tell me in passing, I could tell you right now I won't remember. So please take that opportunity to ask more. A couple of other things that I'll be talking about, just a little bit of background about me, the people who don't know me. So I started off, I was an elementary education teacher. I taught actually fifth grade, then seventh and eighth grade, and then high school, an alternative high school for kids who got kicked out or pushed out or whatever of a regular school, and then worked with children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders for about three and a half years where I lived and worked with them. So I have been doing, and then I do teacher education for the past couple of decades. So I really have both the practical experience, and then I'll have to say I'm a parent of two boys who are 12 and 15. We did back to school shopping at Metro Town last night. So I try and bring in a lot of different examples and things. So I just, you know, from both, actually I do nothing until I had kids. I have to say, you know, all of that, PhD, all that kind of stuff. I thought I was learning something, no, really, you know. So I'm going to bring in some of those examples. But one of the things that I couldn't, you know, that I really wanted to start with, I was thinking about social and emotional learning, emotional literacy, the whole idea of how you bring in this part of the classroom into young readers. And I had to start with reading you a book. Pete the Cat was walking down the street in his brand new white shoes. Pete loved his white shoes so much, he sang this song. See, there's Pete with his white shoes. Let's see what his song is. Hmm, I love my white shoes. I love my white shoes. I love my white shoes. See, he's even got a little guitar there. Okay, oh no. Pete stepped into a large pile of strawberries. What color did his shoes turn? Red! Yes. Did Pete cry? Goodness, no. He kept walking along and singing his song. And Pete's saying everything is cool. Okay, what does Pete sing? Ah, there he is. I love my red shoes. I love my red shoes. I love my red shoes. Oh, no. Pete stopped in a large pile of? What color did his shoes turn? Blue. Did Pete cry? No. He kept walking along and singing his song. And here he says, awesome. I love my blue shoes. I love my blue shoes. I love my blue shoes. Oh, no. Pete stepped in a large pile of mud. What color did his shoes turn? Brown. Did Pete cry? Goodness, no. He kept walking along and singing his song. He says, groovy. I love my brown shoes. I love my brown shoes. I love my brown shoes. Oh, no. Pete stepped in a bucket of water. And all the brown and all the blue and all the red were washed away. What color were his shoes again? White. But now they were wet. Did Pete cry? Goodness, no. He kept walking along and singing his song, rock and roll. I love my wet shoes. I love my wet shoes. I love my wet shoes. The moral of Pete's story is, no matter what you step in, keep walking along and singing your song. Because it's all good. Now I will say that that story is a book that goes along with a program on which I'm doing research called Mind Up. And the Mind Up program is a program that's a social and emotional learning program that's about teaching children mindfulness, but also optimism. And Pete's story is a story about optimism. It's about how do we look at a glass half full and half empty? And the research on optimism are a couple of things. One thing is that you can learn optimism. You can actually teach optimism and become more optimistic. And what we know about the research about optimistic people who look at the glass half full, or like Pete, who actually wear rose colored glasses, who are somewhat delusional, they have better relationships, better job satisfaction. They live longer, and they recover better from illness by having that optimism. So this is a way of how you can bring books into the classroom and have literacy at the same time as teaching reading, but also teaching social and emotional skills, teaching different things like that. So that's one of the illustrations. And I have lots of other ones along the way that will get us to think about Pete. So some of you have seen my talks before. Know this. Don't give the answer out. Educating the heart without educating the mind is no education at all. Who said this? Who do you think said who's this quote? It's not me. I'm just reporting it. Who? Someone? Aristotle. Yes. Someone new. So usually people say the Dalai Lama, then Einstein. Well, what's so interesting about this is that this idea of educating the heart and teaching social and emotional learning and well-being has been around for a long time. That it's only that the science and the evidence base has been around for about the last decade. That the research now is starting to support this idea that when you educate the mind, you should need to educate the heart as well. We also know that a comprehensive mission, this is just a quote from an article that talks about that the comprehensive mission for schools is to educate students to be knowledgeable, responsible, socially skilled, healthy, caring, and contributing citizens. And if you look at any of your mission statements of your schools, even of the mandate, I think for schools in BC is social and human development, that we get so focused on the academic achievement and we forget the purpose of schooling is really about the whole citizen. And I think back to Chris Kelly, who was a superintendent of Vancouver, several years ago was mentioning that, well, what is the purpose of schools? Oh, I have to see my, I don't know why that happened. Sorry, you guys. Okay, there we go, thank you. So one of the missions of schools is to not develop just good learners, but good people. And he talked about, think about the kids that you're raising about helping them become a good neighbor. Like who do you want your neighbor to be? What qualities do you want your neighbor to have? You want them to be a good person who's gonna help you, look after your house when you go on vacation, lend you something when you need it, be a good person. So we really have to think about how do we do that? And what I argue here is it doesn't just happen as part of education, that it's something we have to do intentionally, explicitly and focused. So I just wanna talk, give you a little bit of a background. The way that I'm doing this is I have a couple of things that key ideas in the beginning, because they were really key ideas that I was worried that they might get lost in the shuffle. So I wanted to start with a couple of key ideas that I wanted you all to have. And then I go through some of the resources that I'm just gonna share with you right now, because I know some of you, as you prepare for next week, you'd love to have just a couple of resources right away. And then I'll go into some of the link between research and SEL. And all along the way I've tried to put in strategies so that I'll talk about some research, talk about that and then talk about how do you then interpret it from theory and research into practice and things that you could bring back right away. As I said before, I have so much information and so much resources. So see this is just an appetizer with lots of other information. So first of all, Suzanne Denham, who is at University of Delaware, she's kind of a person who's done so much research on young children's social and emotional competence, literacy, has some wonderful programs. In fact, from her I learned about a way to assess children's understanding of others' emotions with puppets. And they have this, and I'll tell you a bit more about that. But she talks about emotional literacy and really the ability to identify emotions in yourself, understand why we feel the way we do, understand emotions in others, is really as vital as any other skill and is particularly central to children's ability to form relationships. And that idea of social-emotional competence is about just being emotionally, understand your own emotions, but also to form friendships. For example, I don't know if any of you know of this research by Gary Ladd that showed that children who began kindergarten with at least one other child that they knew in their kindergarten class, just one other child who was a familiar peer. Six months later, they had more friends in that classroom, and one year later, they had more positive feelings about school just by starting kindergarten with one other child they knew. Now, you might say, why would that be? Well, think about it. You walk into a strange room, strange environment, you know no one. All of us have been in situations like that. You've seen one other person you know. You might not even know them that well, but you go right to them and you connect and you together explore. So again, now what would be the practical applications of that when you have children starting kindergarten? Try and make sure that there's another child that they know in their classroom. And I think some schools really do try and do that. Cal Izard, who is really the sort of grandfather of all of the research on emotions in young children, he talked about the children's understanding of their emotions, their ability to talk about them and their ability to read emotion signals of others, provide them with some very valuable schools that not only affect their personal and social adjustment, but their academic performance as well. Think about children who are in classrooms who don't understand what people are feeling and they can't read the subtle nonverbal cues. They're kind of clueless and out of it and how important. And I think I have to emphasize here, these are skills that can be learned. It isn't like you're born with them or you're not. And I'll get to that. But these are emotional literacy activities are so critical. So the first thing I wanna sort of my take home message is that these early years of development, kindergarten to three, I'd actually say preschool two, three to five are transitional years in the terms of the development of emotion understanding. They are times where you begin to learn to identify emotions, develop a vocabulary of emotions that you are able to then, they're just very important. And if you don't have those skills, it could put you at risk for future development. We also know that there's an inextricable link between your social and emotional competence and your academic performance that they fit. I mean, and I think all the stuff we were hearing before about just even how you use self-regulation strategies, your instruction, how you receive instructional support, all have to do with how you feel, you know? I love this one quote that I have no idea who said it, but I love it, kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And how important that emotional world of the classroom is for motivation. And we also know that all of the research is pointing to the importance of actually helping children learn these important social and emotional skills early on in their school careers and that they need to be cultivated and supported in the same way you support literacy skills. I would argue that you support children in understanding their own emotions. And there's lots of examples I'll be giving along the way of how you can do that. So we know, so this is what I'm gonna just tell you some intentions in this, so in this next little while, you'll learn what SEL is, if you don't already know or define it, you'll be able to know why it's important because I do have to say, and actually I'll say it at the end, but why it is important and also some actually classroom strategies. What I do have to tell you that social and emotional learning is a movement that's happening across the world and that BC is the leader. And I'm not just saying, like I'm really not just saying this, British Columbia is the leader in the world for social and emotional learning. It's amazing. And I'll tell you, it really started, first of all in the 80s with the mandate with human and social development, but really what was the catalyst was the social responsibility performance standards and we're sharing. Sharing, over there. We can thank her and Maureen as well, really being the ones who have taken the charge and it was social responsibility, not mandated, very strategic, very important, that happened around 2001, was it 2001, 2000, that then took a spread like wildfire and then other parts of the world, especially the, which I'll get to later, the collaborative for academic and social and emotional learning, began looking to BC to see what we were doing in this area and the idea that there's several school districts now that have actually social and emotional learning coordinators. I just heard from Surrey yesterday, anyone here from Surrey? Yes, that there's a teacher, a support teacher for social and emotional learning. So districts now are starting to realize that I think Coquitlam has had that in place, Vancouver and other districts, I wanna say Tiris as well and others are really identifying that as an important aspect and we need to celebrate that. So I just want you to think of three main things as I'm talking, because I talk about social and emotional learning and it almost gets like, okay, we have to teach kids these skills. You know, we have to learn how to identify emotions and understand emotions and there is that piece of it, but I want to emphasize these other aspects. First is the development of the whole child, a whole child approach is so critical. Context, I'll say it again and again and again. Context, context, context. You have to focus on creating a safe, caring, participatory, engaging, well-structured environment. Context matters. You can't teach any of that social and emotional learning if you don't have that context and at the very heart of it all are relationships. Are the teacher's relationships with each of those children and the children's relationships with each other as well as all of the other relationships, how the teacher's relationships in the school to each other and the teacher's relationships with parents and all of those, but relationships are the key and I use a quote by Bulby and this is really a critical one that human beings of all ages are happiest and able to deploy their talents to best advantage when they experience trusted others as standing behind them. And this one, does anyone know about attachment theory? You've heard of Gordon Neufeld, right? But it made me think both of Deb's presentation this morning as well as Faze and talking about how important that teacher relationship with supporting, that's really what to me what I saw those strategies of that teacher supporting children and their students to be successful and how critical that is. So, and what we find in research that the features of classrooms that promote positive child development are the quality of relationships with adults consistently comes as a critical feature of any setting, the quality of that relationship that children feel connected. And I'm just gonna tell you briefly about a study that is so interesting to me. Bridget Hamra and Bob Pianta did a study in 2005. It's published in Child Development and they looked at, they did an observation of classrooms. They looked at how children, a number of different factors of teacher-child relationships and through an observation. And they looked at several different types of things. They looked at things like positive climate, negative climate, emotional support, instructional support. And they looked at, this study was looking at kindergarten status on reading. Well, the Woodcock Johnson first grade composites and looked at children who had no risks or children who had multiple risks. What you see here is that children with high risk status who had high emotional support from their teachers in the classroom had the best achievement. That that was both the two, in fact, the other one that matches this, the two most important things for helping those most at-risk children was were instructional support and emotional support. That those were the two key issues. And here you can't read all that, I'm sorry, I just wanted to put it up here just to remind me. And I could put that article on there. The dimensions of the emotional support included things like teacher sensitivity. The sensitive teacher is tuned into the child and manifests awareness of the child's needs, moods and interests and capabilities. And allows this awareness to guide his or her behavior with the child. Positive climate, I love this. A positive classroom climate is characterized by pleasant conversations, spontaneous laughter, and exclamations of excitement. Yay! It's a yahoo, what was that? Yahoo! And teachers demonstrate positive regard and warmth and interactions with students. Now this is, I have to say a couple of years ago, I was working with a district that is unnamed. Of a teacher who was teaching grade four or five who came up to me after I'd been presenting and said, Kim, I just don't know what to do. She said, my principal came to me and said, the other teachers are complaining about my class because my kids are laughing too much. And they wondered if kids could be learning if they were laughing so much. So we have to really look at our own vision, our views of what learning is. And so anyway, so this is a great study and it tells you all sorts of things about the literacy instruction, instructional conversation, things like that. But I'll just go along with what Faye was saying. And we need to have a strengths-based approach. And I have to say this is a lot easier said than done of looking at the positive, trying to move away from what the child doesn't have to things that they do have and how to reframe the negative into a positive. There's some kids who are, I'll talk about my son, Griffin. Griffin as a child was one of those children who never took no for an answer. He was tenacious and he just persevered. Now as a parent it drove me fricking nuts. I have to say. But I tried to reframe it and think about that perseverance will really do him well in certain circumstances. So how can you take things that we automatically would see as a negative to see as a positive in children? And then I'm just, this is the resource part of the talk. I'm just gonna tell you a couple of quick things. First of all, how many of you have heard of the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education? Oh wow, that's amazing. So the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education began in British Columbia in 2006 when the Dalai Lama had a visit here. And it's located in Vancouver and they have a speaker series. So first of all, you should know two things. One is their focus, their whole renewed focus is on heart-mind education. So K to 12 and looking at children and how you do it. And they have a speaker series and on their website you can go and see the list of all the speakers and watch videos of the speakers that include Dan Goldman, Sir Ken Robinson, Richie Davidson and you could go and access all these videos for free everything. And now we have a speaker series that's happening. I happen to be speaking on September 27th. David Osher from American Institute of Research is talking about SEL and managing conflict and then Clyde Hertzman is presenting November 22nd and these will all be videotaped and you'll be able to upload them online. And the Dalai Lama Center is also just trying to increase their amount of resources and things like that in terms of heart-mind learning which is really related to social and emotional learning. The other place, how many of you've ever heard of George Lucas? Okay, George Lucas, yes the Star Wars guy started an education foundation called Edutopia. Has anyone heard of Edutopia? Oh good, lots of you have. And Edutopia has one of its theme areas is social and emotional learning and you could go onto Edutopia website, find all sorts of videos on social and emotional learning and action as well as all sorts of lesson plans, activities, articles, all on social and emotional learning. So that's one resource. How many of you have ever heard of Scientific American Mind? Scientific American, the latest issue of September, October is all on SEL. They have an article called Changing a Child's Mind. It's a special section on SEL, self-regulation, mindfulness and stress in the brain. And I think it fits more with self-regulation in the way that Deb first talked about in terms of the developmental psychology, not the strategies as much as the self-control thing. They have an article on the education of character and talk about SEL and this classroom here, a classroom in Vancouver. The story actually starts in Vancouver giving illustrations of what's happening in BC, in SEL. So in Scientific American Mind. Now another place, this is again, these are all be available to you. There's a Center for Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning at Vanderbilt University and you could do all sorts of download and resources and this one is just one thinking called Teaching Your Child to Identify and Express Emotions. Now one of the things that I was thinking of that you all might be, as you work with young children, the part of the education is not just educating the children, it's supporting the parents at home. How many of you feel that's important? Good, all of you. So the idea is here are some things that you could point parents to and what I love is this next one, and I just found it this weekend, it was so cool. This backpack series and it's from this technical assistance center on social-emotional intervention called challengingbehavior.org which I didn't really like, but I guess it's okay. I don't know, anyways, I have mixed. And they have this backpack series. It's these one-pagers you print off and it's things like how to help your child recognize and understand sadness or how to help your child understand and label emotions. And it's a one-pager, you print off, it has all sorts of little tidbits for you just put in the backpack for parents to have. So again, another great resource. There's so many resources emerging in this area. And then I just had to point you to a couple of things on resilience. You'll get these, but one of my favorite websites is Feelings Factory. Does anyone know Feelings Factory? The FeelingsFactory.com and it's a place you could go and find all sorts of charts and resources and puppets and everything for bringing social and emotional learning into the primary grade classroom. And it has all sorts of things that are really inexpensive to get big charts of emotions and oh, puppets, I don't know, I love puppets. All sorts of things like that. So anyway, so those are some things. And then just the latest resource is this one out of the National Research Council that's about 21st century skills. And that might not be as interesting to everyone, but again, it just came out July 15th. And as you can see, there's a huge amount of resources available. And I said this the other night, I have been described by someone as a human Google for social and emotional learning. So again, as I'm talking about things, please write down. I wanna provide, I take my role very seriously as a resource for you and the idea that I can give you as many resources as possible on all of these topics. So why now? Why do we need social and emotional learning now? Well, I talk about why is social-emotional learning important? What we know from research, from experience that teaching and learning have strong social and emotional components. Think about, I don't know, have you ever seen children stressed? Have a lack of motivation? You know, all of these, it's inextricably linked to how you feel and how you learn and how you see yourself. So we know that that's so important. We also know that emotions can facilitate or impede children's academic work. Like how, you know, they could say, I can't do it. I can actually tell you a story. I worked in this one school for kids with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. And I had, one of my boys was named Brad. He had been identified as having a lot of learning problems and he came in on tests as a grade two reading level and here he was 14. And he just would always walk around about how stupid he was, how dumb he was, he can't do anything. But then every month when his favorite thing were about cars, he would get car and driver magazine and he would sit on his bed and read the entire magazine from front to back. And you would walk with Brad actually and he would tell you how fast each car was and how fast it went, zero to 60 seconds. So here was a kid who now they said, well, why can't we take his love of cars and now start helping him have that as a doorway to his literature. And so what I argue for, one thing is that reading and literature, it has to be psychologically relevant to children. It has to have a personal meeting. Think about when we go, when we choose things, things have to be psychologically relevant. And the only way that you can choose things to be psychologically relevant is if you know the kids really well. If you get to know what they're likes and dislikes and what the things they're interested in and how important it is for them, for you to have an opportunity to learn those kinds of things about them. So what now? Well, we know social and emotional learning is a growing movement, as I mentioned before. How many of you have heard of Dan Goldman? Right, so Dan Goldman in 1995 wrote a bestselling book called Emotional Intelligence. He has a more recent one called Social Intelligence and really talked about emotional intelligence as a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and other's emotions, to discriminate among them and to use the information that guides one's thinking and action. So it really put that on the, and CASEL, which is the collaborative for, how many of you have heard of CASEL? The Collaborative for Academic and Social and Emotional Learning was started by Dan Goldman in around 1997 and Eleanor Grohwald Rockefeller. And they began it really in part because someone said, if you're writing this book, Dan, and you're talking about how important it is, we better have something to work with it now. We have to have something to respond to all the interest that's gonna come out of that. And CASEL, www.CASEL.org, is located in Chicago and they really, what we call it, is kind of the mothership of SEL. So you can go on there and see all sorts of resources. And I would say, you can go on their website now, but in November, they're redoing their website because they're doing a district initiative across eight school districts in the US. I'm working on having one of the districts or having work done here, but having intensive SEL focus in eight of the largest school districts in the US and they're gonna redo their website so that it's all gonna be teacher-focused and all the resources for teachers. Right now it's kind of a mix between for researchers and for teachers, but there'll be lots of really important information on there come November, which again is really important. They talk about five dimensions of social and emotional learning. And if you think about these five skill areas, they've been called lots of different things, but the five include two about the self, self-awareness and self-management, which some people call self-regulation or self-control, social awareness, two social, social awareness and relationship skills, and then finally responsible decision-making is. Those five skills that they really, those five dimensions they really focus on things like self-management, refer to managing emotions and behaviors to achieve one's goals, self-awareness, recognizing one's emotions and values as well as strengths and limitations, responsible decision-making includes making ethical, constructive choices about personal and social behavior, relationship skills, forming relationships, working in teams, dealing effectively with conflict, and social awareness is showing empathy for others. Social and emotional competence measures the ability to do this, and then social and emotional learning is the process by which you bring those about. And the key of it is to do the instruction, is that you need, and I have to just, did I say context before? A few times, context, you need a safe, caring, well-managed, engaging, supportive environment that has high expectations. That is the foundation to social and emotional learning. And you could have, if you had a teacher that just focuses on social and emotional learning without any of those other aspects, you could actually, I argue, although I have no, I don't know where, I have no evidence to really support it, but I think you could do harm. If you suddenly open the opportunity for children to talk about their emotions, but don't have any support for how you deal with those emotions, then children can go, it could go awry. And what we know is providing explicit skills instructions into curricular activity, both you need, so I guess the other thing I want to really argue for is for social and emotional learning, it isn't just about doing, sort of having that environment, but you actually do need children to have explicit instruction and opportunities to practice identifying emotions, and it has to be infused. So instead of just saying, okay, now here's our time for social and emotional learning, and then kids are in the classroom, that you have to use that language of emotions whenever you can of how children are feeling and use that opportunity, and of course this safe, caring, highly engaging learning environment. And it should be, all I have to say, and I understand, I have all these different things, it has to be in the walls and the pores and the doors and the floors and every aspect of the school to think about how you can have SEL, what SEL would look like in all these different dimensions.