 I'm James Milan. Welcome to this edition of Talk of the Town. I am joined today by somebody that I spoke with when she was first in her job about five years ago, almost actually to the day or week. And she is Sarah Byrd. She is the Director of School Counseling and Social Emotional Learning. And I spoke to her, as I said, five years ago just after taking that job some months into her first year as our first SEL Director for the Arlington Public Schools. And I asked Sarah to come back in today because we have a number of things that we'd like to talk about. We want to kind of follow up on some of the conversation that we had all those many years ago before, let's see, a little event known as the COVID pandemic hit. But also to discuss partly the numbers and more the significance of a report that Sarah recently delivered to the school committee here in town. The title of the report, I'll read it, it's long. It's the Universal Mental Health Screening and SEL Assessment in Arlington Public Schools. And it covers a lot of ground, and Sarah is in complete command, I noticed, of its content. So this, I warn everybody, is going to be a kind of free-ranging conversation. Sarah and I talked a little bit about what ground we're going to cover, but there is much to be discussed here. So bear with us, I'm sure it will be worth it. Anyway, thank you for coming in. I really appreciate it. You are one busy woman, and we really do appreciate the time. So I actually wanted to ask you to just to start with, SEL is something that you are, you know, you wake up every day living and breathing, and probably lots of people in our audience are aware. But let's just assume, or let's let us speak to those for whom they're tuning in and they're like, okay, so what are you talking about here? So what, tell us about SEL, give us the basics. Yeah, and it's, thank you for asking that too, because it's a term or an acronym that we toss around and not everybody has the same universal understanding of what we're talking about. So in schools and in communities and even in homes, social emotional learning, which is the SEL that we're talking about, are the habits, the thoughts, the patterns, the behaviors that we are supporting and fostering and encouraging with our students. Specifically, in Arlington public schools, we use the five basic competencies that the collaborative for academic, social and emotional learning has researched and used and really vetted and endorsed across the country and the world. So those five competencies that we're talking about are the same across all age spans, even into adulthood. So those same competencies that you and I are using right now, I mean, while we're using them, whether or not we're using them well, or they need some help, it's up to our own assessment every day. And it's just like any skill set, right? If we're sick, they're going to be, you know, a little weaker. And if we're having a great day, they're going to be stronger, right? So those, let me tell you what they are. They are self-awareness. They are social awareness. They are self-management. They are relationship skills and responsible decision-making. And those five skills are the same for, you know, if you're looking at a three-year-old or a four-year-old, they're going to be developmentally different there. But you can still ask a three-year-old or a four-year-old how they're feeling. What's their self-awareness? You can have reasonable expectations for how they're managing themselves. You can teach them how to have age-appropriate relationships. You can teach them how to make good decisions. Same thing for you and I, you know, how are we socially aware of one another? Are we self-aware? Are we managing how we're feeling right now? Did we make responsible decisions to get here and so on and so forth, right? So those skills are never ending in their development, in our reflection of them. And in schools, we really need to make space in terms of how we're coaching students in them, intentionally naming them, and providing opportunities to allow students to practice them in culturally appropriate ways. Because, you know, in my Italian Portuguese household, having, you know, a conflict and making decisions when it's a holiday and it's loud and it's noisy and you want food at the end of the table, it's going to look very different than somebody else's household that's maybe smaller. You know, my husband has a much smaller family. Perhaps that decision-making and that relationship and that conflict is going to look very different. So, you know, not naming, this is what it needs to look like, but asking us to be self-reflective and socially aware of, well, what's it look like in your family? What's it look like in your family? And working with students to articulate and figure out, oh, that's how that's going to work for me. Yeah, and as you talk, you know, as you kind of listed those five pillars and also, you know, kind of just went into, like, a little bit further description for a couple of them at least, I'm thinking, as you're speaking, I'm thinking, yeah, you're right that you can, you can ask that of a three-year-old or you can help teach a three-year-old how to do these things. But I also know plenty of adults, plenty of folks my age and above, below, etc., who have, who would have some challenges of responding to some of those basic questions, how do I feel, you know, etc. So clearly lifelong stuff, but of course now, and it's partly your, the scope of your work to integrate that within, you know, our students' experience in schools from, I assume, right, from pre-K and kindergarten right all the way through high school. Exactly, exactly. And it's, especially in the school-based setting, we're not structured as a school where there's a separate SEL curriculum time. You know, we have specific instructional time for math and for English and science and social studies and PE and so on, but there's no SEL instructional time for the most part. It would be in an ideal world, it would be lovely to have a bit of instructional time set aside for that. So we could teach some of our SEL curriculum lessons, but for the most part we're left to take those five different competencies and embed them into existing content, which is ideal because that's how our brain functions and that's also how we function and we learn in social settings, right. So when you read books about different characters, you're not just reading about where they go and what they do, you hear about how they're feeling and their relationships and what drives them to make a decision and the risks and rewards of what choices they can make and then they make a choice and then you see the fallout from it and there's all of that energy and that drama in the story. That's all emotion, that's all SEL and so when we have teachers naming those competencies within the literacy moments, that's when the learning is really rich because they're talking about and teaching and practicing the SEL competencies within the context of the literature. Same thing with even science, you know you can have chemical compounds that are having certain reactions towards one another and you can talk about or is this a base, is this an asset and how are they reacting and in history I love, you know, going through historical figures and thinking about what were their leadership styles, you know, how did they lead their people and even current events and thinking about how can we be using the different competencies to reflect on our reactions to what's going on in the world, how different choices could be made, what are responsible choices, how do we manage our feelings and our reactions to what's going on, so it's really rich. Yeah and again as you're speaking I'm thinking pedagogically it's also a very useful tool for teachers just in terms of imparting content and giving students a way to connect with the material. So clearly you know the work you're doing involves working directly with teachers, working directly with students but doing an awful lot of indirect invisible kind of scrambling behind the scenes I would think in order to be able to, you know, do this successfully. I want to change, not change gears for a second but I had told you that I reviewed our first interview number of years ago and I was really struck by one thing because of course neither of us could possibly, nobody could, see the pandemic over the horizon at that point but one of the things that you said and I'm going to quote your actual words to you which I wrote down was you were talking about how school is a great place for social emotional learning to happen, how it is the place to happen and you were saying that now young people don't come to school to get information as was the case at some point in the past. They can do all that virtually, they don't need us for that. What they do need us for is to figure out who they are in context of the world around them. That came from a more innocent time right when we were assuming that we were going to that you would have assumed that you'd be able to continue the work that you had begun at that time and that was based on certain premises like hey we're all going to be here together each and every day. All right so then we get the intervention of the pandemic. People are forced are kind of atomized right like we're all down just in our little pods in our little spaces and we're not in community. Just talk to us a little bit about how that has been given that you were optimistic about the potential for this work that you do and how it could in a span of five to seven years because I asked you to actually speculate what would it be like. The vision you painted was a nice one which was then completely Shanghai in a sense. So both on a personal level to whatever degree you're willing to share that and then professionally how have you reacted adjusted what have you learned these kinds of you know anything there that you want to address. Sure personally I am an optimist and professionally I am also I practiced radical acceptance from years of being a therapist right so you get the duality of those two hand in hand and what that's done for me throughout the pandemic is to say there are a lot of things that the pandemic has done for the field of social emotional learning that has been very helpful to to the work and putting it as a priority. Social emotional learning is something that only people would only pay lip service to or people would say oh yeah it's this touchy feely thing you know it's really great in elementary schools or it has to do with puppets I don't know you know it would be sort of discarded and left for pre-K. And then when the pandemic came and hit and families you know even if you believed in your in your gut that this was something that was important I think a lot of families that have healthy kids and kids that were pretty much taken care of themselves and doing just fine were now believing well maybe this is for everybody maybe this is actually something we could all benefit from and maybe we're advocating for this for all of us in community all the time because this is now thrust all of us into the spotlight to say now that my student has been away from their classroom and now that they're just looking at them on the screen and now that they've been removed from this everyday protective factor because that's what it is to be in community to be with friends to be in spaces where you feel competent and confident is actually a huge boon to your existence to your identity to who you are and all of the families of you know no matter what grade level elementary middle high started to see what it was like to have a student slowly withdrawal and and not nothing pathological we're not talking about kids with diagnosis here we're not talking about kids with any you know neurological issues or needing medication just that slow removal and we all felt it ourselves too there all of a sudden came this mass advocacy for social emotional learning is important we need to get these kids and that you saw that as a push to get kids back in you saw that as a push for vaccines or whatever it was that we needed to get them back in community you saw that even locally for how can we get the rotating schedule to get them back in in a safe way you know however it was that families found they could advocate to get their students in community learning pods you know whatever it was that worked families were advocating for some type of social emotional learning to manifest for their student to be held in community again so that's the optimism in me that looked at at the pandemic and said people have lived it they get it now because it's almost like you don't know what you've got till it's gone type of a moment right and then that radical acceptance part of me is looking at all of this and saying and yet it's still not going to be perfect because what we have now been left with is this tidal wave or these repercussions of kids coming back in and having these gaps or these years of interrupted learning and so you know my daughter was in kindergarten when the pandemic started she's now in second grade and so she has if you think about it when she comes into second grade and you realize that her whole first grade year was kind of mushy and then her kindergarten year was interrupted so the first when she came back to second grade her whole set her toolbox of skills was a half finished toolkit from kindergarten and as teachers are coming into that and going oh my gosh that means like the fourth grade and fifth grade students are coming in with toolkits from like first grade and second grade and then freshmen are coming in with toolkits from middle school maybe fifth grade that's that gives you so much compassion for the kids for the teachers for the families to realize that there's the potential for huge hiccups in terms of I miss the lesson where you talk to the bully on the playground I miss the lesson where somebody teases you to your face and you don't know what it feels like to just turn red and want the world to swallow you up and we just didn't have those lived experiences so yeah i'm just gonna interrupt for a second yeah because you're you're talking about missing toolkits right because again we have this gap of a couple years and and to me it sounds then like you are um acknowledging in in a way that the that sel demands like sel progress demands community demands that we be face to face with each other out on the playground or in the classroom or in the hall or wherever um in that basically taking that away just created a gap for everybody there was no way to keep moving forward with that in in a virtual way is that is that right yeah and you know a gap compared to what so we're all in this together so we all have this blip on our radar right i think there's there's this temptation to compare it to the normal from before and sure okay there's this gap compared to before but we've all got this hiccup together so that's where the radical acceptance comes in to say yes and let's all learn together let's all have this lesson together so there's some research that comes out of rocks um rox ruling our experiences that was um looking into adolescent girls and trying to find out during the pandemic how they were feeling and one of the major findings was that they were feeling like they had no vision for their future they weren't quite sure they couldn't envision what a future might look like because colleges were shut down they couldn't envision going to high school because they weren't having course selections and things and those are not things that i would have anticipated or seen because we were focused so much on how are you doing in the moment right now so even just listening to them and finding out oh you're struggling now because you have no compelling vision for the future that's worth listening to them and just sort of accepting right now is what it is the lessons we've missed or the lessons we've missed let's radically accept where we're at and recalibrate and figure out okay what do you need how do we move forward and if our adolescent girls were looking for well what does my future look like now what does college look like now or do i even want to go to college now that was compelling and teen and adolescent girls really get a sense of identity and purpose and belonging from community and them not being immersed in that was really jeopardizing that sense of compelling future so also hearing that and saying we've got to get them back in community we've got to get them connected to one another how do we create opportunities for that that's also really compelling information to hear from them so what what has what have things looked like this year for you and kind of broadly speaking in the sel world of arlington public schools you know given everything you you've just said i mean everybody finally is back to some some semblance of normal normalcy and so how do you pick those reins back up again or sure i don't even i don't even know how to ask the question sure well you know i can start just realistically um in terms of programming right so this um this year we have been able to take the second step social emotional learning curriculum at the elementary level across the district in all seven buildings and with the help of our sel coach and then this infusion of a new grant funded sel coach to move through the buildings and work with classroom teachers to support them in implementing just a couple of units to start grappling with like we said do you have instructional time for it and if you don't how can we help you infuse this into some of your other learning spaces that's new for a lot of a lot of folks we have responsive classroom in in all of our buildings and again though given the pandemic we have to onboard new folks with responsive classrooms so the past few years have been a bit of a scramble we've done some you know interim trainings to get people on board with the same language but a lot of it is also playing catch up getting people trained who haven't been trained giving them materials when they haven't had it and a lot of one-on-one coaching for folks who are new to it or could use a refresher so it's a lot of like you said scrambling the background but also getting into classrooms and meeting with teachers and finding out okay the fourth graders that are in front of you look a lot like first graders let's put the fourth grade materials to the side and actually go back to the third or the second grade materials and let's use them for now because that's actually going to best serve the students in terms of scl curriculum i'm not talking about the academic content and let's see if that's going to help them meet their needs and make them feel more competent and confident in their learning space as a community and those types of adaptations and coaching are really helpful at the secondary level we've been working with a program called ruler which is really dynamic because and it stands for regulating understanding labeling expressing and i'm sorry recognize them and regulating two hours i flipped them but all the different emotional fluency elements like we were talking about so having the adults actually this year immerse themselves in that program so that they can get really confident with wow how am i feeling tired it's not the right word that's a biological feeling but i'm feeling a little conflicted or i'm feeling a little distressed or i'm feeling kind of apprehensive and excited you know actually getting feelings words so that we can then model that for students and start to increase their emotional fluency so that's what we've been seeing in terms of programming in terms of feelings and experiences it's a mixed bag you know yeah especially because i mean you you know as you were just pointing out it it is glaringly obvious that the load on teachers and the load on the scl coach and coaches um the load on you uh etc it's it's all been bottlenecked right so now how to both backfill and keep moving forward and you know again on some level we can't keep going you know you can't go forward um teaching fourth graders as if they were second graders whether it's scl or or the actual you know content um and yet that is that is the right thing to do now so how to figure out how to close that gap as you continue to move forward it's just it's just a good illustration of how challenging things are um in in our schools right now just to do right by our students which is the you know everybody's core motivation i know but that is a very um you know it it's kind of a daunting uh scenario in a sense um although you you again kind of explain well how it is that there's a path forward with this and how it is that a radical acceptance person can see the opportunity and also see again that this universal recognition that we the pandemic is is you and i were pointing you were pointing out before we went on air you know there's nobody that hasn't dealt with this so these kids are dealing with it of course but they see their parents and their neighbors and their grandparents etc and there's got to be something to be um to be uh extracted and well utilized from the fact that that's a universal experience i think it is it's this collective experience that we've all gone through and there have been some wonderful people in the community who've also articulated this as well it whether you choose to call it you know chronic stress um or collective trauma it's had an impact you know neurologically on us physically on us emotionally on us but we've all experienced it together and and to varying degrees depending on your resources depending on your privilege depending on so many things what we can do is acknowledge that and name it and radically accept okay now how can we help each other okay i'd like to uh actually change gears i asked you about how things have been this year um and again i'll just remind folks that that part of my motivation for asking you in today was the your discussing of a report that was provided for the school committee and that you know i'm sure is available um and again that's the called the universal mental health screening and scl assessment for arlington public school so it is the report that encapsulates for the moment yes you've been clear about um where where things some of where things stand um in terms of our students mental health and just where where they're at is that right yeah so um a universal mental health screener is not diagnostic so it's yeah so i'm i'm very particular in framing that because it can be very easy to look at something that says mental health and to immediately attribute that to a mental health disorder or mental health disease and just like mental health crisis correct thank you so just like physical health you and i are sitting here right now with our own physical health and our own mental health and i currently at the moment i'll only speak for myself right i am feeling in good physical health and good mental health at the moment good for you when we thank you when we say mental health though in our community and society we tend to attribute that with a negative stigma and so i want to be very intentional in that part of the work we have to do around mental health is destigmatizing it so when we say we're doing a mental health screener we are not looking to pathologize all of our students it's just like doing a vision screening or a hearing screening um and when we do that with all of our you know students with the nurse's office it's the same exact thing right so we're just doing a universal screening of all of our students who often you know whose parents have given us the permission and to make sure that we're catching anybody who might need follow-up with their doctors their pediatricians same exact thing um that communication i feel is very pertinent at this moment in time until we destigmatize mental health because otherwise people will look at that and say whoa look at all these numbers look at all these mentally unstable students and that is not at all the case so thank you for allowing me to clarify that clarification absolutely and very necessary so thanks thanks for that absolutely um but let me ask you um you gave this presentation to the school committee is that something that you do each year um or was this a by by special request um yeah dr homen had asked me to um give a brief report out on where we were because we have just received a rather large grant from the department of elementary and secondary education so it's not something that we necessarily share out every year this is actually only the second year that we have been um in process with our universal mental health screenings so we couldn't have been doing them for the past five years because we haven't been doing it but we did just receive a $350,000 grant from the state and it's from federal funds that are specifically targeted to covid needs around mental health structures and supports uh specifically around sel coaching and around universal mental health screenings and there there are a lot of specific parameters so dr homen asked that i report out on a couple of the data points that are connected to the grant funding so that school committee in the community could hear about where the funding is going um what programming around the universal screening is going to be supported from that and i will just kind of point out to our viewers that if you are interested in knowing where that funding is going um sarah does a great and quite comprehensive job in that school committee presentation which you can find on acmi i think it was a maybe three weeks ago or so probably mid february school committee meeting if you are interested we're not going to be done we're not going to be going into that uh here today but i i was struck um in listening to your presentation um and a little bit in in the responses of the school committee members but um around how numbers as presented in the report could have people going oh or you know all kinds of things because you know one of one of them is that it said um you did an assessment of uh it was a screening as you were saying um and that um from sixth to to 11th grade um the average of uh people who would be um manifesting that they could use a little that they're they're starting to struggle a little bit or not people the kids that are they're starting to struggle a little bit you know goes from uh kind of a in an average year might be something like 10 to 25 percent and now we're we seem to be looking at numbers more like 20 to 40 percent thank you very much for for putting that up on the screen there i figured that's what you're talking about um yeah so so put give us some context for this because you know clearly the situation is concerning it's probably not alarming we need context sure absolutely okay so what we're looking at here is uh last year's data at the end of the year so this is one so 2020-21 uh yes thank you so last year we used a screener from out of ucLA and it was um a trauma screener specifically created for time around covid actually it was sensitive to the fact that when we are in the midst of covid and this is when a lot of our students were we actually all these screeners were given when our students were still virtual or hybrid right so um not in person all the time and what we did was we selected this screener because we wanted to make sure that we were sensitive to the specifics of the covid setting we didn't want to send out a screener around anxiety and then have 90 percent of our students say yes i'm anxious all the time and have it be because of the context of covid not because of an internal rumination on themselves of thoughts and things along those lines um and the covid screener was evidence-based out of the one that we used and it was really good at sussing out the difference between those students for whom their their feelings and experiences were actually impacting their functioning so that's why we picked it a number of other colleagues in similar districts we're a part of a coalition called the massachusetts health and school mental health coalition in the state we're using the similar one too so we were partnering with a number of other like-minded colleagues and they also were using the similar screener and as a matter of fact they came out with similar rates and so it was reassuring to realize that this is actually just the state of how students were feeling and how they were experiencing things so what you're looking at everywhere from i think it was 19 percent at the sixth grade up to 38 percent at the 11th grade this is the percentage of students who screened in on that screener in the moderate or highly elevated range so this isn't looking at just severe this is looking at that whole swath of students that we've responded to and when we did respond it was one to two different actions we would take we would look at the data and we would for the students that were severely elevated we would call home or meet with the students or a combination of both and say hey families remember that screener that we were going to have your students complete their scores indicated that they're probably going to benefit from talking to somebody or from meeting with some type of an outpatient clinician do you already have a therapist do you already work with a team if you do would you like to have these results from the screener you know can we get a would you be interested in signing a release of information so we can partner with you and we can work more collaboratively because all the research and data says you know as much as everyone in a child's life can circle up around them and have them be the center that's so much better in terms of outcomes for that student so that's what the goal was for students who are highly elevated was let's either get them somebody to really support them or if they already have that person let's really circle up around them and if it was more of a moderate level what we offered was small group skills groups whether it was coping skills or stress management or psycho education like this is what happens when things get really stressful your heart rate goes up your breathing starts to get shallow and this is how you become aware of it and how you can sort of prevent that from happening or interrupt it and we offer that to all these students so it's really it's a high number and all of these students were offered those opportunities in a year that was really critical and we also did progress monitoring so that would basically mean anybody who took part in the group also at the end of every session they filled out a couple questions that said basically how are you feeling and just overly simplifying it and our progress monitoring that came back to us from fifth grade through twelfth grade showed that overall it was an upward trend so students who participated in the groups and they were all virtual mind you these were not in person overall reported increase in their feeling states throughout the process of their six-week group that was a positive on from the screening team perspective because students participated in the groups but they also felt better as a result of participating yeah so that was great what you're just saying this is wonderful to have this conversation because otherwise we're left with graphs like this and the graphs say oh my god look at the problem look look at this how dramatic and they don't include oh what are we doing about that and the fact that you know that number of close to 40 percent of 11th graders well they were all offered a suite of services as a result of this screening and the whichever of them participated as you were just saying it worked to the degree that they felt better on the whole so super important to be able to again dig down below these numbers and find out again what's being done what's really happening here not just what is being you know reported in a certain way by looking at data in a certain data is just one piece of information right here's the so here's the group participation right it's right so the the yellow bars are the total responsive students who were who would be eligible for a group participation right because we offered that not just to the students who came up in the moderate but also the severe right so the full percentages all those students we saw on the first graph were all offered the groups and you can see that those in the blue were the ones who then participated so you know elementary age the younger you are the more excited you are to participate or the more excited your parents are to have you participate and actually the high schoolers were pretty into it because they were completely virtual so any opportunity to be in community they they kind of jumped at it it was more so we saw a little bit of a of a gap the older that they got but even the high schoolers who participated in the groups still reported out that they were feeling better by the end so this is also another nice data point to have in terms of seeing the participation from the students who were offered the groups I I agree with that and I am struck I have to say and again you know we've just been talking about how hey these these these graphs and these data representations that we're looking at they they don't really tell the whole story and etc but something that's quite striking there is and I'm just going to ask you kind of somewhat anecdotally or based on your experience is what's happening there in ninth grade which is the only place where more children or more kids opted out rather than in for these and that's the only the only one there does that have to do with being in ninth grade like coming you know you're coming into a brand new situation ninth grade is fraught in a lot of ways anyway so you have to think about this our ninth graders last year had never stepped foot into the high school they had never met the counselors and social workers who were running the groups and they probably didn't know the students that were in the groups with them so we we were not surprised by the low engagement of the ninth graders and it's actually you know and wearing my counseling hat now it's actually a group that we continue to follow through this year as sophomores because they as a transitional year that we know is a particularly vulnerable year they are a group that we want to make sure are particularly held and monitored and supported so it's not surprising at all that only roughly 50% of the students that were eligible participated in a group because that takes a lot of courage to sit there and to say I'm struggling a bit that's why this group is even offered to me and now I'm going to be brave even in the midst of my struggling and join a virtual group with adults I don't have relationships with and potentially kids I don't have relationships with that's that's gutsy even for a ninth grader who's doing just fine so that's that's not surprising at all I'd be hard-pressed to think of adults who would join that group well absolutely and in fact as you described that and I'm thinking back to you know many many many groups of ninth graders that I that I saw while while being a high school teacher myself I I'm actually quite amazed that that you got almost 50% of them to say yes to that because you just described it it ninth grade is all about overcoming fears of you know like people you don't know like peers and adults that you have to start building relationships with etc at a time in your life when you're already dealing with a whole bunch of other stuff developmentally as we know so you know I don't think anybody ever looks back on their ninth grade year as the being the apex of their you know schooling experience anyway but this is a particular this group I'm glad and not surprised to hear that you are paying particular attention to because you know it's tough enough as we've said and then trying to do it under the circumstances that people that we were in in the in the fall of 2020 yeah oh that's so anyway thanks thanks thanks for that context absolutely I know that another piece of the report that you gave or the presentation you gave in so it's probably in the report as well has to do with students self-assessment like um and I am curious how meaningful a factor is students self-assessment as you you know take the the data and the information that you're getting here and and decide what you're going to do with it so uh the the self-assessment that you're speaking of is so switching gears here now from the mental health assessment which is going through um an evidence-based very well researched and vetted you know external data point that is something that students complete and then the score tells them externally you know this is the cutoff score and this is where you're at that's to the side and now you've switched over to social emotional learning indicator score you're absolutely right which is no no no it's great I'm again this will be my like clarity of helping folks to understand because sometimes we'll say we'll use interchangeably things like assessments or surveys and so on and they're in terms of my field especially since I sort of have these two departments and these two hats sometimes they get blurred a bit so the social emotional learning indicator score is a learning assessment so just like we have uh you know units tests for mathematics and you know comprehension scores for literacy we have we actually have a way of assessing your social emotional learning competency learning scores your your skills there which is very different from assessing your vision your hearing your mental health your mental health brilliant yes thank you so um having established that one of the ways that we can assess your scl skills is through a score called cellists and that is a collection of some really great questions that students do self report on and it is collected through through the state and a couple of other pieces of software that we have locally and there are different developmentally appropriate questions so there's a different set of questions for elementary for middle for high and um and they are based on the five different competencies so there's questions around self awareness questions around relationship skills and so on and they're really lovely when you go through them because it is the students self reflection on those competencies that report back to them and to us how well they rate themselves in that skill and then we have the ability to look at their scores but also then to look at their scores as compared to other peers in the same grade level other peers across the state potentially and that skill as compared to other competencies so as a student you can get back those five competencies and say you know overall i'm doing you know average for my grade level arguably but i'm really strong in self awareness i'm just not so great in self management or i'm really great with decision making but my relationship skills could use some health help so it's a really dynamic way of looking at data and it's definitely not a two-dimensional bar graph it's got lots of deep analysis that's available for students to look at and you can even look at item analysis and so on and so forth so what I was able to share at the school committee was really just an image just one picture and a snapshot that says on the whole you know our students are looking at self-assessing themselves around a 500 on a scale that could be much larger up to 700 so you know our students are overall scoring themselves around the 24th percentile and that's 24th percentile of all the people who are scoring themselves in this in this particular yes and so overall our students are ranking themselves lower than average they're viewing their scl skills as lower than average in terms of i was just looking at self-awareness but these as an example but for all five competencies our scores are all solidly in the five hundreds yep and you know to give you an idea in terms of the the profiles you know what's the difference between a 500 and a 700 right so we talk about okay students for self-awareness they're aware of their strengths but it's hard for them to take risks so for example if you're looking at a student in class you know they're not going to raise their hand if they're not sure that they have the right answer so it'll be one of those moments where you just sit there and it's silent whereas a student who is more of a 700 in self-awareness they're going to raise their hand and say i'm not sure if this is it but i'm going to go for it right because they're okay with taking risks they do feel confident in themselves that sense of self-worth even if they don't have the right answer right and that's it that's just one example you know which may score them higher on this scale but probably may not may not adhere them to their class maybe but it also has to come down to doing hard work right so students who are in the 500 don't necessarily have the confidence in themselves to do hard work so if they're given a task or an assignment they might check out or moan and groan about it or not commit themselves to doing the work because they don't believe that they can do it their sense of whether or not they're capable is lower whereas a student who's in the 700 is like oh this is a hard task and i can do hard to things and that's isn't that what we all want for our students absolutely is not necessarily the confidence in that i'm a know it all but rather oh there's something difficult in front of me and i am resourceful and i have skills and i can do hard things and that's that's what we're working towards and that's that's the way we wanted to communicate that is that the the scl skills are not just do you know what self-awareness is can you check in and see how you're feeling but when it comes down to learning in an environment can you sit in a classroom and when there's time for a discussion and someone else has a different opinion from you and your group can you share your opinion do you feel like you need to conform to what the group is sharing do you know your identity can you then do something that's hard in front of you and ask for help when you need help that's all tied into scl skills right and so just a couple of things and and then we'll we'll we'll wrap things up um just a couple of things coming from this one is clearly this is all about scl skills as you were just saying this particular assessment and these the numbers 500 700 and then these descriptions that people can see or did see on the screen when we were showing it um so two things one is do you know um and is there much um much priority placed on whether there's a correlation between these scl skills and then academic performance that's question number one and question number two sorry to give you both because they're not really related number two is is one of the goals or intentions of this to um provide useful information for the students themselves is that primary or how does that compare to the goal of what you can do with this data in terms of oh I love those two questions okay so yes there is an endless amount of of research that has shown that when you have students who are developing and have strongly developed scl skills it has a massive impact on their academic skills absolutely that's the whole foundation of the the field it wouldn't exist if it didn't show that so I'm more than happy to to share some of those um those research reports and the links and so on but um at easiestcastle.org you can go there and there's massive research pages that show it um the other thing too even just economically for every one dollar invested in social emotional learning education at the school level equals 11 dollars in the municipality of savings because that's money saved from what you have found oh everything so there are massive benefits to social emotional learning when you're investing in it and yes you find that students are um growing with leaps and bounds in terms of the academics and it's just beautiful to to dig into it I'm gonna shut down that part of my brain but the other thing I'm going to speak to is you asked about to share it with students that's actually my favorite thing to do with the cellist data sharing it with teachers is great because to see their eyes light up and think about all the different instructional ways that they can use the data to support the students is really exciting but to share it with individual students is fascinating and creative and fun because they can look at it and they can say oh wow yes I am really good at that and that is my superpower because it does it shows you very specific superpowers that kids have that are much higher than other peers within their classroom and they and it's really pinpointed and they're able to look at it and say I am really good at making friends with new kids in the classroom when they come in and that's not something other people do but what I'm not great at is sitting with people in you know the lunch room that I'm not already friends with and it's not a deficit based assessment so they don't need to look at it and say how do I fix all these things that are wrong which is unlike any other content area what they can do is they can look at all their superpowers and then say how do I explode those things that are great and that's actually if you look at anybody who's majorly successful they didn't look at their weaknesses and say how do I bring those up to be average they looked at their strengths and said how do I get to be incredible in my strengths and that's what you can do with the students is you can sit there and say what are you great at and how do you become even more incredible well the students and adolescents that I remember and still work with actually and still still hang out with because I do love that age group you know I think just getting that message from a from adult or adults that they trust that says it's fine for you to concentrate on the things that you're great at and to see how to make those work even better for you and not naturally go to that place where adolescents spend a lot of time as we know of just kind of like oh you know oh I can't do this I can't do that I'm not good at this and not good at that so I love that idea that you that this would introduce conversations that not only bring that to light for them but also give them a way to kind of feel great about it so because what do we do as adults the things that for us are on the weakest side we we use life hacks for or we outsource them right so I use alarms to help me stay prompt and on time right I don't I haven't prioritized that as a life skill I've just accepted it's not my strong suit I'll set an alarm for it we can teach kids to do the same thing that's not your strong suit use some other tool to do it for you and now spend your energy doing the things that you love well I love the fact that we've been able to wrap up again what was promised and has been in fact a wide-ranging conversation with really kind of focusing on both the value of SEL this work that you are doing in the schools you know again mostly around students and their experience kids you know young people and how they are navigating the world but also nice that it's good for academic performance too and then and then secondarily just kind of this this overall sense that you project of energy and positivity and optimism which again is a great note on which to end this conversation so I know you have plenty of work to do still in front of you the rest of the year and on from there I do hope that we can speak more regularly there are a couple of things that I that came up in our conversation today that I would love to delve into a little bit more with you in future iterations but I will for today say thank you so much for joining us thank you I have been speaking of course with Sarah Bird who is a director of counseling and social and emotional learning here at Arlington Public Schools I'm James Milan this has been Talk of the Town thanks so much to Sarah for joining us and thanks you thanks to you as well we'll see you next time