Over the past 40 years, students’ home lives have changed dramatically. As income inequity increased and wages remained stagnant, two-income families became a necessity, putting additional pressure on parents as they tried to raise their children and also make ends meet. At the same time, more and more children began to come to school less prepared and with more learning and behavior problems, even as early as preschool (Gilliam & Shahar, 2006). The growing diversity of the student body resulted in more English language learners, and teachers needed to learn to be culturally responsive.
In response to these increasing demands, research has begun to highlight the critical importance of teachers’ social and emotional competencies (SEC) in their ability to build and maintain supportive relationships with students, manage the classroom effectively, and teach social and emotional skills to their students (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Jennings, 2016). These skills include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and effective decision making (https://casel.org/what-is-sel/). Because of the particular demands of the classroom context, along with inadequate preservice training in teacher SEC (Schonert-Reichl et al., 2017), teachers can benefit from professional learning to help them build these skills. My research has demonstrated how supporting teachers’ social and emotional development results in improvements not only in teachers’ own well-being and functioning but also in the quality of their classroom interactions and student engagement (Brown, et al., 2017; Jennings et al., 2017).
The classroom context and the demands of teaching require exceptionally high levels of SEC. The traditional classroom contains 20 to 30 young people and one adult, confined to a room for a period of time. As mentioned in the previous chapter, confinement is an automatic stressor, acting like an emotional pressure cooker. In a confined room, there are a myriad of social interactions among, between, and across individuals and groups, including the teachers’ interactions with individuals and groups of students. In this context, strong emotions such as anger and fear can be easily triggered.
These emotions—anger and fear—signal threat, the fight, flight, or freeze response. When threat is perceived, brain functions shift into survival mode, resulting in hypervigilance or disassociation. While these states of mind can help us survive under serious conditions of threat, they are counterproductive for learning. Just imagine trying to figure out a difficult crossword puzzle while fearing that someone is breaking into your house. Imagine trying to immerse yourself in a good book when you know a hurricane is approaching. It’s very difficult because all your faculties are focused on survival.
The threat response is contagious. This makes sense because when one of us is threatened by dangerous conditions, we are likely all threatened, and children are particularly good at sensing adults’ emotional states. So, in a sense, our well-being is a bellwether for our students’ well-being. When we feel stressed out, for whatever reason, so do they. Indeed, research has demonstrated that when teachers report higher levels of stress, their students exhibit more interpersonal problems and externalizing (acting out) and internalizing (acting in) behaviors (Milkie & Warner, 2011). So, we are not just leaders of our students’ learning and interactions, we are their emotional leaders as well. In this role, intentionally managing our stress and emotions can make a huge difference in our students’ engagement, motivation, and prosocial behavior.
That our threat-response, designed to help us survive physical threat, can be triggered even when there is no actual physical threat at all is uniquely human. Because we have minds that can interpret and imagine a calamity in the future and remember and ruminate on a trouble of the past, we can get stuck in anxious and depressed states of mind and we can overreact to situations that are not presently threatening our survival. And when we are under stress, we can easily take things personally, assuming that someone is intentionally trying to annoy us or make trouble for us when in fact they are not.
For example, Ms. Asfour was leading a read-through of a script based on The Diary of Anne Frank (Goodrich & Hackett, 2017) in her eighth grade English class. Several students were assigned to play each role, and they were taking turns reading their parts. As they read, she kept looking up at the clock, feeling pressed for time. I could see that she only had about 5 minutes left before the bell would ring.
One of her students, sitting in the back and clearly bored, was getting antsy and fidgeting with his pencil. Suddenly the pencil flew into the air and fell on the head of the girl reading the part of Anne Frank. She was so absorbed in the reading that the flying pencil shocked her. She turned and glared at the boy behind her. This interruption clearly annoyed Ms. Asfour, and she began to lash out at the boy. It was clear to me that it was simply an accident. He didn’t mean to hit the girl with the pencil. He was just bored and fooling around, understandable given he was just sitting there, listening to his peers read out loud, and watching the clock, but with a very different state of mind than the teacher. But because she was already feeling time pressure, Ms. Asfour immediately imagined that he had intentionally flipped the pencil to disrupt the lesson and to annoy her and the girl. This, too, is understandable, given that Ms. Asfour felt she just had to get through the reading before the bell rang. However, if she had realized that she was feeling this time pressure and that it was likely that she was not going to get through the reading anyway, she could have calmed herself down and shifted the lesson to something more engaging for everyone, instead of feeling stuck doing what she had already planned. Then, when the pencil flew, she could have viewed it as comic relief rather than an intentional, hostile act.
In this case, there was no real threat. The pencil flying was annoying, but it didn’t hurt anyone. The time constraints were real, but not really physically threatening. It was obvious that Ms. Asfour was not going to finish the play during the time she had, but she felt she had to try. The time pressure was self-imposed. Often we don’t notice the feelings associated with this process while it’s happening because our attention is focused outward: on the lesson, the students, and the clock (Jennings, 2015). Also, it is the nature of “negative” emotions like annoyance (teacher-code for anger) to reinforce our perception that our interpretation of the situation is right. I’ll explain more about that in a bit.
As Robert Sapolsky articulated so well in “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” (Sapolsky, 2004), our stress system is often triggered by things that we can’t control (and that are not really life-threatening), like the frustration we feel when we’re stuck in a traffic jam, and that threaten our sense of self, like the bitter feeling that arises when we hear a snide comment from a coworker, or like the worry we feel when a friend doesn’t text us back right away. All day, things happen that can trigger teachers and students due to the pressure-cooker quality of the classroom.
These are not real-life threats, but our bodies may respond to them by cranking up our stress hormones and neurotransmitters to give us the extra strength and endurance we need to run away fast or fight. In these cases, we don’t need the extra strength. We sit in our car fuming while these unused biological substances wreak havoc on our bodies, ultimately leading to chronic disease, such as diabetes, heart disease, and yes, ulcers (Seaward, 2018).
One time, I was faced with a similarly time-pressured situation. I needed to finish a lesson, but Jill kept interrupting me. I felt my heart rate rise as I became annoyed with her. All of a sudden, my patience evaporated, and my words and the tone of my voice became harsh, “Jill, I’m trying to get through this lesson. Will you just listen?” In my state of mind, this felt like a reasonable request, but to her it was an attack. Jill was actually listening, she was listening deeply, but she was confused about something and was trying to sort it out. My sharp comment shut her down. Shame and embarrassment flooded her body, and she no longer cared about the lesson.
When incidents like this happen, students become less trusting. Other students can feel her embarrassment, which can complicate the social interactions and relationships in the classroom. The connection and relational trust that I had built was damaged over a simple, harsh rebuke. So, to function in today’s world, we need to find a way to hack this biological function so we don’t get so many false alarms that can interfere with our own well-being and our interactions with others.
Over time and with some training in mindfulness and emotion skills, I learned how to deal with these types of situations with much more composure, but it wasn’t easy. In my book Mindfulness for Teachers (Jennings, 2015), I provide an extensive review of classroom stress and of how engaging in mindful awareness practices and developing emotional skills can help us manage stress and cultivate a supportive classroom learning community. If I could turn back the clock and do things differently, I would have noticed the discomfort in my body from the stress—my shoulders and jaw tightening, heat arising—and this would have signaled to me that I needed to calm myself. Rather than lashing out at Jill, I would have let my students know I was feeling anxious about the time. I might have said, “Jill, I’m so glad you have questions about this lesson. I just realized that I’m feeling some stress about the time. We only have a few minutes before the bell rings, and I was trying hard to finish. I don’t think that’s going to happen, so I’m going to calm myself down. When I get stressed out, I notice that my shoulders and jaw get really tense. Does that ever happen to you? When I notice this, I can take a few slow deep breaths to calm myself down, so that’s what I need to do now.” While this may seem like a derailment of my own lesson, it was clear that I wasn’t going to make it through my lesson anyway, at least not with my students’ full understanding. This is a common dilemma in the current system. There is an arbitrary, artificial time constraint that doesn’t give us or our students the time we need for deep teaching and learning. Just getting through the lesson becomes the goal.
In the next section I review each of the CASEL social and emotional competencies (or lack of them) and explain how they are enacted in classroom interactions and sometimes cause stress for both teachers and students.
The five competencies—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making—play out in the classroom interactions as an integrated system of SEC. However, to better understand each of them, I will break them down into discrete competencies.
Socrates said, “Know thyself” (Plato, ca. 400 B.C.E./1925), and for teachers this is an especially wise maxim. The more we know about ourselves, the better we become at monitoring our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Since we now know that teachers’ emotional states are critical to our classroom climate, when we can monitor ourselves, we are in a better position to orchestrate the classroom interactions we know will promote learning.
When we’re in touch with the values that motivated us to become educators, we are more able to consistently behave in alignment with those values. When we know our overall strengths and weaknesses, we can better work with them; and when we have a clear idea about our cultural, racial, religious, gender, and ethnic background and identity, we can better understand any biases or misunderstandings that arise within us as we interact with others. Having a basic understanding of our personality can also be helpful. Personality can and does change with experience, but it helps to know your underlying tendencies. Am I typically introverted or extroverted? How conscientious, open to experience, emotionally regulated, and agreeable am I? To learn more about your personality, I recommend accessing the online inventory at the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment project (SAPA Project, 2018), which will give you a report on various dimensions of your personality and cognitive abilities.
As I described in Chapter 2, recognizing the messages people learned about life as they were growing up is important because these messages become biases, “scripts” that may run automatically when they are not paying attention. I call these our default parameters because we default to these behaviors when we’re not mindful of how we feel and how what we feel is affecting our behavior. For a brief example, let’s return again to the issue of time urgency, a common stressor for teachers. In the dominant American culture, time is important. Many of us have learned that being late is disrespectful. As a child, I learned that if I didn’t come home on time, I was in big trouble. This was back in the day when young children could safely play unsupervised in the neighborhood, but parents still worried when children came home late. I recall being harshly punished for coming home late, even spanked. I got the message, “Late is very bad.”
As an adult, when I’m late I immediately begin to feel anxious. My heart rate rises, and I get a sick feeling in my stomach. If I’m doing something like driving or walking, I begin to rush. In my mind, I imagine the people I’m meeting becoming angry and judging me harshly. All of this is a script that I can hack, but only if I’m conscious. Once I notice that I’m running a script, I can take a breath and calm down. After many years of experience, I know that being a few minutes late is not a big deal. Many times, I’ve arrived five minutes late to a meeting to find that most of the others have not arrived yet!
This script can play out in my interactions with students, colleagues, and parents. When my colleagues or students are late, the script can flip. Now, I’m annoyed with them for being late. So disrespectful! But I now have years of evidence that my default parameter is culturally conditioned and very context dependent. Yes, if it’s a matter of life and death, time is of the essence. In most cases, time is not really a big deal. In fact, traveling in many other countries, I have learned that time is perceived very differently in different cultures, even in U.S. subcultures!
These are all fairly stable self-attributes. Next, let’s examine how to monitor inner bodily sensations, feelings, and thoughts. A powerful way to learn these skills is to regularly engage in mindful awareness practices (Jennings, 2015). When I perceive an actual physical threat or a psychological threat, my stress response is triggered, resulting in a physiological and psychological process designed by nature to help me survive. If I feel like someone is interfering with my goals or breaking a norm, anger may rise. Because “anger” is a strong word, and teachers are not supposed to get angry, we usually call it annoyed or frustrated. Anger is easy to recognize because it triggers the fight response. My blood pressure rises, and I may begin to feel “hot under the collar.” My face may actually redden. My shoulders rise and become tense, and I may even find myself clenching my fists and my jaw. My face begins to grimace, and my voice becomes harsh. One marker of anger that is easy to miss when we’re feeling anger, but is unmistakable when we are viewing someone who is angry, is the glare. Take a minute to glare. How does it feel? Do you notice the tension around your eyes?
In my years of observing teachers, I have noticed how these anger signals can play out in the classroom. When teachers are conscious of their anger, express it without blame, and model self-regulation, students learn that anger is a normal feeling that we all have. It’s not a bad thing, and it can be managed without hurting others or ourselves by bottling it up. It’s a signal that things are not going the way we’d like, but to really have an impact, it will be best to calm down and speak clearly about what is happening, what we need to change, and what we want the others to do, specifically.
However, this is not always easy due to the nature of anger. Since anger evolved to help us fight real physical threat, our mind wants to keep us angry until the threat has gone away. It does this by telling us a story about the reason we’re angry and how we are right to feel anger about the situation. It exaggerates and personalizes the situation, “He always does this to mess up my lesson!” We make it all about us. Practicing mindfulness can build our capacity to observe this tendency. Once we recognize the script that keeps us angry, we don’t need to get so wrapped up in it. Once we let go of anger, we can see that what is really happening is usually not about us at all.
If we are not self-aware when anger arises, we may say and do things we don’t intend to and may later regret because it may disrupt the social and emotional climate in our classroom. When I lash out at Jill because of my own feeling of time urgency, I trigger the stress response in her. Like in the example with Jill, the teacher’s anger may trigger a student’s fear, and they, along with many of their peers, will shut down. Another possible student reaction is anger. A student may feel outraged that they are being unfairly attacked simply because they don’t understand. In this case, the teacher unintentionally initiates a power struggle with the student. The student may respond, “I don’t understand. You’re not explaining it very well.” Now I feel personally attacked because this statement reinforces my own script that she’s intentionally trying to mess up my lesson. There’s only one way power struggles go. They spiral downward until everyone is feeling awful and is blaming one another.
When I was observing classrooms, I became amazed at how often this scenario occurs, damaging the emotional climate of the classroom and derailing learning. When the class has one or more students living in adverse conditions, the power struggle can be even more damaging (for more information about trauma-sensitive approaches in the classroom, see my book, The Trauma Sensitive Classroom: Building Resilience With Compassionate Teaching.)
The degree of self-awareness required to function well in the classroom context is quite high. We must not only know our fairly stable attributes but also be able to monitor our scripts and emotional reactivity in the moment, all day long, while confined to a classroom, controlled by an artificially created schedule, and surrounded by young people who are just beginning to learn about themselves and their own emotions.
Along with self-awareness we must cultivate self-compassion: the ability to give ourselves the same kindness and compassion we give others. This is not an easy task for those of us who have inherited this archaic model of the teacher that we sometimes feel we must conform to. We will lose our temper and say things we regret because we are human beings, working under very challenging conditions.
When this happens to you, remember that you can repair the breach in your students’ trust by being honest with them. Teachers can model for students how to repair social trust by expressing regret and explaining what happened, how we felt, and what we need. While this can be really difficult at first, because we may have absorbed the message from society that we are supposed to be perfect, you will be amazed at how well students will respond. We can even model self-compassion! “I was feeling so angry I didn’t realize I needed to calm down, and I said some things in a way that was harsh. I didn’t mean to do that. I was feeling a lot of pressure to get through this lesson, but my relationship with you is much more important than one lesson. Now I’m feeling sorry, and I also need to show myself some care and kindness because I’m human, and we all make mistakes.” What a lesson in self-awareness and self-compassion! These lessons are much more vital to preparing our students for the future than the lesson that was interrupted in the first place.
When we think of teaching our students self-management, we often think of emotional and behavioral self-regulation (e.g., impulse control). Indeed, these are two competencies that are critical to success in academic and social learning; these skills help us manage our emotional reactivity and our cognitive functions so we can get along with others and focus on our work. However, self-management is much more than this, and effective self-management requires self-awareness.
Managing stress is a big part of self-management, and when I understand myself enough to know what tends to be a stressor for me, I can proactively manage my stress. I can recognize when I’m tired or emotionally exhausted and engage in self-care activities that will help me build resilience. I can avoid certain situations when I know I’m too stressed to deal with them appropriately, and I can stop and take a breath if I need to deal with those situations right away. This pause for breath allows my nervous system to settle, and my stress response goes down. This reduction in stress helps me think about the situation more clearly, allowing me the ability to reappraise the situation. Is it really so stressful and threatening? Or, am I overreacting because of a script?
When I feel stressed, my motivation declines and I become discouraged. After pausing to calm myself, I also can take a minute to set my intention. This involves three steps:
1.Recall my values: Why am I doing this work?
2.Imagine my “best self”: How do I want to be?
3.What is my intention for today? Set the intention by focusing on it, by visualizing yourself being this way, or by putting the intention into words. Focus on this intention for a minute or so.
When I am clear about my values and intentions, I am able to set goals and organize my time and activities to align with my intentions from moment to moment, like the GPS on a phone. This practice can promote self-discipline and self-motivation.
The self-management competency is critical to creating supportive classroom interactions. Because of the stressful nature inherent in the classroom, we need to learn techniques to recognize and manage our stress while we are teaching so our reactivity doesn’t creep up on us and surprise us and our students. As the adult in the room, it is our job to make the classroom feel safe and inviting for everyone. If we lose our temper, we disrupt that sense of safety. This is not to say you should try to suppress your feelings. We often confuse suppression with regulation. When we try to suppress an emotion, it tends to leak out in facial expressions and actions, which can be confusing for students. Think about how creepy it is when someone smiles and acts like everything is okay when they are fuming inside. We may also become sarcastic, which can come across as cruel and hostile to students.
If we are overwhelmed by strong emotions, we will find empathizing with those around us very difficult, and it will be easy to forget that our students have very different agendas than we do and that they likely will not understand why we are upset. Most of the time students don’t want to upset the teacher, and kids rarely upset adults intentionally because we are so scary to them. However, if a student is feeling confused about how we are feeling and begins to distrust us, she may do things to test us, to see if we’re being real or not. Our students don’t do this consciously: it’s an unconscious protective mechanism. When I’m in the midst of feeling stress, this can seem like an intentional act of defiance or an attack, and my stress can turn into anger, “righteously” directed at the student. But if I do this, it just confirms the student’s unconscious sense that I wasn’t honestly expressing my emotions and thus I can’t be trusted.
Depending upon their experiences with adults, children may prefer the explicit expressions of anger over the sense that the teacher is suppressing emotions and faking that everything is ok. For these kids, suppressed anger is terrifying; perhaps they live with a parent who suppresses anger and then explodes irrationally and unexpectedly (Jennings, 2019b). If we’re not careful, we can easily initiate a power struggle with these students because our process inadvertently triggers their feelings of threat, and they become defensive, expressing fear or anger. As soon as a strong negative emotion disrupts the emotional climate of the classroom, academic learning stops, because everyone in the room enters a defensive mode that prioritizes basic survival over learning. Indeed, we now know that when we feel threatened, executive functions of the brain become temporarily impaired and we have difficulty focusing our attention on anything but the threat (Lupien et al., 2007).
Self-management also involves the way we organize our time, our activities, and our surroundings. Do I put things off to finish them at the last minute, causing myself undue stress? Do I have a self-care routine that supports my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health and development? Do I take on more than I have the capacity to accomplish within the time available? For students, self-management is having all the materials they need to get started on a learning task. It also means being able to manage their learning by taking things one step at a time, keeping focused on the task, and getting help when they need it.
Social awareness is a crucial skill for teachers. It is the ability to empathize, respect, and take the perspective of others, including those with backgrounds other than our own. Given the history of the factory model and the feminization of the teaching profession, there’s a high probability that any given teacher in the United States will be a white, middle-class woman. As a member of the dominant culture, it can take some extra effort for me to recognize and understand cultural differences and the racial, gender, and religious inequities embedded in our systems (Irving, 2014). Social awareness requires open-mindedness and intentional study of structural social injustices and implicit and explicit biases that play out in school, among students, between teachers and students and their families, and between teachers and colleagues.
Indeed, the political climate can exacerbate these embedded systemic biases and cause real harm to students. Tensions in the larger society play out in schools. Stories abound about increases in bullying and racial, ethnic, and religious attacks since the 2016 election. University of Missouri professor Francis Huang and my UVA colleague Dewey Cornell (2019) led a study of Virginia middle school students, examining student reports of bullying between 2016 and 2017 by congressional district. Those districts where Trump won the most votes had significant (17%) increases in bullying compared to those where Clinton won.
“While the ways in which the presidential election could have affected students is likely complex, educators and parents should be aware of the potential impact of public events on student behavior,” said Cornell in a statement first published as a press release (Pals & Boylin, 2019) and then republished in the mainstream media. “Parents should be mindful of how their reactions to the presidential election, or the reactions of others, could influence their children. And politicians should be mindful of the potential impact of their campaign rhetoric and behavior on their supporters and indirectly on youth.”
Social awareness involves a deep understanding of the social and ethical norms for behavior and differences in these across cultures and other social groups. If we judge the behavior of our students and their families based on our own cultural norms, we may do them a great disservice. If their norms are different than ours, subtle but important differences may cause difficulties in classroom interactions. For example, it is a norm in the dominant U.S. culture that looking someone in the eye when they are talking to you is a sign of respect. In other cultures, including some Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native American cultures, this can mean the opposite—disrespect—especially if the person speaking has authority, like a teacher. I grew up with the dominant norm, and a student not looking me in the eye when I’m speaking to them about something important can feel dismissive. If I have social awareness, I can recognize that the student may have learned a different norm about eye contact and is actually acting with deep respect by not looking at me. If I’m stressed out and don’t have the bandwidth to recognize my script about eye contact and respect, I might become annoyed and unintentionally say something that might damage my relationship with the student.
Imagine a teacher asking a student for whom eye contact is considered disrespectful to look them in the eye when they are talking to the student. The student has been taught from a young age that this is disrespectful, especially in relation to an adult with power, so it’s very difficult for this student to raise their eyes to the teacher’s. The more the teacher forces this behavior on this student, the more frightened and uncomfortable the student becomes. Both are locked in a battle of conflicting norms. In this scenario, the student’s trust in school and in the teacher can quickly erode and may never recover.
Social awareness is the recognition of how a social group functions and of how to promote a more supportive and socially cohesive social group. With social awareness, I can consciously impact the social network patterns of my classroom, which can dramatically affect the classroom climate. Another UVA colleague, Scott Gest, has been studying social networks in classrooms. He and his colleagues have shown that teachers can affect social status patterns, such as peer norms and status hierarchies, and social affiliation patterns, such as informal peer groups and friendships (Gest et al., 2014). Indeed, just being more aware of these networks has a positive impact on your classroom. For example, when teachers have a more accurate assessment of the classroom peer networks, peer norms against aggressive behavior are stronger (Neal et al., 2011).
Teachers can also act to reduce status extremes in their classrooms. When we are conscious of the social hierarchies in our classroom, we can intentionally offer attention and responsibilities to students to uplift those who seem socially disengaged or rejected. This may help them become more socially integrated into the peer network. We can also reduce the importance of status by eliminating or reducing competition for special duties, activities, or attention. In their research, Gest and his colleagues found that when teachers take active measures to manage the social hierarchies in their classrooms, their students enjoy learning more and feel a stronger sense of community with their peers and the school as a whole (Gest et al., 2014).
Social awareness involves respect for everyone, including those who are different from us. Indeed, teachers who are socially aware appreciate the diversity of people in the school because they recognize the strength this diversity—of culture, race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, language, and physical and learning abilities—brings to the learning community. When teachers and other school personnel recognize that greater diversity equals greater community richness and resilience, each individual is honored, rather than being seen as lacking in some way, for the special difference that they contribute to the diversity of the community.
Building and maintaining healthy and rewarding relationships with our diverse students and their parents involves clear communication, good listening, cooperation, and skillful conflict resolution skills. To provide high quality emotional support to others, we must be able to see them for who they are, not who we wish they would be or in terms of how they are “supposed” to be.
As teachers, it’s easy to get trapped in the factory mindset looking to achieve the perfect “product” which, in this case, is the outstanding student. However, only a few of our students can fit into this narrow bracket that schools have identified as outstanding. This narrowly defined outstanding student sits still and listens attentively all the time, courteously raises their hand to answer your questions, seems to always understand your lessons, focuses on their work with great enthusiasm and attention, always does their homework, and gets along well with their peers. From this student’s perspective, school is a wonderful place—the most wonderful place possible!
However, most kids do not come to school with these characteristics, yet the status quo is to try to mold them into this ideal student. But when we try to do this, we overlook the wonderful strengths, gifts, and interests our students bring to the classroom. We see difference as a problem, rather than a strength. Every student has value, even if they are not completely thrilled with being in school or don’t have the academic and social and emotional skills that fit the mold. Indeed, a valuable aspect of human diversity is neurodiversity. In his book The Power of Neurodiversity: Unleashing the Advantages of Your Differently Wired Brain (Armstrong, 2011), Dr. Thomas Armstrong explains the evolutionary advantages of pathologized (e.g., ADHD, ASD, etc.) differences in how our brains function.
It’s true that we teachers will likely need to modify our instruction and social interactions to meet these students where they are. However, when we open ourselves to the wonderful diversity of all our students, we may find gems. For example, I once had a fourth grade student named Sam who had a really hard time reading. He was several grades behind, and I was working on finding ways to help him catch up. As I got to know him, I realized his general knowledge about the world was prodigious for his age. He knew the names and characteristics of numerous animals, living and extinct. He could describe processes and relate them to other elements, such as evaporation and how it relates to cloud formation. He knew the names of most of the countries of the world and could find them on the globe, but he struggled to read a simple sentence.
With time and patience, I realized that a series of traumatic experiences at school had left him fearful of reading. Earlier in school when he was asked to read out loud, students made fun of him and the teacher failed to help him through the painful situation, leaving him ashamed, embarrassed, and terrified of reading. When the rest of the class was busy working independently, I sat with Sam and tried a new way to reach him. Rather than asking him to read, I decided to focus on writing. He knew the sounds of the letters in the alphabet, so it wasn’t difficult to get him started writing about his amazing knowledge base. I said to him, “You know so much about dinosaurs and we’re going to study them soon. Could you help me by making a book about dinosaurs to share what you know with the rest of the class?” His eyes lit up and he immediately started drawing pictures of each dinosaur and writing short sentences about each one. I told him not to worry about spelling, just get out a draft, and then we would work together on editing it. After he finished the book and we had edited it together, I invited him to read it to me. He had no difficulty reading the text he had written.
This demonstrated that he actually could read, he just had a block caused by the traumatic incident earlier in his school experience. We continued working on books in this way, and he loved sharing his general knowledge with his peers. Within a few short months, he was able to begin reading books at grade level. Because of his voracious curiosity, he devoured books and his reading quickly improved.
At the same time, Sam’s social skills flourished. Other students enjoyed his books and asked him questions about other animals. He became the class expert on dinosaurs and animals in general. He had found a way to make a valuable contribution to the class. By taking a strength-based approach to helping Sam, I had found where he excelled and used this to support him in overcoming his fear of reading. This may seem like hard work, but when we see and connect with our students, teaching becomes so much more enjoyable and our students are more likely to engage in learning. Sometimes it just takes a minor shift in approach to reach a student and help them thrive.
Relationships skills can play a role in school collegiality. Teachers gain more power as the shortage grows, and they can leverage this power in their relationships with principals, other administrators, and other staff to advocate for their students, to advocate for autonomy to teach in their own way, and to create more opportunities for collaboration with other teachers. Teams of teachers working together in professional learning communities can cultivate rich new ways to teach and develop exciting new content. These activities enrich the work of teaching in ways that not only improve our teaching but also reinforce our love of teaching.
As we begin to flex our relational muscles, we learn that minor shifts in attitude and approach can result in significant changes in our schools. Parents, too, can play a supporting role in this transformative process. Recently, there were several successful teacher strikes across the country (van Dam, 2019). What was unusual about these recent, successful strikes was that, in many cities, parents and students joined teachers on the picket lines and this likely made a difference. When parents recognize the critical unmet needs teachers and schools have, they are motivated to help because they see that their children’s education is at risk. However, teachers often overlook building bridges with parents by getting to know them and giving them opportunities to contribute. Finding ways to engage parents in meaningful contributions to their child’s classroom and school can support the relationships and build community.
One of the most important social and emotional competencies, which draws on all the others, is responsible decision making. Teachers make tens of thousands of decisions a day in very quick succession. Indeed, this rapid decision making in an unpredictable and multidimensional context can be cognitively and emotionally taxing, resulting in increased stress and reduced performance (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009).
Ms. Fairfax is getting ready for her day: setting up her classroom for an exciting activity that her class will engage in later that day; writing the lesson schedule on the board; preparing supplies for an art project. As she’s doing all this, a parent comes in to talk to her. Immediately, she feels time urgency. She thinks, “If I talk to this parent now, I won’t get all this set up finished.” The distress interferes with her planning and her interaction with the parent. She doesn’t want to be rude, so she tries to listen, but she’s only half-listening because she wants to get back to her set up. As she “listens,” she nods her head robotically and keeps glancing at the clock. She tries to find some words to placate the parent so she can get back to work. The parent finally leaves, after getting the impression that Ms. Fairfax doesn’t care about her concerns.
In this scenario, Ms. Fairfax got her classroom set up, but she missed an opportunity to build her relationship with the parent. Because she was so focused on getting her class set up, she missed an opportunity to enlist the parent’s help. Here’s an alternative scenario. Rewind!
Ms. Fairfax is getting ready for her day. She is setting up her classroom for an exciting activity that her class will engage in later in the day, writing the lesson schedule on the board, and preparing supplies for an art project. As she’s doing all this, a parent comes in to talk to her. Immediately she feels time urgency. She thinks, “If I talk to this parent now, I won’t get all this set up finished.” Recognizing her growing stress level, she takes a deep breath, focuses on her feet and the weight of her body on the floor, and greets the parent with her full attention and friendliness. As she makes an authentic connection with the parent, she says, “I really want to hear about your concerns and I need to finish setting up my class. Could you give me a hand while we talk?” Not realizing that teachers need their mornings for set up, the parent apologizes for interrupting and agrees to help. Ms. Fairfax needs some paper cut for her art project. “Can you help me cut this paper?” As the parent cuts the paper, Ms. Fairfax takes care of other tasks and they talk. It turns out that the parent wanted Ms. Fairfax to know that she and her husband have separated and today is the first night their daughter has stayed with her father at his new home. She came in early to give her a heads up.
This is an example of just one of multitudes of critical decisions that teachers make on the fly all day, identifying and solving problems, analyzing situations, evaluating situations, reflecting, and making decisions that will affect the lives of students and their families. To do this well, we teachers need to think about how our behavior will affect others in the long and short term. We need to take into account the needs of many: our own needs, the needs of our students and their families, and the needs of the community.
One area where responsible decision making is critical is classroom management. The decisions we make about how to respond to our students’ behavior can have serious effects on their learning and development. While we may have the expertise and training to be a “warm demander”—the mode science has shown works best when it comes to managing behavior—our stress can get in the way.
Mr. Carroll’s fourth grade class was engaged in a lesson on electricity. Students were grouped into teams that were working on creating circuits with a battery, wires, and a flashlight bulb. He noticed a conflict brewing in one group and the students beginning to tussle over the wire. It had been an exhausting day, and Mr. Carroll was tired and feeling stressed out. Jaime, one of the boys, had a history of getting into conflicts with peers. Because Mr. Carroll was stressed and feeling time pressure, he jumped to the conclusion that Jaime was the instigator and immediately took the wire from Jaime. Jaime began to argue with Mr. Carroll, feeling unfairly attacked. This only annoyed Mr. Carroll further, and he told Jaime to go take a time out. What Mr. Carroll didn’t know was that Jaime was being bullied because of his Latinx heritage. One of the other boys in his group had grabbed the wire from him when he was connecting it to the battery saying, “Give me that wire. Mexicans can’t do science.”
In his rush to keep the group on track, he made a quick assumption that Jaime had caused the problem. Since he hadn’t gotten to know Jaime well, he didn’t know that Jaime was being bullied for his ethnicity and that was why he often was in conflict with peers. Rather than jumping into a conflict situation like this, Mr. Carroll could instead take a moment to observe the interaction. While doing this, he could take stock of his current emotional state, recognizing his feelings of stress. He could take a moment to breathe deeply and focus attention on his feet, which would also give him a moment to observe objectively. He may then notice the expression of contempt on the face of the other boy, and he may hear his comments. He may take reflect on the social inequities Latinx families face in his community, considering that this may play a role in Jaime’s experience. In this way, Mr. Carroll can consider all the factors that are playing into the conflict he sees and be able to make an informed decision on how best to respond.
Clearly, in this scenario, Jaime wasn’t the instigator. When Mr. Carroll jumped to conclusions about him, he reinforced Jaime’s feelings that he is unwanted in this classroom, since both his peers and the teacher pick on him. His growing sense of isolation may lead to further conflict with peers and teachers and eventually lead him to drop out of school. If Mr. Carroll takes the time to assess the situation, he may also notice his own biases about Latinx people and how this bias distorts the way he sees the conflict.
Mr. Carroll holds himself to high standards, and he intends to make decisions that are unbiased and supportive of all his students. However, we are all influenced by the messages we receive from the media and society in general, which result in implicit biases that we may not be aware of and that can surface in stressful situations. Once we understand this normal tendency, how it might play out under stress, and what situations tend to trigger our stress, we are much more able to manage our stress and our reactions, allowing us to engage our social awareness and relationship skills to make a decision that better meets the needs of everyone concerned.
This chapter considered social and emotional competencies and the critical role they play in effective teaching. As we develop these competencies, we will see how they can empower us to better recognize, honor, and express our own needs. This examination of the demands and resources that affect our teaching lives and the ways we can address the stressors we have the most control over—our own perceptions, biases, habits, and skills—concludes Part I of this book. In Part II, we will examine how we can apply systems and design thinking to transforming our school systems from the bottom up.