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Desk with a small daily plan and a to-do list checked off item by item, self-management bit by bit
EducatorsedLeadersSocial-Emotional LearningK-12

Improving Self-Management Bit by Bit

by James A. Bailey
written by James A. Bailey 6 minutes read

Editor’s Note: This month’s column is the first of two to explore Self-Management.

According to a 2020 article on npr.org, the human brain is capable of processing 11 million bits of information every second. The conscious mind, however, maxes out its processing capacity at just 40 to 50 bits of information per second. 

What’s a bit?  Encyclopedia Britannica states that a single letter in a word consumes two bits of information.

No matter how simple or complex the scenario, our minds will always be capped at being conscious of no more than 40 – 50 bits of information per second, even though there are millions of other bits of information around us.  As a leader, thinking about how to more intentionally allocate your consciousness bits budget can have a direct impact on your self-management competency.

How CASEL Defines Self-Management

With that in mind, CASEL.org defines self-management as: 

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

Let’s try to contextualize our conscious processing capacity, ahem, a bit more and then ultimately connect it to why developing self-management skills ought to be a part of your leadership practice.

A One-Minute Box Breathing Exercise

We can start with a seemingly simple exercise. Box breathing is a technique used by a wide range of people and professionals, including Navy Seals and athletes, to quickly induce a state of calm.  We trace the “box” by inhaling for a count of four, holding our inhalation for a count of four, exhaling for a count of four, and holding our exhalation for a count of four.  We then repeat that cycle.

Easy, right?  Don’t be so sure.  Most likely, your mind will also bring forth other information beyond just counting to four.  Notice any thoughts that pop up in addition to your count.  Notice if you lose count and find yourself needing to restart the box.   Notice whether or not you are able to maintain your focus exclusively on your four counts.

Set a timer and take one minute to box breathe, noticing your capacity to maintain focus and any distractions your mind may introduce. 

Once you’ve finished, make a mental note of any distractions you observed and how successful you were in managing them. 

From Box Breathing to the Staff Meeting

Now, let’s compare the relatively simple scenario of one minute’s worth of box breathing with a far more stimulus-rich scenario such as leading a staff meeting. What would compete for your consciousness budget?  You’d be aware of your physical surroundings, your staff, and your own experience to some degree moment to moment. Any and all of those stimuli will contribute to your self-management decisions, depending entirely upon what information is consuming your bits budget.

Unattended, if your self-management skills are not strong to begin with, or under your intentional development, no one would fault you for feeling overwhelmed by the combination of recognizing and handling all of the information present.  In addition, you may be overwhelmed by the very limited, but potentially emotionally-charged information that you are processing internally  (for example, staff may seem distracted and aren’t paying attention to you).  

Return now to your box breathing experience.  If you are like most of us, even in a relatively simple exercise like this where the stimuli are constrained , your mind probably wandered away from “only” counting to four on each side of the box. If we can be distracted when our only task is to count to four, what might that suggest about how effectively we are managing both ourselves and others in the staff meeting? 

That’s just one of a number of questions that may arise as you explore increasing your capacity to self-manage.  We submit that these questions are important to explore and answer, as a lack of self-management skills can lead to health issues due to increased stress, or to damaged relationships in school, where relationships are arguably the essential building block in the social and emotional act that is instruction or leadership.  More striking still, neither teachers nor principals typically receive any kind of training on this topic in credentialing programs, so it is no wonder that the demands school place on educators can exact such high tolls.

Steps to Build Self-Management Skills

Fortunately, it is possible to sanely and sustainably increase your self-management skills.  Here’s how you can break down the challenge to increase the odds of your success:

  1.  Pick a very narrow time of day to focus on: this might be the first 15 minutes of your day, or five minutes right before lunch, or 10 minutes from when you walk in the door.  Pick a time when you are either at your best and most likely to have the energy necessary to make a good choice or a very small window when you’d like to improve the quality of choices you might make.
  2. Set yourself up for success ahead of time.  If you know your patience is likely to be short during your focal window, consider including a few minutes of box breathing to calm yourself down and give yourself the chance to focus on the choice that you want to make.  Hack your brain by having a short affirmation or paragraph that you can read to yourself that affirms the behaviors/choices you want to make.
  3. Remind yourself of who you want to be.  Remind yourself of the benefits of improving your self-management.
  4. Celebrate and track your successes.  Check the self-management box each day.
  5. Reflect on your progress and challenges on a weekly basis.  You will start to notice differences immediately if you are consistent.  Give yourself the opportunity to see those and to identify new challenges that need to be overcome as you increase your self-management.  Rinse and repeat with changing new behaviors, racking up wins one at a time.

Developing self-management allows for increased openness to moderating our actions based upon our awareness of the complexity that may be present in even seemingly simple situations like counting to four.  Our brains are already limiting what we can pay attention to, filtering out potentially millions of bits of information every second, and leaving us to contemplate no more than a relative handful of information.  We’re focused, to a certain degree, by default.  It’s our job, however, to do our bit to increase our capacity to self-manage our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in order to, ultimately, improve student outcomes.

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School leader pausing to breathe before answering an urgent message, self-awareness and impulses
EducatorsedLeadersSocial-Emotional LearningTeacher RetentionK-12

Understanding Self-Awareness and Impulses

by James A. Bailey
written by James A. Bailey 6 minutes read

In last month’s column, we explored some of the misconceptions surrounding self-awareness- an essential skill for today’s leaders, especially in schools and districts. Another common misconception about self-awareness is that to be self-aware means that we typically think about self-awareness in the long term. In other words, we believe that to be self-aware means to know how our day-to-day actions add up to our permanent likes and dislikes, our personalities, our strengths and weaknesses, and our strongest values and beliefs, some of which may never change.

Self-Awareness in the Moment

Self-awareness, however, can also be about the short-term, the more immediate side of our emotions or our impulses.  CASEL discusses impulse control as a skill under self-management or what you can do to minimize or control the urge you have to act. We believe, however, that being more self-aware of impulses in the moment is a recognition of how these skills need to interact to make us better leaders and better humans. In essence, it is almost impossible to control an impulse if you are not first aware that it exists. 

Take this situation for example. Over the course of a morning, a busy principal finally gets five minutes to decompress after dealing with many different situations, both easy and hard,  and people, both easy and hard.  A teacher walks in and asks a simple question to which the principal snaps at her, telling her to just give him five minutes. In this case, the lack of self-awareness reduces self-management of the impulse. 

Recognizing What is Emerging

Scenarios like this repeatedly play out in the exceedingly busy world of school and district leaders, but without our awareness, these instances can begin to label leaders as demanding or hard to work with. Our belief is that one important form of self-awareness means recognizing what is emerging in the moment and choosing whether to act on it. 

This form of self-awareness acts as the critical gateway to all other SEL competencies for leaders. You can’t self-manage, be more socially aware, build better relationships, or make more responsible decisions without better self-awareness in the moment. Too often leaders in their harried and fragmented days often forget that awareness in the moment can prevent many larger issues down the road.

Impulses

What exactly is an impulse, and how do they emerge? An impulse can be defined as a strong and unreflective urge to act or a non-deliberate action, in essence suggesting we have no control over them. An impulse expresses an urgency to act. I feel angry, I snap; I feel hungry, I eat. 

The impulse also acts as a desire for something, especially an emotional calming- if I do action X it will quiet emotion Y causing me less discomfort. The impulse doesn’t consider the bigger picture but demands emotional calming, as in our example. If the principal shows irritation at being bothered, he may be able to get five minutes to calm his nerves, but not considering the impact on the teacher. 

Impulsive behavior is typically seen as negative, but we have impulses all the time. Our brain appraises a situation, predicts and shoots forward a thought or emotion often without our knowing it. Our mind tells us to do that, say that, eat that, go there, and we often follow blindly to soothe our emotions. We feel the slightest bit of boredom, and our brain tells us we need a quick shot of interest, so we check our smartphone without even thinking about it. Rapidly and without conscious thought, we stifle the emotion over time, creating a habit.   

Some impulses are helpful, and some are not; it depends on the content and context. An impulse that leads to saying the wrong thing to a large group is much different than saying something helpful off the top of your head to a single person. Over time, however, without realizing it, these impulses become habits that begin to define how people perceive our leadership. So how can leaders become a steady, emotional resource for their teachers, not prone to impulses, rather than a demand on their emotional state?

Sharpening our Self-Awareness

Most of us who have led districts and schools recognize the insight we have at the end of a long day of meetings, calls, and situations. We often realize we have lost touch with ourselves, our inner feelings sometime early in the day, and only when walking to our cars to drive home, do we realize how stressed or tired we really are. Over the years, we have become masterful at stuffing our feelings and awareness away and out of touch. To improve our self-awareness in the moment, we need to sharpen the precision of our awareness and then understand and tame our impulses.

  • First, train yourself to slow down throughout the day. Set a timer on your phone or watch every hour for 3-5 minutes to check on your self-awareness. Imagine a camera strapped to your forehead, constantly looking outward. For this three to five-minute period, visualize turning the camera inward to see what is happening with your thinking, your breathing, and your type and level of emotion.
  • Second, begin to associate your impulses with signs in your body. Does your impulse to speak start as a feeling in the back of your throat? Does your impulse to react with anger start with a tightening of your jaw? Whatever the feeling you have, begin to associate it with what it is asking you to do and what emotion needs calming at the time.  Is your impulse to check your phone boredom or a reluctance to do something? Is your impulse to avoid somebody fear or reluctance to have a hard conversation?
  • Third, once you can begin to become more aware of your impulse in a moment, you can begin to use a simple recipe that combines self-awareness and self-management to tame these impulses:
  1. Self-awareness-Feel the impulse and the emotion
  2. Self-awareness-Determine the strength of the impulse and if it deserves any attention
  3. Self-management-Disengage from the impulse by telling yourself to slow down
  4. Self-management- Evaluate the need to act and consider the action in relation to your values, the other person, or the long-term relationship and the upside or downside of acting
  5. Self-management- Choose to act or not

These small actions, if intentionally done and practiced during the ups and downs of the day, can help all leaders become more self-aware in the moment and begin to tame those impulses that we believe we have no control over. The increasing demands on leaders today don’t often allow leaders time and space to worry about self-awareness. But if self-awareness in the moment is the gateway to all other SEL skills a leader needs today, they can become a more supportive resource to others around them as they become more practiced at acting rather than reacting. Leaders just need to practice curbing these impulses and raising them to a different level of awareness.  

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The silhouette of a person with raised arms standing on a mountain peak against a vivid orange and purple sunset
Professional DevelopmentSocial-Emotional LearningTeacher RetentionEducatorsK-12edLeaders

Avoiding the Self-Awareness Trap

by James A. Bailey & Randy Weiner
written by James A. Bailey & Randy Weiner 5 minutes read

Continuing our series on adult SEL, Over the next two months, we’ll address self-awareness. Self-awareness is a skill most of us think we’ve developed. Examining that potentially misguided belief allows us to engage in a bit more self-awareness and fits nicely inside an attempt to better balance educators’ job demands and resources.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” 

When Verbal Kint shared his observation with Agent Kujan in the 1995 film “The Usual Suspects,” the line immediately worked its way into pop culture. In fact, Verbal’s musing borrows from centuries-old religious textual analysis. Going back to at least 1836, it is possible to find references to this notion of the devil’s overwhelming power, a great power that could conceal its very existence.

Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, we assume most readers will accept that, as humans, we’re capable of telling ourselves the truth and engaging in some self-deception. We can appeal to our better angels as well as bedevil ourselves. It takes a touch of self-awareness just to entertain the suggestion that, like the devil in the quote, we can convince ourselves of something untrue. So, to avoid fooling ourselves here, how might we understand what it means to be self-aware?

Defining Self-Awareness in Adult SEL

CASEL.org, one of the most commonly used social emotional learning frameworks in the nation’s schools, defines self-awareness competency as “the abilities to understand one’s own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior across contexts. This includes capacities to recognize one’s strengths and limitations with a well-grounded sense of confidence and purpose.”

CASEL’s definition suggests a more introspective bent to self-awareness, but it is also important to include an outward-facing aspect to the definition of self-awareness. CASEL actually does this by naming another competency, Social-Awareness. They define that as “the abilities to understand the perspectives of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts. This includes the capacities to feel compassion for others, understand broader historical and social norms for behavior in different settings, and recognize family, school, and community resources and supports.”

Combining CASEL’s definitions provides a more holistic conception of self-awareness that requires looking both inwardly and outwardly to arrive at an elevated level of self-awareness. The organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, who has written extensively on self-awareness and delivered a TED Talk on the subject with over four million views, takes this approach in her self-awareness definition, seeing it as an active endeavor to both look internally to see oneself clearly while also soliciting feedback from others to enrich and interrogate one’s self-perception.

Don’t Trick Yourself

So let’s now come back to Mr. Kint and the pastors of the 1800s. Concerning self-awareness, we might draw upon their sentiment to arrive at a more leadership-oriented observation: the greatest trick we’ve ever pulled is convincing ourselves we’re already sufficiently self-aware.

According to Eurich, only ~10-15% of the population is actually self-aware. She finds that as power and experience increase (dynamics that some of us conflate with expertise and accurate perception), self-awareness decreases. The more we drink our own KoolAid, the blurrier our vision becomes.

There are real consequences to diminished insights into ourselves. To borrow from another pop culture icon, you might be lacking in self-awareness if:

  • You have little empathy
  • You always need to be right
  • You’re quick to judgment
  • You crave attention
  • You’re unable to accept constructive criticism

The Cost of a Lack of Self-Awareness

These are just a handful of telltale signs of a leader who lacks self-awareness and the impact on the leader and those being led. Let’s take a quick look at how just one aspect of a lack of self-awareness in leadership can be translated into the Job Demands and Resources Theory.

The Cost of a Lack of Self-Awareness: How Always Needing to be Right Translates into the Job Demands and Resources Theory

Increased Demands

Decreased Resources

More effort required by those being led to stay engaged/make contributions

Less energy available for more productive efforts

Leadership stance demands an unproductive/unnecessary defense of every position/decision.

Lower morale raises the likelihood of attrition.

The extra effort required to have even a chance of getting through to the leader

Fear/futility of challenging the leader weakens the culture. 

The table above depicts a toxic work environment that siphons adult energy from serving children more effectively. On the page, reading through the table may feel like a review of an extreme scenario. Don’t miss the opportunity to engage in a little self-awareness of your own: might any part of this scenario describe your own practice? Regardless of your answer, how do you know? 

Controlling the Ups and Downs of Leadership

In our work, we often share the graphic below to emphasize what school leaders know all too well: there are very few if any, moments in a leader’s day that are not fraught with the intense emotion of one kind or another.

self-awareness, Adult SEL

Every one of those moments is an opportunity to practice increasing self-awareness, reduce the demands we place on ourselves, and increase the resources we make available to others with whom we’re in the community. How to do it? Beat the inner devil at its own game:  we can assume we’re not as self-aware as we otherwise might think we are.

A Few Ways to Operationalize Self-Awareness

  • In your next meeting, actively try to agree with everything that is discussed
  • When you find yourself engaged with someone else whose negative emotions are intensifying, actively accept those emotions as valid rather than try to refute or discredit them.
  • Seek out the person you believe least respects or agrees with you, and invite that person to a no-agenda meeting. Just talk to each other.

The demands school leaders face and the consequences those demands can create require an unreasonable and super-human capacity to manage. Understanding how depleted leaders might fall prey to self-deception is not difficult. Increasing self-awareness can be part of the antidote, especially if we flip the script and embrace the idea that we may not be as self-aware as we think.

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Teacher assisting diverse students in a classroom environment, promoting education and learning
K-12Social-Emotional Learning

Supporting Social Emotional Environments

by Kathy Dyer
written by Kathy Dyer 5 minutes read

What makes kids, families, and communities feel safe? Builds their sense of well-being? Empowers them to thrive? Safe spaces for learning, whether inside a school building or out in the community, requires equitable social emotional environments. As Jonathan Aldis (2019) from Stantec said, “We want spaces where students can practice for the future.” That “practice” involves physical, social, emotional, and academic opportunities.

For many, it is about redefining what is possible. Families were and are all in different places, pre- and post-pandemic. A trauma-informed environment is created by promoting the wellness of students and staff. Academic support is part of this. Perhaps more importantly, ensuring that everyone feels safe and supported on other levels – physical, social, and emotional – contributes to an overall feeling of wellness.

Developing Social Emotional Environments 

Maximizing physical and psychological safety, facilitating recovery or adjustment, and supporting children and adult’s ability to learn and thrive is critical. Establish routines with clear, concise, consistent communication to start.

Communication and engagement with the community seem to be an area of opportunity for many school districts. As Joe Sanfelippo (2016) says, “Flattening the walls of your school entails eliminating the communication barriers so everyone feels like they are part of the school community.” While districts and schools are invitational with parents when it comes to events at the school, attendance often remains low.

Engaging Families to Develop Social Emotional Environments

Identifying barriers to family engagement is critical. What keeps them from engaging in their children’s schools? Communication with families regarding student performance and needs is sometimes limited to report cards and heavily loaded with information from the school and not as much from the parents. It’s the stories behind the data that build engagement.

How might you share data to enhance parent understanding and engagement? How can you use stories to help families engage? What stories help families understand the school’s vision and goals to personalize them? Remembering that people walk through doors in two directions may be useful. How can educators walk through doors to meet families in contexts where they are most comfortable and accessible? How are educators and the school showing up and going out in the community?

Equity Centric Thinking

In an equitable community, all are welcome, valued, and have a voice. Some educators unconsciously adopt biased and deficit-based thinking. We talk about having high standards for all learners and yet hear the comments about “they can’t do that kind of math.” Deficit thinking has been embedded in our systems for a long time. Changes in beliefs about the potential of learners are a must as we move forward.

Trauma-Informed Social Emotional Environments

Acknowledging the trauma related to the pandemic for all people and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on certain communities, along with systemic racism, bias, and discrimination on a broader scale and the violence in multiple communities, it is important to start the environmental transformation.

According to The National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a trauma-informed system is one where all parties involved recognize and respond to the impact of traumatic stress on those who have contact with the system, including children, caregivers, staff, and service providers. Recognizing the impact on children and adults, trauma-informed practice is not something nice to incorporate and is mandatory.

Leading With Empathy

Empathy plays a big role in our environment. Who gets to decide what’s “best” for students and families? Establishing an environment that empowers all members to build and practice empathy will go a long way to creating an authentic and welcoming environment.

The mirror neurons in our brains are activated when we perform an action and observe an action. “Sometimes called “empathy neurons,” these cells help us understand the intentions of others and are active during social encounters.” (Tomlinson & Sousa, 2020). Schools provide a wealth of social encounters in the classrooms, halls, common spaces, and outdoors.

Practicing Mindfulness in Social Emotional Environments

We can control how we act; we do. Pausing to look for and from other perspectives helps us build empathy. Practicing mindfulness (breathing, brain breaks, etc.) supports our ability to harness our emotions. Developing personal and classroom routines, learning how to set boundaries, and building our vocabulary to describe our emotions allow us to express and receive input from others in ways that demonstrate self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness, all aspects of SEL. All of these contribute to the environment that supports SEL.

Establish an environment that mistakes are part of. One where mistakes are “expected, respected, and inspected” (Peters, 2021). It supports the power of “yet” and a growth mindset. Routines help establish welcoming and equitable schools and classrooms. Recognize that everyone has expertise. In your ecosystem, there are community, family members, educators, and students with knowledge, skills, and experiences to share. Create environments and offer invitations for people to share.

Actions You Can Take

  • Leverage asset-based language. In Choice Words, Peter Johnston offers a plethora of examples of how a subtle change in words can have a large impact. This relates to the practice of challenging ideas rather than feedback, which is like providing feedback focused on the task rather than the person.
  • Ask this question of each group – students, families, and community – What can you tell me about the school that teachers and administrators don’t know? (Boss, 2017)
  • Apply structures, strategies, and tools that support active engagement, persistence, and collaboration, practices that provide routines.
  • Remember that the school has community spaces – hallways, a lunchroom, a library, and school grounds. Greeting learners, educators, and families in those community spaces go a long way toward making them feel welcome and valued.
  • Create a word wall for emotions. Provide learners with multiple words to describe the nuances of their feelings. For younger learners, a page of emojis, with the words beneath, is a way to build their emotional vocabulary and their ability to read and understand words.
  • Support students in processing current events and their personal impacts. Create space for dialogue and other forms of expression. These opportunities help foster resilience and empathy.
  • Put students and teachers at the center of decision-making about opportunities that more
    equitably address and support the wellness of the school community.

Resources

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An adult coal miner in a hard hat with headlamp holding a small brass birdcage with a yellow canary inside a dim underground mine tunnel
K-12 TeachersSocial-Emotional LearningK-12

Teacher SEL-Separating The Canary from the Coal Mine

by James A. Bailey
written by James A. Bailey 5 minutes read

Welcome to our new column on adult social-emotional learning! Over the next 12 months, we’ll focus on how school leaders can embrace adult SEL to reduce educator turnover and attrition. Based on the research we did to write The Daily SEL Leaders: A Guided Journal and our work supporting leaders across the country to develop their SEL skills, we hope to bring a new perspective on the growing crisis of educator attrition and teacher SEL. 

Let’s begin by analyzing the attrition at your school. Think about how many educators at your school leave at the end of the year, never to return. Now, how many educators want some guidance? Unfortunately, thousands of educators are quietly deciding if they stay in education next year or look for something less stressful and fulfilling- yours included.

In many parts of the country, the attrition problem is reaching crisis levels, with the demand for teachers far outstripping the supply. For example, many districts hire teachers with substandard credentials and permits in high-needs areas, relying on underprepared teachers to serve some of our most at-risk children.

The Cost of Teacher Burnout

The need to hire non-certified teachers results from a low supply of teachers and an overstressed and overworked teaching force. For instance, a study done in the spring of 2021 (CDC Foundation, 2021) found that 27% of teachers self-reported symptoms consistent with clinical depression, and 37% self-reported symptoms consistent with generalized anxiety. As we all know, without quality teachers in the classroom or quality leaders working to improve our schools and districts, the quality of education will continue to deteriorate, with especially severe consequences for high-poverty students of color.

The canary in our educational coal mine has been quite clear about our educational affairs. However, as well-intentioned people, including school leaders, think about potential solutions to the attrition problem, might we be focusing too much on the canary and not enough on the coal mine?

Teacher SEL-Who To Blame? The Canary or the Coal Mine

You have heard the analogy of the canary and the coal mine before. If not, miners used to take a canary down into the mines in the early days of mining to check air quality. If the canary died, the air was unsafe, and actions were taken to fix the air so that workers wouldn’t die.

The canary wasn’t blamed or threatened, or incentivized to do better. Nor did they try and evaluate the canary or build a more robust and resilient canary or buy the canary a gym membership so they would breathe better. None of these after-the-fact solutions were tried. If the canary died, the work was stopped until the environment was fixed. The environment or work conditions were blamed, not the canary.

What’s most interesting about this early method of gauging air quality is that it serves as an interesting analogy not only for stress and burnout but for educator retention and attrition. Every day our educators- the canaries- go to work facing not bad air quality but workplace demands such as large class sizes, disruptive students, massive changes in technology, and limited amounts of time that can lead to excess stress, burnout, and eventual attrition.

What is Holding Back Teacher Success

To extend the metaphor, we tend to place almost all the blame on the educator/canary in schools. In the US today, we believe if we build a stronger, more resilient educator/canary, we never have to worry about or question the coal mine/work environment, nor do we have to worry about the messy issues implicit in developing adults’ social and emotional skills.

We should, of course, continue to strengthen our educators. Higher salaries, increased health benefits, and supporting educators’ capacity to be resilient despite their challenging work are all excellent ideas, and they are all, however, only canary/teacher-centric solutions. 

In our analysis, however, the mine/work environment should attract more of our attention. Even if you were offered a huge salary to teach but knew the coal mine was poisonous, you likely wouldn’t accept the job. The safety of the coal mine matters, and it matters a lot. The same thing holds, or at least should, for schools. 

Demands Versus Resources in Teacher SEL

So, how might making schools emotionally safer and more productive places to work? Firstly, we must stop blaming the canary and focus more on the coal mine. Second, one usable framework to better understand the impact working in schools has on educators is the Job-demands and resources theory (JD-R).

The JD-R theory offers a lens through which to view educator dissatisfaction and well-being. The central idea in this theory is that energy is necessary to do productive work, and workers require balance so as not to run out of energy, similar to the canary not running out of air to breathe.

The Drain on Teachers

Attempting to meet job demands request of physical and/or mental effort. Too many demands drain educators’ energy, and ongoing, high demands deplete a teacher’s physical and psychological energy. Over time, this sustained energy loss can lead to higher levels of emotional exhaustion, greater stress, lower organizational commitment, lower engagement, and a higher motivation to leave the school or profession (Granziera et al., 2021).

In contrast, job resources allow educators to work productively by meeting their work’s physical and psychological costs. They provide oxygen to the canary. Job resources may include tangible items like people, money, or materials. Still, they also include personal resources such as social and emotional competencies and social support within a school or workplace. This is where adult SEL competencies and skills come into play.

Establishing Great Teacher SEL Practices 

When all educators in the building develop their self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship skills, positive cycles will ensure that they become reinforcing and supportive over time, lessening the impact of the demands.

In sum, we have the knowledge and the science to make the coal mine safer for the canary. But if we continue to blame the canary, we will soon run out of canaries. It may be time to better understand the coal mine instead. We will focus on bringing you adult SEL ideas and skills to make the coal mine safe.

Stay Connected With Teacher SEL on edCircuit. 

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A group of smiling high school students at a long desk working on laptops, bright classroom
Social-Emotional LearningK-12

Social Emotional Learning-Feb 2023 Digest

by EdCircuit Staff
written by EdCircuit Staff 3 minutes read

Educators, community members, and stakeholders strive to support children’s academic growth. However, many have realized that academic success is directly tied to students’ social emotional skills. Throughout the month of February, edCircuit Contributors discussed Social Emotional Learning. Additionally, articles covered various topics, including STEAM laboratory safety, Edtech integration, CTE, and more. 

Below are several SEL-focused articles published in February 2023 on edCircuit. 

Social Emotional Learning

Career Technical Education

  • Rigor in the Career Technical Classroom – Rigor is more about quality than quantity and focuses on the depth of understanding; this is particularly true in career technical learning. 
  • The Wheel: Gig Economy and Value – We are all aware that we’re in the midst of a sea change in the workplace. This article discusses how systematic change and the gig economy intertwine. 

STEAM Laboratory Safety

Sponsored by Science Safety

Professional Development

Shows & Podcasts

Several new shows and topics will release over the next few months. We are excited to bring a whole suite of new video and audio content for our readers. In the meantime, please explore episodes from this month. Thought leaders share there voices every day on our shows and podcast. These series include:  

  • Mind the Gap – A global education conversation YouTube video series
  • Author Chats – K12 Authors discuss their latest publications and provide insights into their inspirations. 
  • CoSN Podcast – Certified education technology leaders discuss digital equity, innovation, IT leadership, cybersecurity, and more.
  • SaferEd – Insightful discussions on a variety of topics for making schools safer

Join The Conversation on Social Emotional Learning

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