Why NOW is the Perfect Time to Implement a
School-Wide SEL Professional Development Training
At the end of any school year, educators are already planning for the next one. They assess what went well and what they can do better. They set goals. They find the holes in their nets and look for ways to patch them.
We don’t know yet what it will look like when educators greet their students in the fall, likely they’ll be met with all manners of trauma in addition to academic deficits. As educators plan for next year, their students’ health and safety, both physical and emotional, are at the forefront of their minds. They know that students cannot learn until they have their physical and emotional needs met. But, how do they do this without burning out their students or themselves?
The reality is, schools can’t go at this alone. Now more than ever, home and school environments will need to effectively work together to build their students’ social- emotional skills. Parents and educators will require quality SEL professional development training to help develop their awareness and raise their intentions, so together, they can more effectively shape these skills moving forward.
When a school community embraces transformative social-emotional learning, they help students and staff meet their emotional needs and cope with situations they can’t change. This builds relationships and trust that overflows into academics. Teachers are more productive, students are more ready to learn, and as a result, students make more significant academic gains.
A school-wide SEL program with explicit instruction and professional development training allows school communities to harness and maximize those benefits. It provides a shared experience and vocabulary that allows anyone in the school community—students, educators, and parents—to get onboard with social-emotional.
Keep in mind whether they know it or not, educators are already teaching social-emotional skills to their students all day, every day. It’s a natural part of being an educator.
In their individual classrooms, and often without knowing it, teachers regularly model SEL skills through interactions with their students, classroom management strategies, and discipline procedures. This is fine on a small scale, but imagine the impact an explicit school-wide SEL effort could have on leveling up every aspect of education?
Such an effort requires fidelity—time, patience, trust, and loyalty—to thrive. An SEL initiative is not a one-and-done fad diet for a school. It is a lifestyle change that promotes sustainable overall health. While some of your school community members might resist at first, as fad diets have disappointed them before, others will start sharing their positive results, and the movement will spread.
Our students will need extra nurturing next year, requiring us to change course and focus more on the students and less on the scores. But with a sincere, ongoing commitment to an SEL initiative in your school, you can do both. Better yet, you can make a permanent change that becomes a part of your school culture and benefits every student in the future.
Even if you agree with the good SEL can do, you might be thinking that it’s too much to take on right now. You have enough to figure out for next year. That’s where Social Success in Schools® can help. Let us be your go-to SEL professional development training resource with our ready-to-use online school-wide SEL professional development program that has done the research, planning, and presenting for you, so you can stay focused on your students, who will need your dedicated educators now more than ever.
Together, we got this!
Your Team at Social Success in Schools®