Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Building a culture of health starts with developing children’s social and academic aptitude from a young age with self-knowledge, empathy, communication skills, collaboration, and growth mindset.

Social-emotional learning. Grit. Resilience. Agency. Empathy. Executive function. Education experts agree these are all crucial for student success, but the agreement stops there.

Social-emotional learning (SEL) has become a top implementation priority for districts, ed-tech companies and education researchers, and for good reason: Kids need it.

With the rise in youth suicide rates, increased numbers of violent incidents in schools and the growing rate of American youth diagnosed with mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, the social emotional instability of America’s youth has, according to some experts, become a national crisis. Many are turning to SEL as a means to address this growing concern and spark conversation around sensitive or vulnerable topics.

Three social and emotional learning activities that are designed to address high school students’ need for status and respect.

Summit Preparatory Charter High School in Redwood City, California, uses a variety of activities in the weekly, 90-minute Habits, Community, and Culture (HCC) class, where students learn Habits of Success and develop social and emotional learning (SEL) skills. The school has developed an HCC curriculum for grades nine through 12 and hired two full-time teachers for HCC, but Summit’s academic teachers also use some of these activities to build SEL skills and deepen their relationships with their students. Cady Ching, a biology and AP environmental science teacher at Summit, incorporates opening activities into all of her classes: “In my freshman classes, we do them every class period.”

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Here are some of the opening, group sharing, and closing activities that teachers use at Summit:

Creating a Twitter board is simple. Make a template with space for a profile picture, the student’s real name, a Twitter-style handle, a short bio, and a list of followers. That takes about a quarter of a page, leaving room for tweets. Have students fill out profiles—some of mine drew a profile picture, but most used a photo—and slip the profiles into clear sheet protectors. When we do this exercise, I display the profiles on a whiteboard for a few days, using magnets to hold them in place. When we’re done, I store the profiles in a folder—they don’t take up much space and are ready for next time.

Cut some paper into small slips that students can use for tweets, which they can tape onto the appropriate profile.