SEL and Online Learning: Some Tips

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Online school is hard for everyone in one way or another. Parents, teachers, administrators and students all find aspects of online learning they struggle with. While this is something I put together for an SEL conference, it also applies to all online education spaces if we have any hope of making learning meaningful for students right now.

  1. Know Your Students – get to know who they are, how they identify, what the barriers and challenges are that they face with regard to online learning. If this is the only thing you do, it will be important.
  2. Engage Students – Create opportunities for students to be part of the learning process. The more our students are empowered to be the architects of their own learning spaces, the more they will learn and the more they teach their peers. Be willing to acknowledge the unique perspectives and talents every student has that can enrich the learning environment for everyone.
  3. Vary Access Points – Make sure you aren’t just catering to students who are comfortable with online school. Provide links to videos, models they can hold in their hands, music and other forms of information they can engage with. Even students can be surprised at what sparks their interest and understanding.
  4. Use Social Media – this can feel a little concerning; creating relationship with students outside of the school learning platforms, and I get it. But students learn best from folks they’re in relationship with, so even if you just create an Instagram account where you post memes that are relevant to what you’re teaching, it’s a way to connect with students where they are already spending time.
  5. Prioritize Relationship – I know we all have specific things we want students to learn about, but remember, students learn best in the context of relationship. Make sure you’re giving them lots of opportunities to connect with you and others – smaller groups or 1:1 time with a peer or giving them tasks that will spur creativity and bonding outside of the subject matter.
  6. Know What’s Important – and express it to students. Competition and assessment are not important when it comes to SEL. This is about creating connections for students and helping them understand how to know themselves and find their tribe. You can’t challenge them to do that, you have to empower them to do it.
  7. Share Power – Make sure you communicate clearly to students how they can share their ideas and contribute. This can mean thoroughly explaining the “raise hand” feature on an online meeting platform or letting them know that feedback can be anonymous or submitted “offline” if they feel intimidated by sharing in the larger group. Build in time for feedback about which lessons and ideas resonate and which fall flat as well as generating thoughts about what would work better. Do it every session. Convince your students that they are part of the process and help them feel confident sharing their ideas.

When Having a Suicide Prevention Protocol isn’t Enough

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wooded area with footpath to a small stone temple

A friend who is a middle-school educator and the parent of two adolescents shared with me this morning that she learned about a student her son’s age who took his own life last week. As expected, it has shaken her and caused her to examine how to respond, both as a teacher and as a parent. She said that the school district has deployed its suicide prevention protocol and, while she is grateful there is one in place, she told me that it feels “mechanistic.” It is definitely important for schools to have a set of tasks and supports available in the event that a tragedy like this happens, but the truth is, it isn’t enough, and without those protocols being grounded in secure relationships that already exist between staff and students and families, it will always feel like a checklist instead of a true, heartfelt response.

We can’t hope to deploy these resources and talking points after the fact in any effective way if we haven’t put in the effort to create strong relationships before something painful happens. Even if we as adults are sincere in our offer to be available for students and families who are grieving and frightened and angry, if we haven’t established – through a pattern of behavior they can trust – a connection before, it is unlikely that those who are in the most pain will feel comfortable coming to us. And if we haven’t processed our own grief and pain, or at least identified them, we will appear to be unsympathetic or simply going through the motions.

My friend noted that, over the years, this particular student had been noticed by many different teachers who wanted to find a way to help him. All too often, protocols and standard practices serve to prevent us from creating caring relationships with students who could use our support. Whether it is a culture that encourages school staff to see certain things as their purview (education and behavior management inside the school setting or hours) and assign others to families (deeper emotional and adjustment issues), or one that encourages them to be hands off for fear of liability, those things stand in the way of building truly supportive connections with students. It may be that class sizes prevent teachers from being able to connect with all of their students or a lack of resources means that there isn’t a skilled, trained staff member who could build a relationship with a student and their family. Whatever the barriers are, if we aren’t working to be in relationship with our students and their families or caregivers, when something like this happens, we won’t be able to provide the kind of support that is most profound and meaningful, even with a list of well-researched actions and scripts in our back pocket.

We know that students learn best when they feel as though they are in connected relationships with their teachers. We also know that they learn best when they are supported at home. Having a suicide prevention protocol might look good from the outside, but if we aren’t using it in the context of foundational relationships with students and families who believe that they can trust us and speak honestly about their struggles, it doesn’t amount to much. It is up to us to do the hard work of creating connections between teachers and students and families so that when there is a tragedy, we can rely on our relationships to hold us all as we grieve.