As a classroom teacher of 16 years, I understand the pushback from some within the education community about adopting a social emotional learning curriculum and making it a priority within their classrooms or schools. For the first 12 years of my teaching career, I taught at upper middle class, high-achieving schools in suburban Texas neighborhoods. When I wasn’t teaching these students, who came to school predisposed for success, I taught overseas in Abu Dhabi. Once again, I was teaching students who rarely wanted for much. After 12 years of teaching, I moved to Tampa, Florida, and began working at a Title 1 charter school with a minority majority. My school was 100% free breakfast and lunch. We won’t even begin to discuss my belief that all school lunches should be free, for all students.
My students came from broken homes and challenging circumstances. Many no longer lived with their birth parents, due to parental incarceration, drug addiction, abuse, or neglect. It is an understatement to say that many of our kids came to school for love and stability, not for learning. While we were lucky to have many guardians involved in the lives of their kids, not all students had this advantage. I never doubted that our parents/guardians wanted the very best for their children but many were so overwhelmed with the struggles of daily life, that they didn’t have the availability to be a strong presence in their child’s educational journey. Having had negative school experiences themselves, and often not graduating high school, many of our parents were not comfortable walking into the school, much less meeting with teachers for a formal parent-teacher conference.
With all of this being my reality as a classroom teacher, it should be apparent that I’d have to tend to the mental wellbeing of my students before teaching them to succeed academically. All of my training in education taught me this as well…. You must meet Maslow’s hierarchy of needs before addressing Bloom’s. However, once in the classroom, sometimes this can become blurred, with so much pressure coming from administration and leaders at the district and state levels. You are constantly reminded that how your kids perform on a state test will determine if your school is even open the following year. As a teacher you’re in the trenches with your students all day, everyday. You know their needs, you internalize these needs and take the weight of these needs home with you most evenings. But the weight of those needs is counterbalanced by the school and district’s demands for higher test scores and better reading statistics and constant meetings and required paperwork.
Teachers go into the teaching profession to help the next generation and to educate the next group of leaders in our country. But the daily reality for teachers is the constant demands for harder curriculum to be mastered at much younger ages. The accelerated reading expectations in kindergarten often replace any play time, as the importance of play in school is often overlooked. Play in schools is where so many students of previous generations learned valuable lessons and life skills. Such as conflict resolution, sportsmanship, taking turns, accountability, and active listening. No adult was needed during the authentic learning time, it happened naturally for children. As playtime has slowly been erased in most schools across America, kids are no longer learning these valuable lessons. At the very core of social-emotional learning, is the idea of reinvesting in our youth by instilling within them these important life skills that will allow them to become resilient individuals in school and in life. Social-emotional learning is too often seen in a negative light and as a classroom teacher, I can understand that. Teachers are reminded daily of the importance of test scores and data, but no one is looking at the data of mental health for our students. No one is asking to view the data or statistics on the mental wellbeing of today’s kindergarteners versus those from 20 years ago. No one is asking to see the data to support how trauma impacted home life affects our students in every dimension of their life and learning. No one is asking to view the data on how mental health is affecting high schoolers and clouding their minds with the stress of life, school friends, sexuality, parents, and social media. Funding at all levels comes based on data. Teachers, schools, and districts must prove that what they are doing is working and prove that they are creating literate and successful students. No one can argue the importance of producing well-educated, literate students. So why is the importance of mental wellbeing up for debate?
Teachers enter their profession, not for pay or glory, but with the intention of making a real impact on their students and creating the next generation of leaders for our country. I was this teacher. I entered the classroom ready to change the world. A bit naïve, I must admit. I wanted to be THAT teacher that my students always remembered. Then the pressures of the educational world came on strong. I was the only 3rd grade teacher at my school. The previous year our school earned an F rating from the state. This was my first year at the school and my first year teaching this state’s curriculum. I was reminded on a daily basis that if my kids didn’t do well on the state test in the spring that we would all be out of jobs. This pressure weighed heavily on me. I didn’t want to fail my school or fellow teachers, but most importantly, I didn’t want to fail my kids. Reading was our focus much of the day. A good portion of the rest of the day was spent breaking up fights and handling behavior problems. About this time, my principal wanted to remind us all that we should be devoting at least 30 minutes a day each morning to our SEL lessons. I left each day exhausted, with my resignation letter written in my head. It was just too much.
After 2 months of this, one Monday morning I decided to finally open the binder that contained our SEL curriculum and give it a try. I was fairly certain that I was quitting soon, so I really didn’t care about their end-of-year state test scores. Monday was hard. My kids, especially my boys, weren’t having any part of it. Tuesday was the same as Monday. But by Friday I noticed a subtle difference. My boys weren’t participating, but they also weren’t distracting either. After 3 weeks of this, I found myself looking forward to these lessons and I think maybe my kids were too. I gained insight into their lives, fears, and insecurities during these times. They became comfortable enough to be vulnerable with each other and could begin to drop their hard exterior. It was still there for sure, but they were allowing some of the vulnerability to shine through. It took over a month, but I suddenly realized that I was having fewer fights among my boys on the playground. I wasn’t leaving exhausted or frustrated and I wasn’t mentally writing my resignation letter. I was actually starting to LIKE these kids. By winter break, when I hugged them goodbye before the 2 week holiday, I shocked myself by realizing I was going to miss them. I had gone from planning my exit strategy to actually loving these children. I changed not only their social emotional outlook but also my own outlook on the situation.
I wanted to be that teacher that made a real impact on the lives of her students. But even I pushed back on the importance of SEL lessons within my classroom, not because I didn’t think mental wellbeing was important, but because there was so much other stuff piled mountain high on my plate. I was convinced that I didn’t have time to fit it in. It took me changing my mindset to really understand and accept that until our students have their basic needs of love, stability, and safety met, they aren’t mentally prepared for the curriculum to be taught. Until our kids are mentally prepared to learn, they aren’t able to keep up with the rigor that is expected of them. Without learning the skills needed to settle disagreements, resolve conflict, and gain self-esteem and resiliency, our students are going to struggle with collaboration and understanding the views of others while in school and eventually in the workplace.
My kids’ test scores that first December of implementing the SEL curriculum for reading were where I expected them to be in May, if I was lucky. Greater than that, we were able to read novels in class, and actually discuss the moral dilemmas within the plot and how we would handle the situations. My focus then could be on educating these kids and didn’t have to be on classroom management and behavior. Until we invest in the mental wellbeing of our students and educators, we are going to continue suffering along the current path we are on. Teacher burnout, failing schools, and school shootings don’t need to be the legacy of this generation! Producing a generation of children that can see their own resiliency and potential can and should be our legacy.