Social-Emotional Learning: Self-Awareness

Engaging in Self-Awareness practices helps us understand our reactions to daily situations, and make an active choice of how we want to deal with them. Remembering that we have choices is a crucially important part of our agency - and when our own agency is strong, we can better support our students' agency, too. Learner agency is the students' voice and choice in their own learning.

Finding time for practicing self-awareness can be hard. My solution is to go for a walk in the nature because it helps me to focus. 

How are you supporting your wellbeing? What are your practices for learning more about yourself?

CASEL has a great resource for Transformative SEL, where you can find more about supporting students identity and agency. And  HOPE is a helpful resource for embedding positive experiences to our everyday teaching practices.

Social-Emotional Learning: Relationship Skills

Connection to nature is an important part of learning the social-emotional skills we all need. 

Recent research emphasizes the impact of nature on people's health. We need fresh air and water. Kids love to play with water and sand.

Here is an interesting article from "Project Learning Tree"

Mother Nature is a great teacher and getting kids outside to learn and play is good for their brains and their bodies. 

Contact with nature is more essential today given that children are spending nearly 8 hours a day using entertainment media and only 6 percent of children ages 9-13 play outside on their own. We are at risk of losing an entire generation’s appreciation for how nature works and what it needs to remain healthy and productive.

Here you can listen about  Trauma-informed Design 

And here is recent research about nature connection:

Lanza, K., Alcazar, M., Chen, B., & Kohl III, H. W. (2023). Connection to nature is associated with social-emotional learning of children. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 4, 100083.