Social and Emotional Learning to STAY In and Ongoing Reflective Process

• In Event: Rethinking Arts Education for Social and Emotional Learning

Abstract

Social and emotional learning (SEL) equips ourselves to be whole people who have healthy awareness of ourselves, create healthy connections to others, make positive contributions to our communities, and give us power over our own lives. SEL is not an extra thing to do in classrooms, but should be an integrated part of all learning. Most great teachers build classrooms where students build and practice social emotional skills because learning math, science, reading, social studies, music, and art all require setting and achieving goals, managing personal emotions, showing empathy for others, maintaining positive relationships and community and making positive decisions.
Through research and practice gathered in a drumming program, this framework for developing SEL is to STAY in a reflection-driven process where educators:
•Select skills (like goal setting, self awareness or leadership)— by asking “What do you and your students/children (if parents) need to learn and practice?”;
•Translate those skills/sometimes called competencies into language, routines, plans and community commitments that students understand; and then take...
•Action—where social emotional learning must come to life as student and teacher behaviors/action that live in everything we do in class--And finally support…
•Youth Empowerment—where SEL is driven by students to empower them to think critically and not focused on controlling student behavior. This also includes making SEL culturally relevant and actively working against the racist systemic and education mechanisms that exclude so many.
The Arts Collab has applied shared constructs to assess SEL through the Arts-integration for Social Emotional Learning (SEL) project, funded by the School of Education’s efforts to support interdisciplinary teams working on problems in education and the arts at the intersection of research and practice. Beginning in Fall 2019, we delivered community arts programming synthesizing the arts of drum and dance through Drum Power and Performing Ourselves. This project has three key objectives: (a) provide SEL development and practice to students through drum and dance; (b) provide modeling and professional development to school staff on arts integration and SEL integration with academic skill teaching that includes coaching and observations and; (c) assess student growth in SEL and drum/dance skills self-efficacy, and assessing teacher growth in SEL and arts integration practices. The project uses quantitative surveys to measure student SEL self-efficacy growth, and qualitative interviews (Charmaz, 2006) to gain deeper understanding of outcomes for both teachers and students, and seeks to lay powerful foundations for SEL arts integration work in one school community and to establish a model for moving this field of research and practice forward.

Author

• Yorel Lashley, University of Wisconsin - Madison