What's Joy Got To Do With It?

Traditionally, it is the time of year when many of us reflect on personal goals, set intentions for the coming year and look for a fresh start in our classrooms and workplaces. This personal and professional period of reflection and reset may look and feel different as we face new daily challenges in our return to school. As a school division, we can look to our strategic framework, Compass to 2025, to organize our reflections and guide our shared intentions for student well-being. Goal 2 guides our collective efforts to “Create an inclusive learning environment that supports the physical and mental health of all students and strengthens the social-emotional skills they need to become balanced, resilient learners who are personally and socially responsible.” Social-emotional learning (SEL) helps students thrive in school and life by supporting learners to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.

In this issue:

• Three Key Messages About SEL

• Brene Brown’s Value Naming Strategy

• Connie Hamilton’s Elevate Student Status Approach from Cult of Pedagogy

• Virginia Beach Middle’s Intersection of Academics and SEL

• Professional Learning Opportunities

In VBCPS, we have three core beliefs, or key messages about SEL:

• Key Message #1: Social-emotional learning helps people develop the essential skills they need to succeed in school and life.

• Key Message #2: Social-emotional learning is focused on creating a safe and inclusive learning environment for all students.

• Key Message #3: Social-emotional learning is about the well-being of young people and adults.

Each of these messages is further supported in the VBCPS SEL Message Maps. For the remainder of the 2021-2022 school year, each edition of the Joy Newsletter will highlight resources and supports that align with one of the five key SEL competencies outlined in the VBCPS SEL Framework.

January kicks off with Self-Awareness. In VBCPS self-awareness is defined as, “Identifying one’s thoughts, emotions and strengths, and recognizing how they influence one’s choices and behavior.” The aligned skills for this competency are to:

• Identify feelings and emotions

• Recognize interests, strengths and personal values

• Develop a growth mindset

• Build self-efficacy and develop a positive identity

The first key message in the VBCPS SEL Framework focuses on helping people develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they need to succeed in school and life. One of the key SEL competencies needed to be successful in life is self-awareness. Setting intentions for the new year requires an awareness of how our own thoughts, emotions, and strengths influence our choices and behaviors as leaders. Additionally, these intentions often directly reflect our values. Brene Brown (@BreneBrown), author of Dare to Lead, defines values as “a way of being or behaving or believing that we hold most important.”

In Colin Breck’s (@breckcs) blog post “Understanding Our Core Values: An Exercise for Individuals and Teams,” he shares the power of explicitly exploring our personal values in order to “improve self-awareness, understand each other better, identify leadership opportunities, and support each other in our values.” He goes on to state that “as leaders, we need to be clear about what we believe and hold important, and we need to ensure that our intentions, words, thoughts, and behaviours align with our values.”

Breck suggests that leaders, defined by Brene Brown as “anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential,” and their teams explore individual values and related behaviors using Brene Brown’s Value Naming Strategy in her book Dare to Lead. Using Brown’s list of values, Breck had his team individually identify two key personal values and the behaviors that support those values. After individual exploration, team members sat down with Breck to name their values and associated behaviors, creating a “shared experience, building trust and connection.” From this experience, Breck gained insight into his own values, broadened his understanding of his colleagues’ values, and ultimately helped his team identify areas where they could make a meaningful impact.

As you set intentions in your building for the new year that will have a meaningful impact on students, consider trying Brown’s Value Naming Strategy with your teams.

The VBCPS SEL Framework identifies self-awareness as a core competency that fosters meaningful collaboration, outlined in key message one as an essential skill for success. By becoming more aware of personal values and the values of teammates, leaders will be better able to build the collective collaboration capacity of their teams to meet the needs of students.

Learn more about Breck and his team’s work with Brene Brown’s list of values by reading the full post HERE.

In the VBCPS Graduate Profile, we envision that every graduate will be future-ready. One of the attributes of a future-ready student is that they are a resilient learner who is able to view “set-backs” as an opportunity to grow and who has the confidence to take on challenges. To prepare students to be future-ready, resilient learners, then we must create safe learning environments where students are aware of their strengths.

To guide the work of preparing future-ready, resilient learners, we can use the key messages and competencies found in the VBCPS SEL Framework. The second key message in the framework is focused on creating a safe and inclusive learning environment for all students by fostering positive connections between students. These positive connections between students will build an environment that promotes self-awareness, the ability to recognize one’s strengths, increase self-efficacy, and build a positive identity as defined in the five core competencies of the VBCPS SEL Framework.

In Connie Hamilton's 2021 Cult of Pedagogy article and interview titled The Importance of Maslow’s Fourth Tier, she references Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to draw attention to the critical need to build the esteem of students through authentic and positive classroom peer interactions. These interactions, according to Hamilton, will “motivate students to achieve and be willing to take risks.” Esteem can be built in many ways. Hamilton states that “Maslow identifies two categories within the esteem stage: (1) esteem for oneself or self-esteem, and (2) esteem from others (Maslow, 1987). It is the second type that includes reputation and respect from others that he claims is most important for children and adolescents.” Below are two strategies to build esteem that prioritize a student’s need to be respected and valued by their peers.

Strategy 1: Elevate a Student’s Status

Hamilton shares the following strategy for building student esteem that emphasizes Self-Awareness and fosters an inclusive learning environment as attention is drawn to the learner’s strengths and the value they bring to the classroom community.

During your next classroom discussion, listen for and create opportunities to elevate a student’s status by:

• Intentionally soliciting affirmations by calling attention to contributions.

• Labeling or narrating examples of affirmation when they occur.

Strategy 2: Accountable Talk

Another strategy that supports Hamilton’s emphasis on leveraging peer interactions and responses to create esteem-building opportunities is Accountable Talk, located in the SEL Stockpile. This strategy emphasizes Self-Awareness and an inclusive learning environment as learners articulate their thoughts and respond to others through meaningful discussions with their peers. When peers engage in this authentic dialogue, esteem is built as peers affirm and add to classmates’ ideas.

During your next classroom discussion, encourage students to engage in positive and authentic connections by:

• Sharing their own thoughts using the suggest, text evidence, and beliefs stems.

• Responding to peer’s thinking using the agree, disagree, and clarify stems.

Both strategies above create authentic opportunities for esteem building from peers. In her interview, Hamilton shares that early in her career she tried “to shower them [students] with positive attention when they did something good. My hope was that the recognition I provided fulfilled their need to be affirmed, elevated their status in my classroom.” She goes on to share the flaw in that approach. It dismisses the need for esteem that is built by authentic interactions with others. “Meeting esteem needs … can’t be faked,” Hamilton states. When we build safe and supportive learning environments that authentically boost the esteem of students in our classrooms, students will become future-ready resilient learners, who are able to view “set-backs'' as an opportunity to grow and are confident in their ability to take on challenges.

Learn more practical strategies for building esteem by reading or listening to Hamilton’s full interview HERE.

The third key message in the VBCPS SEL Framework focuses on the well-being of people and self-awareness, the ability to recognize one’s feelings and emotions, is important for being ready to learn. Inclusive Openings are strategies that build community, create a climate of inclusion, and communicate belonging.

This month we are thrilled to spotlight Andrea Kenyon (@AndreaKenyon8), an 8th grade math teacher at Virginia Beach Middle School (@VBMiddle). Ms. Kenyon integrated an Inclusive Opener, one of the signature SEL strategies, into academics putting a unique spin on Marc Brackett’s (@marcbrackett) Mood Meter. Students graphed an ordered pair representing how they felt using the labels on the x and y axes. The graph shows feelings that are opposites on each axis. The x ranges from tiring on the negative side to energizing on the positive side. The feelings on the y axis range from exhausting on the negative side to restful on the positive side. Ms. Kenyan’s example point at coordinates (3, 4) indicates that she feels energized and that her break was restful.

See the original Twitter post by clicking HERE.

Show off your SEL work by posting a picture on Twitter. Tag @PGIVBCPS and use #VBSEL & #SelfAwareness to be featured in this newsletter.

How can we start this new year happier? Things have certainly not been easy over the last year, and we are still in difficult and uncertain times. The best way to try to handle our difficult emotions and experiences is by focusing on what we can control. This month, we're encouraging everyone to focus on small steps to try to boost happiness - for ourselves and others around us - to spread kindness and hopefully inspire others to do the same.

Click HERE to learn more and download the calendar.

As you follow along with the calendar, tag @PGIVBCPS and use #VBSEL & #VBHasJoy.