I am a proponent of Social Emotional Learning after taking a
couple of professional development classes on the topic. As a school based speech-language pathologist,
I did not have this in my training in the 90’s and none of my professional
development up to this point involved SEL.
I am the one who is proactively seeking the information so that I can
incorporate this into my therapy sessions.
Back in March of 2023, I began my yoga training and a part of my
training was on social emotional learning.
I feel that there is so much more that I need to know that I continue to
seek classes on the topic.
I have seen how our children have changed in the 18 years
that I’ve been a practicing clinician in the schools. Students are coming into school with so much
baggage, trauma, issues at home…whatever you want to call it. They are struggling on all fronts. Some of these kids are way too young to be
dealing with what they are dealing with and yes, we see the outbursts at school
as a result. I work with a few kids that
don’t have any support at home when it comes to academic and speech work. I think that SEL begins at home. For those students that don’t have the
support at home, I think that they are at a higher risk of social, emotional,
physical and mental health issues.
In my therapy room, I come and get my students so that we
have the opportunity to talk in the hallway on our way to therapy. It is their time to talk about the things
that are on their minds and to talk about the things that they did over the
weekend. In my therapy room, we talk
about raising our hands when we want to share out and being respectful to other’s
perspectives. When someone is being
disrespectful, I talk it out. We analyze
what just happened, how it made the other person feel and what could have been
done differently and what needs to happen now (an apology). When my students get stuck when working on
therapy tasks, I no longer jump in. I model
how they could ask for assistance. We
then talk about what the problem is and I ask questions to get them thinking
about different ways to solve the problem so that in the end, they solved the
problem and I point that out to them. That
they can be good problem solvers. When
doing a literacy unit, I always talk about how the character is feeling but
then tie it in to the student. How would
you feel if you were in that situation and what would you do? I’m hoping it provides them with good coping
skills down the road.
