RIGOR Unveiled: A Video-Enhanced Flipbook to Promote Teacher Expertise in Relationship Building, Instruction, Goals, Organization, and Relevance

[00:01] SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Nancy Fry and Doug Fisher of San Diego State University and Health Sciences High and Middle College. They are the co-authors with Dominique Smith, of all learning is social and emotional learning, helping students develop essential skills for the classroom and beyond.

[00:38] Announcer:

And now our feature presentation.

[00:41] SPEAKER_02:

Nancy and Doug, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Thank you.

[00:43] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much.

[00:45] SPEAKER_02:

Such an honor to speak with you as always, and so exciting to see this collaboration between the three of you who have worked together not only at San Diego State, but also at the school where you work and maintain a residency and play an important role there at Health Sciences High and Middle College. I wonder if you could set up for us the work in your school and the work in your research that this book came out of, because you do have kind of a unique working relationship there at the university and the school.

[01:14] SPEAKER_00:

The school has been a wonderful place for us to be able to learn from and learn with. As co-founders of the school, along with our colleague, Ian Pumpian, it has been a place for us to be able to explore ideas, to be able to work closely with teachers, students, and families to find out what works and how it works and what are the best conditions under which that we can make effective practices happen.

[01:46] SPEAKER_01:

I think being around health sciences allows us to try things on. We get ideas from other people's research, and then we have to think about how can we make this happen with hundreds and hundreds of students and all their teachers? And that's the challenge, the relationship, the privilege. of working in a school each day is being able to try things on.

[02:07] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. It's got to keep you honest in a way that most researchers don't have the privilege of being kept honest, to have real teachers and students depending on you on a regular basis to immediately give you that feedback on what you're cooking up on the research side, huh?

[02:21] SPEAKER_01:

That's a good way of putting it, I think. It keeps us honest. We don't write about things that we haven't seen happening and being implemented in our school.

[02:30] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And your co-author, Dominique Smith, is the chief of educational services and teacher support there at the school and was one of your doc students as well. Is that right?

[02:39] SPEAKER_01:

That is true. So he runs all the teacher support, teacher evaluation, all the coaching and support for classroom instruction. And yes, he was a doctoral student, but he comes out of social work. He was an MSW. And so his view of started around the social development, connections, networks, those kinds of things. So it's really interesting to watch the merging of high-quality instruction, which Nancy and I have been working on for a lot of years, and this idea of social and emotional learning.

[03:10]

And we titled it All Learning is Social and Emotional because every time an adult has an interaction with a kid, there is the potential to address social and emotional growth. It could be positive or it could be negative, but it will be. There is always the social emotional learning happening in the class.

[03:31] SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. Whether you intend to or not, you're always teaching around that by the interactions you have, whether they be positive or negative. You're showing children and adolescents how it is that they should react to the world.

[03:46] SPEAKER_02:

I think there's this surge in interest in our profession in social and emotional learning, and we've seen the emergence of many programs for social and emotional learning. But in the book, you argue that, right in the title, that all learning is social and emotional, and it doesn't have to be something that we teach in isolation.

[04:04] SPEAKER_00:

That's the real danger, I think, of social and emotional learning, is that in some cases, it really is seen as a program. It's seen as a set of lessons that happen at a certain time of the week. There's a designated lesson. And beyond that, there isn't a lot of intentionality around how it is that we weave that through the other academic experiences that students are having. Many of those programs have great launching points for being able to develop some initial information and understanding about those ideas. But if as teachers, We're not showing our students how we live and breathe those concepts and how characters that they meet in books, for example, live and breathe those concepts.

[04:56]

Then we've really left some important ideas on the classroom floor. We haven't. really been able to elevate it so that students are able to more fully incorporate this into their own personal lives.

[05:11] SPEAKER_02:

Well, let's jump into some of the specific skills that we can teach, not just as standalones, but as really a part of our curriculum, a part of our content area, work, a part of our everyday instruction within every subject area. What are some of the key skills that come to mind first?

[05:29] SPEAKER_01:

We read... hundreds of studies, articles, policy papers to figure out what we thought and what we could implement in schools here in San Diego. And we organized them a little bit differently than some might. So when we looked, our analysis said one area that we need to develop is students' agency and identity.

[05:50]

And the things that teachers do and say can develop agency and identity. And I'll have Nancy talk about that in a second. The second area we thought about was around emotional regulation. How do we get students to learn what those emotions are, how to regulate those emotions and how to recognize that emotions are part of our human existence and that we have appropriate and inappropriate responses to those emotions. The third area was around cognitive regulation. Closely tied with emotional regulation is cognitive regulation.

[06:21]

So thinking around your goals and being metacognitively aware and setting your aspirations and all the kinds of things about why we do what we do in school. The fourth area was around social relationships, social skills and relationships, and helping students think about how to develop, maintain, and repair relationships in real time. And then the fifth area, which I think is somewhat unique, is this idea of public spirit. That we really want students to engage in leadership and we want them to develop their thinking and we want them to take action in their community and do great things. So we organized ours into those five tenets for social and emotional learning and then we can get into some specifics about how teachers might go about helping students.

[07:10] SPEAKER_02:

You know, it sounds like the first thing that's happening when we break it down that way is we're getting more granular about things that we might typically oversimplify into the categories of, say, academic work ethic and discipline. Right. Like we want our students to work hard. We want them to behave well and to act well and to, you know, become the kind of people that we want them to be. But often we don't translate that into those specific skills. We don't get granular enough.

[07:38]

And we think in terms of these kind of overly broad categories. So I love the specificity there that you're saying we need to look at emotional regulation, cognitive regulation, social skills, public spirit, identity and agency. And Nancy, let's jump into that identity and agency. What did you find?

[07:54] SPEAKER_00:

I think in particular, and going at that granular level, as you said, I'll take on one aspect of that. And that is around the idea of growth mindset and its related concepts around perseverance and grit. Those are certainly familiar terms, terms that have become so familiar within the education community. And yet what is often misinterpreted around that work is that A growth mindset, for example, is simply encouraging students to try hard things. And it's more complex than that. And one of the ways that we found that you can truly incorporate growth mindset as well as perseverance and grit is as a teacher by sharing what your difficulties are.

[08:46]

And I'm not talking about 20 years ago when I had a difficult time doing this. But what are the things that I'm faced with right now? What's something that I'm really working on? So as an example of that, in the school where Doug and Dominique and I work, there are teachers within the school that have put signs out in front of their class that say, here's what I'm working on right now. Here's what I'd like to get feedback about. And so what their students are seeing every single day is here's something that my teacher is kind of struggling with right now and is not afraid to be able to ask for feedback, to try new things, and quite frankly, to be able to fail forward and try again.

[09:35] SPEAKER_02:

I love it. And that's going to sound very familiar to anyone familiar with Readers and Writers Workshop, the modeling and the metacognition that teachers do to share with their students their own process as writers. So you're saying to do that in anything that they're working on, to model that sense of agency and openness to feedback.

[09:54] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. As teachers, all of us are striving to improve our practice with each year that goes by. I don't know a good teacher that says, hey, I hit my high point five years ago, and I'm just going to continue to do the same thing. We're always looking to improve our own practice, but rarely do we actually share our own goals with our students to say, here's what I'm working on this year. I know that this is something that I can be better at. I'm not afraid to be able to set those goals.

[10:28]

I'm not afraid to be able to tell people that I'd like feedback. I'm not afraid to try something that I'm not completely comfortable with. And that's exactly what it is that we want our students to embrace in our classrooms.

[10:42] SPEAKER_01:

Justin, as Nancy was talking, I was thinking about something else that we've been she and I have been talking a lot about lately, and that is teacher turnover. The book is really about what you do with kids as they grow up, children and young adults. But teacher agency is also really important. And there's a new Learning Policy Institute paper out that Linda Darling-Hammond's team did around teacher turnover. And one of the lessons learned is when teachers don't have a lot of agency, if they don't feel like their instructional efforts are resulting in learning, if they don't feel like their requests and advocacy for changes in their school are being heard by their leader, if we reduce teacher agency, they turn over well so when I think about agency and identity yes it's super important when you're five and when you're 15 but it's also important when you're 35 that as leaders we need to think about our teachers sense of agency

[11:39]

them having more agency, feeling really good about the efforts they put forth, also help their kids do better.

[11:46] SPEAKER_02:

So the second big category of skill that you identify in the book is emotional regulation. And of course, we would all love for our students to be more emotionally regulated. We would love for ourselves to be more emotionally regulated. But we don't always think of that as a skill. How did you discover that that was in fact a teachable skill and rather than just, you know, kids don't.

[12:10] SPEAKER_01:

There's a lot of people who've been writing about aspects of emotional regulation, like impulse control and delayed gratification. But I think it starts when kids recognize the emotion they're experiencing. They learn the name of that emotion, what that emotion feels like, and what are appropriate responses in the situation you're in for that emotion. I think we still see a lot of people shutting kids down when they have an emotional reaction to something, you know, not too excited, you're not allowed to be mad, you're not allowed to get hurt, all those kinds of things. And we profile this classroom in which a student is telling on another student, the student gets caught, he's embarrassed, he has to change his clip in front of the class, then he's angry. So he says something that he shouldn't says about a quote, stupid project.

[12:59]

Well, that gets him sent to the principal's office. There was no ability to emotionally regulate. The teacher punished the kid. The kid felt bad. There was no naming of the emotion. There was no appropriate responding to that emotion.

[13:12]

So we think about these situations that occur daily. They're commonplace. Did the child get a sense to say, this is what that emotion's called, this is what it feels like, and here's how I can respond. As Nancy said earlier, one of the really powerful ways of helping students do that is to watch how characters do it in the books we read, because we can start to project, oh, that person, that character's worried a lot, and when she's worried, this is what happens to her, these are the good things and the bad things about worrying, so maybe that's me, maybe I'm worried, and these are the actions I can take when I feel that way. So that's starting off with naming it. Regulating it's really important.

[13:53]

And then as students recognize their emotional lives, then we can start working on things like impulse control and delayed gratification and some of those repairing of those emotional outbursts that have to happen. And we've got to the point where things like clip charts, things like public humiliation are just not doing any good. We really have to think through. Dominique and a colleague, Leanne Young, wrote an ed leadership article last year on clip charts. And it was the number one most downloaded ed leadership article of the year. So obviously they hit some sort of chord with the profession of saying, this is not really working.

[14:33]

And they tell a story about a kid who was on the lowest level, the red level, and it's February and the kid's still on the red level. This kid's not learning to manage behavior, emotions, reactions, appropriate and inappropriate because of this clip chart system. So we can do a lot better work, a lot better job in having kids understand their emotional lives and how to appropriately respond to those.

[14:59] SPEAKER_02:

And I think there's such an important distinction there between having the emotion and acting on it or responding to it. Because, I mean, I would not feel comfortable saying that it is our place as educators to dictate what emotions students are allowed to have and not allowed to have. Right. Like that's kind of a given that we can't control what emotions we have in the first place. But you're saying you teach students that how we respond to our emotions is something that we can learn to control.

[15:29] SPEAKER_01:

Right. And one of the challenges is people say, I mean, we have been in classrooms when people say things like, boys don't cry. And we've been in classrooms when people say, suck it up. And essentially they're saying to a kid, your emotion is not appropriate. It's not allowed. We can't, as you just said, Justin, we can't tell kids what emotions they can and can't have.

[15:51]

We can help them. recognize the emotion, know the name of that emotion, and how to respond when that emotion occurs in appropriate classroom ways. Like, what are you allowed to do when you're super excited in the classroom versus when you're super excited with your family at an amusement park? That's different. The environment helps us determine what the appropriate response to an emotion might be.

[16:13] SPEAKER_02:

And I love, Doug, hearing the English teacher in you come out and say that this is something that you can teach through maybe a novel that you're reading and a character that you're following in that novel and seeing how they respond to and articulate and name their emotions and learn how to handle them. And I wonder for this or any of the skills that you talk about in the book, what are some other examples that come to mind of subject-specific ways? Because again, we're talking about teaching these skills not in standalone lessons, not just in homeroom, not just in an elementary morning meeting, but even in a secondary subject area, you know, a math teacher, a science teacher, a band teacher. What are some of the other subject-specific ways that these are coming up in your school?

[16:54] SPEAKER_00:

I'll offer an example, and it really kind of falls into the realm of cognitive regulation. Cognitive regulation is a place where we are really looking at how it is that students enact a variety of academic behaviors in order to be able to learn. And one of those aspects of cognitive regulation is around decision making. You have to be able to make decisions and kind of figure your way through a problem. Well, that often happens in math class. The students are taught a variety of heuristics around how it is that they approach a particular math problem, that they have to figure out what it is that they already know, that they have to figure out what it is that the problem is really asking them to do, to be able to summarize what it is that you know, to be able to figure out what your goals are, monitor what your progress is, and so on, to work your way through a math problem.

[17:53]

And yet rarely is that leveraged in a way to be able to say, hey, not only is this a good way to work your way through a math problem, this is actually a good way to work your way through a problem that you confront in your life, not strictly confined to being able to work through a complex math problem of one kind or another. That decision-making process that's taught in math class has wide application beyond being able to solve a math problem.

[18:31] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and I love that, you know, as educators, we always believe that what we're teaching in our specific class has application far beyond, right? Like, that's something we've always believed. But I love being able to actually name that specifically and say, you know, this is cognitive regulation. This is emotional regulation. You know, and that is a transferable skill. You know, you're going to use this next period, too, when you go on to your next class.

[18:53]

You know, it seems like so much of the value here is helping students become aware of it, you know, pointing out when they're doing it.

[19:00] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. I'll give another example that goes across classes, and that's around seeking help. We need to help students, first of all, recognize the difference between when it's productive struggle and when it's destructive struggle. There is a difference between the two. And at some point, you probably need to engage in some help seeking. If you come and visit at our school, you'll find that in lots of classrooms, There's actually a poster that we call the helping behaviors, the helping curriculum.

[19:35]

And that's essentially this, that all students need to know how to do and should have the opportunities to do every single day these four things. They need to be able to seek help when they need it, to ask for help. They need to be able to offer help to somebody else when they need it. They need to be able to accept help when it is offered to them. And at times they need to politely decline that help because it's still a productive struggle and they want to try it a bit more. Now in the world of work, that's often described as being a set of soft skills, that those are exactly the kinds of things that teams need to be able to rely on.

[20:22]

We want to make sure that those opportunities are baked right into all of their content classes. And that help seeking, offering help, being able to accept help and being able to politely decline help are a marker of how it is that you learn in this space.

[20:42] SPEAKER_02:

I was thinking about a story I heard recently from a colleague who had been ghosted. Their company had been ghosted by a new hire who was supposedly working on this important big project. And yeah, they have it under control. It's coming along. And then all of a sudden, the person quit. and didn't come back, and it turned out that they had not been working on it at all, or they had started working on it but realized that they needed help, realized that they didn't know everything they needed to know in order to be successful with the project.

[21:14]

And because they didn't have that skill of asking for help and figuring out, you know, when am I in productive struggle versus when do I really need to ask for assistance with this, their only recourse was to walk away and say, I guess I'm just gonna have to leave this job. And that was such a tragedy to me because the organization fell behind because they thought this project was handled and this person had a pretty bad turn in their career as a result of just not being able to ask for that help. So I love that being a part of every classroom every day that students have the opportunity to ask for help, provide help, you know, get that help when they need it. Continue to struggle if they don't need it, because we don't want to over scaffold. We don't want to, you know, over assist kids when they are engaged in productive struggle. So I love that framework for cognitive regulation.

[22:01] SPEAKER_01:

And Justin, thinking about the person you're talking about now, that person has an experience that reduced his or her efficacy. that next time that person goes in, that person has less efficacy, self-efficacy So that person's been harmed by that experience because that person didn't feel comfortable enough asking for help.

[22:22] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. And they're probably not going to take a job at a similar level of challenge when with the help, they absolutely could have been successful. You know, if they had had the wherewithal to reach out and ask for that help and not feel like that was going to be worse than walking away, boy, things could have been so different. Let's shift gears a little bit, but on a similar note and talk about social skills. Now, of course, we talk a lot about social skills at all levels of K-12 education. We want our students to develop social skills.

[22:53]

Often we think about it the most when we feel like the social skills are lacking, but how can we teach social skills across the curriculum, across subject areas and set students up for success in terms of their social skills?

[23:06] SPEAKER_01:

And there are a wide range of social skills that we should and can teach students. And we overview a number of the social skills that are common in our society, that are also culturally laden, that we want kids to learn. The big takeaway for us was really about the social skills and relationships, that we build these social skills so kids can have productive relationships with their peers, with their teachers, with their families. And we spent some time thinking about How do you help people develop healthy, productive, humane, growth-producing relationships? And that's a big important part is we tend to think that students will develop relationships rather automatically or incidentally. And there's actually things we can do that help kids develop healthy relationships with others, with themselves.

[23:59]

And when the relationship is strained, we can help repair that relationship. So do we have have we taught the social skills that, wow, you hurt someone's feelings? How do you repair that? You did something that you now regret or you did something that you didn't know was going to hurt anybody's feelings, but it certainly did or caused them harm in another way. How do you repair that? So again, we do a lot of stuff about looking at how characters in books do this.

[24:27]

We do a lot of things like meetups and buddy ups where they have a chance to talk to one person and they get to know that person. We do a lot of things about getting to know the history or the story behind your name. Learning about each other so we can get a sense of what are the kinds of social niceties and social skills that needed to be developed with students. a lot of circle processes, a lot of class meetings that give kids opportunities to practice their social skills. We also take a perspective that if we're going to teach all these social skills and these relational skills, classrooms should not be places where kids sit and listen for an hour on end. If we're going to teach these social skills, students have to have lots of opportunities to practice and make mistakes and then learn from those mistakes.

[25:18]

So we should see lots of collaborative learning going on in classrooms so that students can practice the social skills and inevitably make errors as they negotiate complex social relationships so they can learn the next level of them.

[25:32] SPEAKER_00:

I think it's really important that, again, we model how it is that we utilize those social skills, not only in how it is that we navigate our relationships with other adults in the school, but that as well, we make sure to name and label when there are a variety of social skills that are being utilized within the classroom or where it is that we need to improve. I think discussion opportunities, for example, are another place where those social skills become really important. So how is it as teachers that we make sure every single year and in every classroom that we have expectations of ourselves about how it is that we engage in discussions with our classmates, for example, how we're able to listen as an ally, how it is that we are able to disagree with someone else without being disagreeable.

[26:31]

That really is the context for learning. But if students are not able to come together and if we are not able to say, here are the things that we want to make sure that we're working on, within our discussions, then we leave students sort of abandoned to whatever skills they happen to already have in possession. And I think this is especially a place that is at risk for older students, because Doug and I often will hear people say, well, you know, that kid's in eighth grade, he should already know how to do this. And it's important to note that yes, Maybe he knows how to do this, but it's clear that he doesn't know how to do this in your class. And if that's the case, then we need to teach what those social skills are and how they're utilized in the context of this class.

[27:27] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And I love that sense of responsibility that we can take as educators that, you know, yes, maybe the kid should already know that by this point in their life. But if they don't, you know, if it was academic content, we wouldn't say, well, you should already know that. So because you don't too bad, you know, we close the gaps, right? We fill it in when we discover a gap. Let's close with public spirit.

[27:48]

Then you have a chapter in the book on teaching public spirit. What does that mean? And how do we approach it in our different disciplines?

[27:55] SPEAKER_00:

I think for social and emotional learning, this is really where it is that we want to get students to. It's the outward facing aspect of social and emotional learning. You know, when we started this conversation, we talked about agency and identity, really kind of centering in on the internal life of the student. But with each of these tenants, we've broadened that out, making that extend further and further into larger networks. And public spirit is the largest network of all. How is it that as learners, how is it that we can serve our communities, whether they're our classroom communities, the communities that we live in, or the larger context?

[28:40]

And we want students to be able to leverage what it is that they know about themselves, what it is that they are learning about the world in order to be able to affect change. In fact, dare I say, This is about civic dispositions and it's about civic action.

[28:56] SPEAKER_02:

So important. And we know that ultimately that's the outcome of what we're doing, right? We are in the business of helping people become adults and they're going to become adults one way or the other. But if they can enter the world with that public spirit, we are not just as a school, but as a society going to be far better off.

[29:14] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I suppose one way possibly of looking at this is that the students that we teach today are are the exact people who are going to decide how it is that you and I and the rest of our generation are taking care of when we need them.

[29:28] SPEAKER_02:

So the book is All Learning is Social and Emotional, Helping Students Develop Essential Skills for the Classroom and Beyond. Nancy and Doug, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[29:40] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much for this opportunity, Justin. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

[29:44] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.