SEL in the Classroom

This year I focused my ICDP on becoming better at explicitly implementing SEL within my classroom. I chose to focus on my opening and closing of the day this year. I had hoped to get further in my journey, but I had a student teacher which did not allow me to implement for as long as I would have hoped. Throughout the process this year I found authentic tools to use as the opening and good things within my classroom to build relationships with students. I also used some tools from Jeffrey Benson in helping with my closing of the day or my launch. Benson's book provides many good prompts for closures to lessons. I chose what to implement based on what the lesson is for the day. For my good things I started to use some questions that I found through a teacher on Tik Tok. Doing the different questions each day and still continuing to do Bop or Flop has helped me to better build relationships with students this year. I have also started to use different launches. One that I probably use the most is with the last 30 second of class having students look around their seats and making sure they have everything and everything is picked up. I have also used launches such as find a partner and share the most important take away you had from the lesson, discuss something from the lesson you need a little more help with and questions along those lines to have students reflect over the learning. I feel overall that I still have more work to do on my ICDP because I want to continue to be intentional with SEL but in ways that are authentic to me. I would like to start off next year having a focus each day and being intentional with linking them to the SEL competencies. I also would like to have some SEL integrated with my formative assessments. This is going to be a continual goal whether I use it as my ICDP next year or not because it is important work.

In this video I talk through what I have implemented this year as well as provide video examples of how I start my class each day and different launches that you can use.