Social and Emotional Learning for successful schools

Course ID

Title of the course: Social and Emotional Learning for successful schools
Course provider: Teacher Academy.
Place: Barcelona.
Period: from 23rd to 28th January 2023.

Objective

Experience

The course called “Social and Emotional Learning”,  organized by Europass Teacher Academy offers concrete tools and strategies for conflict management, stress reduction, and resilience will that empower the participants to not only do SEL activities but to be an SEL educator:  all of these actions are in line with the 1.4 goal of the PNRR, which is supposed to increase educational success and reduce early school leaving.

The course focuses especially on :

• Understand and implement aspects of the CASEL integrated framework;
• Gain greater emotional and social literacy;
• Experience an SEL environment first-hand;
• Increase self-awareness, empathy, resilience, and assertiveness;
• Implement strategies for effective communication, Mindfulness, and collaboration in a tailor-made program to bring home;
• Immerse themselves in an environment of empowerment that will enable participants to continue generating a culture of SEL in their own schools.

EXPERIENCE

The course was based on practical and experiential activities that help participants understand better how today’s educators need to know that the key to optimal learning lies in creating a school community that supports, teaches, and models Emotional and Social Intelligence: our students face a world of complex relationships that require them to identify and manage their emotions, interact constructively with others, understand healthy boundaries, and take responsibility. 

These “intelligences”, as described by Daniel Goleman, can be incorporated into our teaching practices through Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) methods and strategies.

Europass Teacher Academy organized for us guided a tour of the city, gave us tickets to museums and exhibitions, and planned some outdoor activities.

As an ice-breaking morning activity we tried to pose as the characters of famous works of art, and in this picture we are replicating the painting “Primavera” of Sandro Botticelli.

Among the various educational proposals on storytelling, each group developed a story by linking the drawings and the words that had been proposed by the other colleagues: with this activity we were able to combine creativity and inclusivity using different techniques and strategies that will help us to involve all of our students, even the most introverted ones or those with special needs.

This image explains the six main emotions we talked about in the presentation of SEL (Social and Emotional Learning), connecting them to Plutchik’s wheel of emotions, which can be inserted into mindfulness activities to recognize and identify the various aspects of our personalities, at the beginning and at the end of the lesson.

In this photo we are in the University garden to do a mindfulness activity based on the search for natural elements to reflect on, through the use of photography.

At the end of the course all the participants received the final diploma and we shared a moment of greetings and farewells, and we went all together to a characteristic restaurant to eat paella.