My Goal to become an Social-emotional Learning (SEL) instructional Coach:
The improver’s guide was inspired by my friend Phoebe who’s the administrative leader in a P12 school Kaiwen Academy in Beijing, China. Phoebe asked me (translated from Chinese)
“Do you have any SEL-related resources for high schoolers? I'm currently planning a class meeting (主题班会), but it's really quite dull. High school students are already forming their own worldview, they have a sense of "I don't need you to get involved in my ideas", which makes it harder to organize a class activity. Their responses and interactions in those class meetings are hard to follow as well, probably because they haven't established a safe environment, or the relationship with each other has not been created well. This is the current situation of the school— they just can't get along further and deeper. Based on this presupposition, is any good strategy/content/approach to support students develop ethical conduct education( moral education德育工作)?
Therefore, I created an interactive infographic for some educators like Phoebe to know more about how to integrate the whole-child approach, especially Social Emotional Learning into a school.
I hope to start from there, but I’ll be continuously creating more resources and practical tools for educators who are like me: a crossover educator.
The purpose of this was inspired by my dear cohort Michelle Santoro Cavassa (learn more about Michelle here) and she inspired my idea of building resource and community for those “spaceships builder”:
“ I don't believe transformational leadership is hard to find in education. I have encountered many leaders in education that have been what I consider transformational. I love the quote "Education reform can take different forms some people are building spaceships and others are upgrading an old car."Both leaders display characteristics that are transformational, the system they are working within is different as is their approach. They are also faulted, as faulted as they are transformational, so are their systems. One important part of being a transformational leader is to be willing to learn from other systems. Spaceship builders need to learn from the car mechanics and vice versa. If we can more effectively acknowledge what’s working, and what’s not, in a system we can get both vehicles moving in more effective ways. Maybe this is the most important characteristic of a transformational leader.”
The objective of this improver’s guide is to enable an innovative educator to observe innovative education from all over the world, to experience how they communicate, how they think from different perspectives, and how they answer critical questions in education. All of this pieced together my understanding of "learning" and "education" and led me to the essential question for this improver’s guide - how do these great educators grow up? Do innovative educators share common traits?