SEL from the perspective of a high school administrator and counselor

SEL has become a buzzword; positive and negative over the past two years. We expanded our interview this month to engage with both a high school assistant principal and a high school counselor. Veronica York and Jessica Graf both work at Townsend Harris High School, a selective public NYC high school located in Queens.

Veronica York, is the Assistant Principal of Pupil Personnel Services, Music & Arts at Townsend Harris. She has 18 years of experience as an educator and school administrator. Ms. York is a Certified School Leader and School Counselor and throughout her career has overseen Guidance, Special Education, Music & Art. Ms. York has a strong background in social emotional relationships, administrative success and educational innovation. She was born and raised in Brooklyn and is a product of the NYC school system. She believes that student — staff relationships are the foundation to student success.

Jessica Graf is a school counselor completing her 6th year with the NYC Department of Education and 10th year of youth work. Having served young people in a range of settings, from college teaching, to community-based organizations to K-12 schools, she believes that all individuals deserve to feel holistically supported, respected and understood. She is a native New Yorker, public school graduate and toddler parent somehow surviving the pandemic.

Sarah: SEL has become a buzzword in education, especially during the pandemic. As a school leader, how do you define what SEL means to you, your staff and your students?

Veronica: Defining social emotional learning is the foundation to everything that we do. So, we have to care about the whole child and see the whole child in order to be able to educate the child. Although we’ve never spoken about it, as much as we do recently, I think I’ve used “whole child” and “how are we educating the whole child” and “are we caring about them emotionally” for a while now. SEL is lingo we’ve used so much in the past two years. It’s wonderful.

Jessica: It’s interesting to me on so many levels. I have a two-year-old at home and there’s so much parenting content and information out there that I think wasn’t in existence even 10 years ago. I do think there’s a general shift in how we approach our young people and how we think about their social and emotional needs. We try to recognize that they are human, they have feelings, they have emotions and their interactions and relationships with other people and the world matter. And all of those things are skills that can and should be built up whenever possible. So like Veronica said, I think when it comes to school, social and emotional learning has to be at the base of whatever we’re doing in terms of academics.

Veronica: I guess what bothers me about how it is defined in the broader world is that I think sometimes it’s looked at in isolation. Like here’s a lesson on SEL today, whereas it really should be part of everything that’s going on. Whether it’s finding opportunities to put kids in groups and building the conversational skills that we want them to be able to take into their later lives or, giving them opportunities to reflect on identity or other aspects of their selves or their beliefs or their worldview. We talk about students writing across the curriculum, and writing should happen everywhere, and we should need to be able to explain ourselves, in written language, even in mathematics. Social Emotional Learning is the same thing, it needs to live everywhere. Or nothing is really happening. Learning and life is about building emotional connections. If we’re not emotionally connecting to any of it, because our students don’t feel emotionally connected to the adults in the room. They’ll get it on an exam. But will it make an impact?

Shared thoughts: All learning is inherently social and emotional– a process of building self-knowledge, learning how to be in healthy relationships with others, cultivating attitudes/worldviews, building a positive sense of identity, etc. SEL isn’t just a canned product to be discussed in isolation- it has to be part of everything we do. It is particularly interesting because looking at the professional world, many employers report that the skills they value most in prospective employees are “soft skills”- the ability to collaborate, relate to others, active listening, effective communication etc. In this light, SEL should absolutely be at the forefront of everything we do.

Sarah: Can you describe the formal and informal work your school has done with SEL?

Veronica: I think we’re really thoughtful and intentional and knowing that this is important, and this is a value that we keep and we continually say this to our community. We started off our faculty meeting at the beginning of the school year saying we need to take care of ourselves and everyone take a deep breath and let’s do some self care. We need to go back into the school year where this is our main focus, our foundation. Our expectation was that every single subject chose two lessons from “Better, Together: Back to School 2021”. This document provided lessons that had been adapted for the return to school during COVID-19. Throughout the entire school kids were getting multiple different lessons on social emotional learning. Teachers are able to build connections and get to know their students. Having teachers think “I could use things that you’re interested in”. We don’t always think of that as being social emotional learning, but that is exactly what it is, building connections. So that we know one another and the students feel valued. Being really intentional about our conversations and teaching adults how to do that is so much harder than I ever imagined. We did some coaching sessions with teachers, using the Student Perception Survey and targeting areas for development.

Jessica: I think it’s a blessing and a curse that our student body is so focused on schoolwork and their academics. They will always produce outstanding outcomes academically, but sometimes at the expense of their mental health and their emotional well being. So informally, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with kids letting them know that, in the larger scheme of things, “this doesn’t matter”. I try to model a more measured lens in my conversations with students– things like, “You know, you’ll look back on this and it will all be okay, or everything we’re dealing with is really hard and it’s no surprise to me that you’re crying in my office because yeah, it’s a global pandemic. And yeah, you’re a teenager and yeah, that was hard even before.” So reassuring them of that. I’ve called parents and asked them to pull back the pressure. The principal has put out letters to staff and families as well. I think moderating “this is hard” and “familial cultural influence” is a challenge, but a worthwhile discussion to have if we are prioritizing students’ psychological and emotional wellness. I think the most important thing we can do right now is just reassure them that it’s okay to be having a hard time, that struggling is to be expected, and that they don’t have to go through this alone.

Veronica: We’ve been running a lot of groups, counselors are pushing into classes, we’ve run classes on healthy relationships. We did a level one vocational assessment, like you do for students with IEPs for transition, for all students in the entire school. We could then make “one pagers” of information about each student and share that with all teachers. So they can hear directly from students about how they learn best. It gives them a little bit more information to really see the whole child.

Jessica: You [Veronica] did such a good job advocating for more support staff. We have two new staff members this year: a social worker and an additional counselor. I don’t know what we would be doing if we didn’t have two other staff.

Highlights of SEL work from THHS:

• THHS has a physical and virtual zen den accessible to students
• Return to school SEL activities (Fall 2021) Better Together: Back to school 2021 document that was shared with all staff
• Screening tools for all students and working to enhance our MTSS model
• Providing mandated and at risk counseling, as well as referrals to community mental health resources
• Town hall meetings & grade level meetings

Sarah: What are the greatest challenges school leaders face in meeting the SEL of students?

Veronica: Wellness and social emotional learning impacts students and therefore has to be a focus at every leadership level. There are plenty of studies that say when you support the social emotional well being of your teachers, it has a positive impact on student learning; and we see this in practice. So the same is true when you are asking something really hard of the school leaders. If we’re talking about screeners, we have to start off with “how do we screen all students?” Nationally we were getting the message we should screen all students and it seemed like it was the right move. As a high school we wanted to be more inclusive and provide space for student voice, so we implemented self reflection SEL Level 1 google surveys. Allowing students to answer questions themselves. All leaders need to be really thoughtful and caring about our school staff. There’s not a single person walking through this world right now that isn’t in a state of crisis or trauma. We’re living through two years of trauma and something that we’ve never experienced. You need to care about the people in front of you and around you. I’ve read so much research out of the professional world that employers want the soft skills in their employees, they want creative thinking, they want the ability to collaborate, they want the relationship skills. How do we create communities where we’re valuing each other’s wellness, social emotional learning, and health? If we can create a community with that as the foundation, those students are going to be okay; because as a community we’re together and we’re taking care of each other.

Shared Thoughts:

• SEL is not just for students. Important to think about how to teach SEL to adults? This is a focus of current NYC DOE initiatives (citywide, DOE rolled out StrongResilientNYC– upcoming workshops such as “Starting with the Person in the Mirror: SEL for Adult Development”).
• Jessica created supports for teachers including sentence starters, guides for topics like: “How do you send an email to students”.
• School leaders have to be thoughtful and caring about teachers and students, doing the best we can and acknowledging this goes a long way.
• SEL cannot be a compliance task, it dilutes the meaning. It is fundamental to being human, if we look at it as compliance, or a scheduled part of the day, it doesn’t accomplish the real work or provide the skills to be a successful employee.

Sarah: You have touched on this already but would ask you to expand on what school leaders need to know to meet the SEL needs of students.

Veronica: You need to know you can’t learn without a strong foundation in SEL. I know that I can only change people by winning their hearts. So I need to make them emotionally connected. To value something. We could use data and data is financially motivating. But it’s not long lasting. Emotional connection is long lasting and gets you buy in and that’s where real change comes from. So I need to provide an emotional connection to why we all need social emotional learning and then how do we move that needle. So principals should be involved in student empathy interviews and really getting to know students and connecting with them emotionally so that they understand that value. Then we’re not just looking at scholarship reports. We’re sitting down and speaking to students about how they learned best, what they need. Tell me about positive experiences you’ve had in the classroom and tell me about a classroom where you’ve really struggled. So then as leaders, we are seeing classrooms from a different lens and from a student perspective,

Jessica: I think you also have to know where your staff is starting in terms of social and emotional learning if it’s going to be effective. You have to understand what the adults are bringing to the table, what parts of their own identities are showing up and perhaps impacting how they interact with students. Are there cultural biases that are playing out in the classroom? Do staff members have the self knowledge that we’re asking kids to develop? I believe that pre-work is essential for adults if we hope to truly support students’ SEL needs (I’m always reminded of the airplane safety analogy to ‘secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others’). Within the DOE’s current large-scale SEL efforts, there is a professional learning initiative for adults focusing on their own SEL skills.

Shared Thoughts:

• Know students well — this is always built into our school wide goals. We have seen a positive impact from digging into student perception surveys, level 1 screeners, learning style surveys, IEPs, focus groups, small group conversations, empathy interviews; leveraging the counseling department and support staff, involving student leaders in school decisions (e.g. student wellness, student government, School Leadership Team members), and grade level meetings.
• Understand family life and create opportunities for families to be involved in SEL
• Build relationships with community organizations
• Principals need to know that it matters; value it and make it a priority.

Sarah: If we know SEL is important, how can we make SEL meaningful and manageable as a mandate?

Veronica: We should have spent the summer really learning. There should have been a real institute about how we are coming back together, how we start off the school year, how we are celebrating learning? How are we celebrating coming back together and then how does that live every single day in our classrooms where we’re showing up? And again, we don’t all have to be perfect every day, as long as you’ve created those safe/brave spaces. Save/brave spaces where you can say that you are not okay, but I’m really trying. It’s okay for us to not be perfect everyday. It’s about us just showing up, the best we can. We need real meaningful training that’s intentional, and it has to be mandated. It can’t just be optional because people will go to what’s always been important to them. Training has to be built upon throughout the year. We need to create the time and space for it and make it a priority. All those things have to go into play, for something to be successful, to get buy-in and for us to do it with fidelity.

Jessica: I’ve not worked in a community school but I like the idea of a community school where not everything is falling on educators. Maybe that means you have a mental health partnership where there’s a clinic that does a portfolio of services within your building or adjacent to your school. Or if it’s not a community school, maybe you’ve got a really well established partnership with a mental health organization outside of the building. I think that would make it more manageable. When everything falls on the shoulders of the school, things can become overwhelming… public schools are responsible for a lot! So if we can create clear systems that are supported outside of the district- maybe that’s at the municipal or state level, maybe federally- I don’t know what a best-case scenario would look like. But I do believe that supporting SEL can’t fall solely on school staff. We have a dearth of services in general in the field of mental health in the country. So that’s where I think we need a lot more.

Sarah: So let’s end with your message to district leaders and families about SEL. What do they need to know?

Veronica: So the district leaders I would say find a couple of people that you really trust, and that you can have honest conversations with, and work through what this really looks like. Give yourself the space and the time to dream outside of the box. You haven’t done this before. There’s no blueprint for it. So we can’t just pull up the same thing and do the same thing that we’ve always done. You can do something amazing. How do you really do this? How do you support all of the students? Is it summer programs? Is it virtual dinners with your community? We did ice cream parties with kids last year virtually. Meet with kids, they have ideas you can do that go way beyond what I’ve ever thought of. You need the space to sit there and be really creative. I think we need to celebrate those thinkers that are doing something out of the box. Validating their thoughts is really important.

Jessica: When it comes to families, I think just involve them as much as you can with what’s going on at school, so that they can model at home as well. I think when there’s continuity in all the environments that’s valuable. I’ve called parents and said “I’m really concerned about your child. I want to see her do well. Are there things at home that we should know about?” Just having those honest conversations. They’re not always productive but usually somewhat productive for me.

Veronica: I think I also take a really direct line with parents like we start off the year with 1,346 students. I want to end the year with 1,346. That means we need to be together and on the same page and use each other and reach out to one another. We can’t lose a kid this year. I think I have that fear more this year than I ever have in my life. There are so many kids who are really struggling.

Shared Thoughts:

• Families: We need open communication in difficult times. Be realistic with families and children. Encourage families to know when to pull back and help their children balance their needs. Asking for help is ok.
• Continuity is key: this needs to be a long-term community effort: for educators, starting in teacher prep programs and onboarding for new staff. For families, involving caregivers in the strategies used at school and giving them actionable steps to use at home.
• We need to create the space, time and resources- we can’t just say it.

Thank you to Veronica and Jessica for their time, their thoughtful contributions and their commitment to the students and staff of Townsend Harris High School. I know that everyone who walks into that building each day is actively welcomed and there is a plan of support in place to ensure success. We know this is a challenging time for all and we appreciate the honest conversation about where we are and where we need to go.