We had the pleasure of speaking with Anne Childers last week, and it blew our minds. Anne has a ton of experience helping students of all backgrounds, and she’s a great person to boot. She has expertise in everything from instructional design, to Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), Positive-Behavior Intervention Supports (PBIS), Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), etc., so we thought we’d give her a call and pick her brain.
Specifically, we wanted to hear more about her work with MTSS and SEL, since this is a part of what Kelvin does. At its core, Kelvin aims to help educators better understand the minds they enrich. We do this by asking students a series of questions throughout the year — questions about school climate, interests, headwinds/tailwinds, and SEL skills like empathy and grit. The answers to these questions — along with data from parents and staff — help educators build a welcoming, supportive, trusting, and appropriately challenging place for students to learn. (I’ve put some links to research about why this is so important below.)
Anyhow, we were talking to Anne — who is a lot of fun (Hi, Anne 👋)—about all sorts of cool stuff when she told us about a question she asks her students:
“How do you know you’re learning?”
🤯
Whoa. What a question. Zach and I were left nervously giggling for forty seconds, because we were stumped. At thirty years old, neither of us had a good answer to that question. The call ended. Many things were learned. But I was left with that lingering question: “How do you know you’re learning?”.
A possible answer to that question found its way into my inbox courtesy of “The Daily Stoic.” Its subject line was, “This Is What Progress Looks Like,” and I’ll paraphrase some of it here…
Seneca — a famous stoic person — was writing some equally-famous letters when he pondered something like, “‘What does getting better look like? How do you know any of this is working?’” To which he proposed:
“‘What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.’”
🤯
It wasn’t wealth, status, test scores, grades, promotions, or anything else that mattered to Seneca. Instead, it was learning to become a friend to himself, because “a person who is a friend to himself is an aid to all mankind. They are kind. They are calm. They have empathy — for themselves and others…They can stand on the shoulders of giants.” In the same way, this is one way we know we’re learning. We know we’re learning when we’re able to self-reflect, question, and be patient with ourselves. To challenge and encourage. All things any good friend would do.
Each generation of students has its own worries and troubles, but today’s youth have grown up with near-constant connectivity that can amplify the anxiety, uncertainty, bullying and other “fun” flavors of growing pains. So, what if we could help our kids learn to be a friend to themselves — like Seneca? Ask yourself: what if we asked students questions about how they’re feeling? Questions that helped them develop the self-awareness, the language, and skills to be a friend to themselves?
Dr. Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, underscores the role of feelings in student learning when he says,
“Thought and feeling are absolutely intermingled in the brain. There are no areas of the brain that are exclusively dedicated to one and not the other… And so, when a child is subjected to adversity and the adversity gets under the skin, it will impair cognitive function in addition to producing emotional difficulties.” (source)
Feelings and cognitive learning are intermingled. What would happen if we better understood how kids feel and helped them become a friend to themselves? How how high could they reach standing on those giants’ shoulders?
. . .
Some of the research about SEL and School Climate
- A Research Synthesis of the Associations Between Socioeconomic Background, Inequality, School Climate, and Academic Achievement
- School Climate, Student Engagement, and Academic Achievement: A Latent Variable, Multilevel Multi-Informant Examination
- Promoting Positive Youth Development Through
School-based Social and Emotional Learning Interventions:
A Meta-Analysis of Follow-up Effects - School Organizational Contexts, Teacher Turnover, and Student Achievement: Evidence from Panel Data
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