Episode 6: SEL Isn’t Just for Kids Anymore

The growing focus on social emotional learning (SEL) in schools is great for students. But what about their teachers? Kat Goyette is an educational consultant and instructional technology coordinator in California’s Central Valley. Listen in to learn about how Kat works with both students and teachers in her community to develop their social-emotional skills and take good care of themselves.

Learn more about Kat Goyette: Kat’s inkedIn profile. And check out Kat’s book, The Complete EdTech Coach: An Organic Approach to Supporting Digital Learning,

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Announcer:

You're listening to the Voices in Education Podcast, powered by Securly, where we hear from new voices and explore new ideas about how we can reimagine education to support whole student success. Education is at an inflection point. As we grapple with complex challenges like funding and enrollment, as well as diversity, equity, and safety, we also have an opportunity, an opportunity to reimagine education. Now, more than ever, we know the importance that students' overall wellbeing plays in their success. They need to feel supported and safe and connected to be able to engage in their learning and achieve to their full potential. Join your host, Casey Agena, a former teacher turned instructional coach and technologist as he interviews inspirational educators, school leaders, wellness professionals, and more to amplify their voices. You'll learn about the innovative work they're doing to support student safety, engagement, and overall wellness. Who knows? You may even spark a new idea of your own. Ready to reimagine education? Let's go.

Casey:

I'm your host, Casey Agena, and in today's episode, I'm excited to be talking with Kat Goyette of Tulare County Office of Education in the Central Valley of California. She is an instructional technology coordinator and a firm advocate of digital health and digital wellness for her students. Listen in as Kat and I talk about her students, her teachers, her community as they overcome all of these challenges in regards to digital mental health.

Casey:

Welcome, Kat.

Kat:

Thank you. I am so excited to be here, Casey. Thanks for having me on.

Casey:

Let's talk SEL, or social-emotional learning, in Tulare County. Now, SEL has many meanings to different people in different places, so tell us about Tulare County, particularly the impact the past two school years have had on teachers, families, and students, and even just the past two months.

Kat:

Certainly. Tulare County is a relatively rural area. We have a relatively high poverty rate. Many of our students are the children of migrant farmworkers, so it can be a transient population as well, and so the pandemic has been difficult, as it has been on everyone, but it has certainly been difficult for our population quite a bit. There are challenges with childcare. There are challenges with so-called "essential workers." Many of the hospitality industry, the service industry, agriculture, our students' parents still went to work. We went remote learning, so there were high schoolers and junior hires watching their toddlers, so it has been tricky, and that really has increased the need for social-emotional learning.

Kat:

There are many different definitions, as you said, for social-emotional learning, right? When I'm speaking with teachers, I talk a lot about the CASEL framework, the Collaborative for Academic Social-Emotional Learning. I would argue that at the core of social-emotional learning is the idea... What I like about CASEL is the idea that we need to build our self-awareness and really our self-acceptance of who we are and what we're going through. Then in turn, we can learn how to take care of ourselves, and then others. But I think that it really starts with the self and it starts with understanding that I am going through things as a person. I have trauma that I may have gone through. There are these things, these environmental factors that are affecting me, and first I need to recognize them. Then I learn to manage them. Now, I can then, in turn, go and help others.

Casey:

There's this culture clash, too, with that. I'm thinking about the role that parents play in doing their work in agriculture and whatnot for the family, that older siblings are there to take care for the family. There's really a lot of doing things for others where that is counter to what you're saying in terms of self. I'm one wondering how that kind of plays out when you're wanting parents to know it and understand it, students, to be able to do that, teachers to be able to teach that, yet it's a complete 180 from how things may be at home.

Kat:

That's a great point about home cultures. It's also something that teachers, as people that are in a profession that is about caring for others, we often have that challenge as well, where we care so much about others that we forget about ourselves. It is not to say that we should not care about others, but it is to say that if we do not take care of ourselves and understand what it is that is causing us stress. This affects our decision-making. Any stress that we have in our brains is going to release chemicals that impair our cognitive function, right, so understanding that is key, especially when we're fighting our own factors of wanting to care, of being expected to be caretakers to our cultural expectations, our societal expectations, our administrators are trying to care for their teachers, too, so they're going through it as well.

Kat:

It could be difficult to say, "No, I need to stop and take a moment and really take care of myself first." Sometimes we still do have those expectations. We still need to take care of our families. We need to go work. I'm not saying we shouldn't do that. But can we take a moment to say, "Okay, what are those times that make me the most stressed? What is a way that I can manage that stress?" That's where that self-awareness comes into play. Perhaps I notice that every time I look at my calendar, I get freaked out.

Kat:

Okay, well, what can I do about that? Now that I know that, I have to actually notice that to see that calendar, there's something wrong there. Now, I can look at the self-management and say, "What can I do about it? Maybe I can block out some times differently. Maybe I can..." Whatever happens to be, that self-awareness piece, I think, is first. Part of that self-awareness is realizing that there are expectations. We maybe value that, and that's fine, but if I do truly value that caretaking piece of my culture, of myself, of my personality, then I have to understand that I need to be my best self to be the best caretaker I can be. That's hard to do when we're not used to that.

Casey:

Let's take a short break to hear a word from our sponsor.

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Casey:

Now, back to the interview. I'm glad you brought up teachers and in your role where for a number of years supporting administrators, doing professional learning for teachers, and giving them the time during the school year, and then beyond that school time, like in summer and during these breaks for additional learning, yet as we look at the past two months, just with the turn of the new year, we're seeing a lot of, whether it's large urban school districts, really pushing back, seeing some of that fleeting, whether it's on social media of them saying, "I'm looking for another job, I'm leaving the profession," you have these.

Casey:

I'm thinking that from an adult social-emotional standpoint and that idea of healthcare, it's kind of an interesting juxtaposition where we're wanting to support individually the adult, yet what are we doing in terms of supporting a system of adults that are ultimately helping to take care of children? I'm wondering what that impact has on your view because at a county where you have multiple districts that you're seeing and how decision-makings take place to support and ultimately retain and recruit teachers as well, as you look ahead in your magic glass ball, what are we doing right, and what do we need to be doing more of in particularly supporting teachers?

Kat:

I think what we're doing right, what we did, some districts at the beginning of the pandemic, was they gave a lot more prep time for teachers knowing that this was a new environment, they were teaching in a completely different way in distance learning, they did a lot of professional development. Since then, there are some districts that have talked the talk about self-care and have told their teachers to engage in self-care, but have piled more and more initiatives and learning upon them, and the challenge is if I am simply throwing professional at you and I'm not giving you the time to process and to prepare, it doesn't feel genuine. I don't believe that those districts are doing it purposefully, but the term "self-care," "Make sure to practice self-care. Here's some training to go to. Make sure to practice self-care. We're going to give you training on self-care." It can start to feel disingenuous, and so I think you have to be careful.

Kat:

Part of what would help in that is asking the teachers, "What is it you need? What is it you want?" Maybe the teachers will say prep time, maybe they will say they want more professional learning, and that's fine, but they might not, it might not be the time, and so I think that sometimes we have to be careful making sure that sometimes these great intentions, you know how it is in education, you say the term "PBIS" at some schools that I'm at and everyone's like, "Ooh, I don't like, I don't want to hear about that," because it was pushed upon them so hard and was done in such a way that there was pushback, and so I think we have to be careful to make sure that the teachers themselves own the work and it's what is a response to what they are needing as opposed to, "Oh, yeah. We'll give you some self-care time. Remember, take care of yourself. Oh, yeah. Go do all these extra 10 things that I never asked you to do before and get them done by Tuesday," so I think we have to be careful with that.

Casey:

What is the ideology of someone else's great idea is somebody else's overtime?

Kat:

Mm. Nice, yeah.

Casey:

As I'm thinking about that, we had talked earlier about virtual learning and schools keeping that program and building it that it may not be just the for now, that it's something that possibly, we're seeing a number of districts kind of keep it for many reasons.

Casey:

But with that, students do spend more time online, both socially, as well as through learning. Now, that changes in terms of what the teachers are teaching, not only from a content standpoint, but a context piece as well because there's more peer-to-peer interactions, good or bad, there's more devices out there, and there's more guidance needed, either overtly or otherwise.

Casey:

Thinking about all of this that we talked about today and now getting back to the students, that if there is this ability and that there is this trajectory for students both socially as well as academically to spend time online, and then we're also then asking teachers to teach differently, but then to help guide their citizenship online, what does that really mean for them, the students themselves? Is there an overt awareness in terms of their digital citizenship and their digital health and all of those pieces? And how much of that is part of some of these plans that are also in place?

Kat:

That's key. That's something that, it's tricky, too, because we know, we know how vital it is that students learn to be not only safe online, but they are good digital citizens in that they are kind, they have that social awareness where they're respecting differences. We look at the divisions in our country here in the United States and we know that there are adults that could certainly boost their digital citizenship for the good of the world. We know that's true, but the challenge is who teaches it, and when do they teach it, and how do they get trained to teach it?

Kat:

As far as a systems perspective, in an elementary school, not so difficult because we have multiple subject teachers. One teacher has the same kids all day long, so it would follow that teacher would support with that. Of course, we do have to maybe get some training or at least some resources to teachers and such. There are ways that digital citizenship can be embedded into the day as you are teaching things. We have some examples of it in our book, but once you get to that middle school/high school level, who teaches it? Is it history/social studies? Because we're talking about culture and we're talking about, it's really social studies, right, and we're talking about civics and such in essence. Or is it the ELA teachers? Because we can talk about plagiarism and we can talk about copyright and things like that. Who is it? Who teaches it? We could go science and we could look at data. We could talk about how things spread like viruses, I mean, rumors and such. How is it fair that it's one person that teaches it as opposed to another department?

Kat:

I mean, I just am saying that those are the challenges, but we have to have these conversations. This is a new era of education. We cannot simply teach kids reading, writing, and arithmetic. We can't do that anymore. The world is complex. Students have access to not only information from across the internet, from across the world, but also to people, and many times, that's not safe, or they could be harming their own chances of a college scholarship or a job in the future if they're not careful. It's really all about having these conversations of what does education look like in the future? From a large, broad perspective, these are conversations that we need to be having at a larger policy level, but we can start by having some as-needed lessons in classrooms as things come up. We can have kids on Google Classroom, having a conversation in Flipgrid, we can monitor that, and have some conversations about what is appropriate and what is not as things come up.

Casey:

Right. I think that goes back to what you mentioned in the very beginning, self-care is not just about yourself and the realization, but it's even how you portray yourself as well. What you want out there, whether you're from Tulare County or King County, where I am in Seattle, Washington, it's how you portray yourself to not only a local audience, but a global audience, and what impacts then does that have on who I am and how I think about myself and my family, all of those pieces, now we're really coming full circle with this. I want to highlight those student pieces, the self-care, the role of teachers that they play, how we can support them. I really want to thank you, Kat, for your time, your perspective, because it's really unique. I think with the role that you play in and supporting other districts in Tulare County, where we think of California, but that's the real California, so thank you for lending your voice to Voices in Education. I want to thank you all for listening again and we will see you all in the next episode. Thank you.

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Thanks for tuning in to the Voices in Education Podcast, powered by Securly, where we hear from new voices and explore new ideas about how we can reimagine education to support whole student success. If you enjoy today's episode, we hope you'll consider subscribing to the podcast and sharing it with others who would benefit from listening. Even a small act of support helps us reach more people and make a bigger impact. For the resources from today's episode and additional details about the podcast, please visit www.securly.com/podcast. Until next time, thanks for listening.