For Educators: A

How to Guide on
Integrating Social
Emotional
Learning into
Lesson Plans,
Teaching and
Classrooms
Easy, Effective, Science Driven
Methods

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Instructor Introduction
▪ Professor Zinobia Bennefield PhD
▪ Medical Sociologist
▪ Health inequality & Policy
▪ Childhood and Adolescent Health
▪ Teacher
▪ Early Childhood Education (7 years)
▪ University Professor (9 years)
▪ Consultant & Advisor
▪ Helping professional who work with children
▪ Teachers
▪ Children’s Book Authors
▪ Trauma Specialists
▪ https://www.iamzinobia.com
▪ For Educators: Managing Youth Social Emotional Needs
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We will cover these skills

● Connecting Social Emotional

Learning (SEL) to the K-12
experience
● Integrating SEL into lesson plans Course
● Integrating SEL classroom culture Outline
● Integrating SEL into teaching
pedagogy
● Building a resource toolkit

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Disclaimer on Hot Button Issues
▪ There is NO critical race theory (CRT) in this course
▪ Social emotional learning (SEL) and CRT are not inherently intertwined

▪ Social emotional learning (as taught in this course) does not emphasize mental
illness or mental disorders
▪ We will focus on the attributes of psychological well being e.g., self-esteem,
self-awareness, self-compassion, patience, resilience
▪ Social emotional learning in the classroom does NOT exclude parents, usurp
parental authority,
▪ We will situate teachers as, in some cases, extensions of the home unit in
their ability to care for, nurture, and extend kindness to children

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Know Your Students
A bit on cultural competency and neurobiology

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Know Your students
▪ Who your students are impacts (1) how they learn (2) how they feel about what
they are learning (3) how they act out their feelings
▪ Family – Culture (history, culture, language, values), socioeconomic status
(resources they have access to), parental educational attainment
▪ Neighborhood – socialization, libraries, book stores, green spaces
▪ Stress
▪ Acute stressors - birth of a new baby, divorce
▪ Chronic - poverty, bullying, hunger, exhaustion
▪ Trauma
▪ Single, multiple harmful events - abuse, neglect bullying, poverty

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Know Your students
▪ What are your students’ cultural backgrounds?
▪ What makes their language and history unique?
▪ Where are your students from?
▪ What are their neighborhoods like? Are they safe, clean, and well resourced?
▪ What are the values/culture of the community neighborhood?
▪ What are there families like?
▪ What is their socioeconomic position, values on education
▪ What form of discipline is used in the family?
▪ How is language used within the family?
▪ What are the students stressors?
▪ What (if any) are the students traumas?

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Know How The Student Brain Works
▪ 4 Parts of Brain Critical to Development
▪ Left – Order,
▪ Right – Creativity, nonverbal
▪ Upper – Logic, Decision making
▪ Lower – Primal ***
▪ Most brains are not fully developed until age 25
▪ Stress and trauma prolongs that
▪ Recognize what parts of their brain students are using
▪ Learn how to get students to use their whole brain

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Know How The Student Brain Works

▪ Example 1
▪ The temper tantrum student

▪ Example 2
▪ The overly rational, “I don’t care” student

▪ Example 3
▪ The student stuck on a bad experience

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Wrap up
▪ Knowing from where your students are coming and their cognitive capacity:
▪ assists in better understanding emotional displays
▪ assists in incorporating social emotional learning into curriculum, teaching
pedagogy and classroom culture
▪ protects against burnout
▪ protects against some forms of emotional labor

IT MAKES IT EASIER FOR US TO DO OUR JOBS

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Let the Social Emotional Learning
Begin

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Connecting SEL to Learning
▪ You don’t have to do anything to bring SEL into your classroom, you just have to harness
it!
▪ Developmentally, children are sifting through and learning to how to manage emotions
▪ Emotions are apart of the learning process
▪ Growing pains

▪ “I can’t do it” / Frustration

▪ “I’m stupid” / Anger
▪ “Math is hard” / Overwhelmed
▪ “I’m a bad writer” / Low self-esteem
▪ “I’m really good at history” / Happiness
▪ “My friends aren’t like me” / Self-awareness

Connection PAGE 12
Integration Toolkit Conclusion
Connecting SEL to Learning

▪ Confidence ▪ Relationship to others

▪ Self-determination ▪ Self-awareness
▪ Persistence/Grit/Resilience ▪ Purpose in life
▪ Acceptance
▪ Self-esteem ▪ Happiness
▪ Mastery ▪ Empathy
▪ Mattering
▪ Gratitude
▪ Kindness

Connection PAGE 13
Integration Toolkit Conclusion
Integrating SEL into Lesson Plans and Curriculum

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Integrating SEL into Lesson Plans

Standards. Direction. Assessment.

Healthful living standards help Adding wellbeing language to Help students communicate their
guide us connect structured your teaching script helps directs feelings, expand their emotional
thinking to emotional well being. students to not only learn vocabulary, and them connect
academic concepts but to learn their feelings to their actions.
the importance of practice,
persistence, and patience.

Integration PAGE 15
Connection Toolkit Conclusion
Kindergarten and Elementary Learning

▪ Model the behavior you want to see

▪ Weave SEL into every part of the teaching script and repeat while students
complete the assessments
▪ Introduce trying something new as fun/play!
▪ What do we do when we want to give up?
▪ Praise for practice not for perfect
▪ Provide an emotional vocabulary (e.g., frustrated, proud, overwhelmed)
▪ Get physical (happy dance, run in place)
▪ Create a support system (Classmates high five each other)

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Middle School Learning
▪ Introduce the new activity as well as the feelings that go along with
learning something new
▪ Create a community culture instead of a competitive culture
▪ Collaboration and cooperation protects against isolation
▪ Goal Setting
▪ Create (and assign) a problem solver checklist
▪ Insert joy into the conversation
▪ Embrace failure

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High School Learning

▪ Encourage student to be aware of the feelings they are experiencing

▪ Get active
▪ Grounding activity
▪ Deep breathing activity for difficulty, panic, and anxiety
▪ Journaling prompts
▪ Empower students to collaborate with you
▪ Encourage intellectual independence

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Integrating SEL into Classroom Culture

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Classroom Culture

▪ Environment
▪ What does your classroom look like?
▪ How does your classroom feel?
▪ Relationships
▪ Student to student
▪ Teacher to student
▪ Student to material
▪ Teacher to material

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Classroom Culture

▪ Classroom Additions ▪ Classroom Additions

▪ Flexible classrooms ▪ Community learning
▪ Plants ▪ Debriefing
▪ How did we do today?
▪ Family photos
▪ Journaling assignments
▪ Scents ▪ Critiquing assignments
▪ Lighting ▪ Putting school into context
▪ Music (high school)
▪ Grounding exercises

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Integrating SEL into Teaching Pedagogy

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Integrating SEL into Teaching
▪ Teaching Philosophy
▪ What are the rules, values, goals that govern your teaching?
▪ “Revolutionary Educator”
▪ “Dedicated to the Content”
▪ Perennialism
▪ the aim of education is to ensure that students acquire understandings about the
great ideas of Western civilization
▪ Essentialism
▪ believe that there is a common core of knowledge that needs to be transmitted to
students in a systematic, disciplined way
▪ Progressivism
▪ believe that education should focus on the whole child, rather than on the content
or the teacher. This educational philosophy stresses that students should test ideas
by active experimentation.

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Integrating SEL into Teaching

▪ Teaching Style
▪ How does your teaching style help you reach your teaching philosophy?
▪ Collaborative
▪ Authoritarian
▪ “by the book” vs improv
▪ Delegator
▪ Facilitator
▪ Demonstrator
▪ Hybrid

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Build Your Toolkit

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 Here is what we learned
▪ First skill:
Learning and SEL go together!

Course ▪ Second skill:

Summary Integrating SEL into lessons are not costly in terms of time, but
have a high payoff

▪ Third skill:
Creating SEL practices provide students with vital SEL resources

Conclusion PAGE 26
Connection Integration Toolkit
Building a Resource Toolkit
▪ Integrate SEL into teaching scripts
▪ “The most important part of solving a problem is…”
▪ “When I see a problem I don’t know how to solve, the
first thing I feel is…Then I…”
▪ Implement journaling
▪ “If math could be a color (shape, sound) it would
be…because…”
▪ “When I hear someone say math is fun, I…”
▪ Praise for effort
▪ Enhancing your emotional vocabulary
▪ Breathing techniques for nervousness
▪ Building classroom support systems

Tool kit PAGE 27

Connection Integration Conclusion
Easy Mental Health Practices for the Classroom
▪ Grounding
▪ Breathing
▪ Breathing for stress
▪ I Am affirmations
▪ Storytelling….”and then what happened?”
▪ Peer praise
▪ Allow their gifts to shine

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Learn more about topics in childhood and adolescent mental health
For Educators: Managing Youth Social Emotional Needs

Visit me
https://www.iamzinobia.com

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