Linda will be presenting the breakout session entitled:
“Using the School’s Implicit Curriculum to Teach Social Emotional Learning for a Healthy School Climate”
Neuroscience research reveals that the social emotional skills of self-awareness, self-regulation, and resiliency are more important than IQ in student achievement. A systems approach, using the school’s implicit curriculum, is a powerful way to increase student achievement, lessen bullying, and support student engagement and well beings when it cohesively aligns mission, structures, processes, and modeling. Awakening Wisdom, formerly known as theHo`āla Educational Philosophy, developed in 1972 in Hawaii and implemented at Ho’āla School in Hawaii and River School, a charter middle school in Napa, have nurtured responsible, respectful, and academically successful students for over 30 years, winning awards for this approach. In addition to learning about how social emotional learning supports academic achievement and about Awakening Wisdom’s systems approach, participants will take away strategies to use with students, teachers, administrators, and parents to support social emotional learning for all.
School culture and climate is one of the most difficult things to transform. Working with the Camille Creek Schools’ leaders, Caroline Wilson and Nancy Dempsey, made this work easy. Their willingness to shift their own mindsets and grow personally supported their staff in learning new points of view to create a healthy school culture that benefitted their students tremendously. As a result of deep conversations in executive coaching and monthly professonal development, staff shared their significant personal growth in the end of the year survey.
It was fulfilling to speak to the parents of students in the Advanced Learners Program. One of the challenges parents face is how to support their children to be more self-regulating and resilient. Parents want to help their children and, sometimes, it is difficult to know when helping too much may be crippling their children’s discovery of their own capacity to meet challenges. Parents found it helpful to learn how to listen deeply first, instead of problem solving, admonishing, or advising, in such a way to guide their children toward their own problem solving.
It was a privilege to share the Ho`āla Educational Philosophy and to meet educators who are seeking personal meaning for themselves and their students through their schools. Those who attended the afternoon session with me were seeking ways to enrich their school environments to support students, parents, and educators. I look forward to continued work with the Young Spirit Foundation to instill the teaching of wisdom in schools.