McREL
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This blog series began with a look back at Pete Hall and Tonia Gibson’s visit to Liberty Union High School District in Brentwood, California, last summer. After the chaos of the pandemic, students were in no condition to learn, yet teachers were obligated to make that happen. It was unwinnable.We’re happy to report that the principles of social-emotional learning have heavily influenced Liberty Union’s approach to reopening. District leaders believed us when we said high-quality instruction creates its own positive learning environment, and that students will benefit from this feedback loop.

In our last two posts, we reviewed how intertwined SEL and academic instruction can and should be, and promised that teachers can excel at both without adding to their workload. If your reaction is Yeah, right, we understand and empathize. Every year, policies, mandates, initiatives, and improvement plans (not to mention a global pandemic) pile more and more duties on teachers, and somehow these tasks never seem to go back where they came from. So, it’s understandable why so many teachers are feeling exhausted and burned out.

Over the past year, in preparation for a major update of our Classroom Instruction That Works™ strategies and knowledge base, Bryan has led a team at McREL that has synthesized the findings of more than 100 scientific studies of classroom interventions into 14 teaching strategies found to significantly improve the performance of all students—including students of color, multilingual learners, students in poverty, and students with learning disabilities or previous low levels of achievement. Together, these studies reveal several teaching strategies that simultaneously support better student learning as well as the attributes of student-centered, healthy classrooms.

It’s a familiar chicken-and-egg conundrum: Educators readily agree that there are preconditions to learning relating to a sense of safety and self-worth, and if those preconditions aren’t met, learning simply can’t happen. At the same time, teachers are paid to teach, and face pressure to stay in their lane. After two years of intermittent lockdowns, quarantines, masking, and school closures, this conundrum has only intensified. Many students do not appear to be ready to learn, yet teachers are pushing themselves to act as if they are, with predictably disappointing results. So how do educators—many of whom are, themselves, feeling burned out and in need of emotional support—move forward?