School: McKay School
Text: Creating Social and Emotional Learning Environments by Amy Cranston
Study Group Leader: Samantha Murray (Blended/Inclusive Preschool)
Study Group Members: Nicole Johnson (4th grade), Benita Nixon (3rd grade)
Goal: Over the course of the 2020-2021 school year, our RLTA study group will develop a classroom environment that is effective and promotes student voice and choice across domains.
When our team originally came up with this goal, we were expecting to be teaching in the classroom environment. Like many things, the COVID-19 pandemic challenged us in altering our goal. We spent more than half of the year teaching remotely. Our goal then morphed into giving our students more agency throughout virtual learning.
Rating and effectiveness of the professional text
As a team, we all enjoyed this professional development text. The chapters were nicely organized by relevant topics. We also felt like it read easily. We did not feel like we were reading a textbook. This text included relevant background knowledge on educational laws and federal mandates as they relate to social emotional learning in public schools. We also enjoyed the anecdotal stories of past educators that were successful in creating positive social emotional environments for their students.
Implementation in the classroom and reflection
Overall, we all feel that we increased student choice and voice in our classrooms. We learned valuable strategies that will inform and improve our SEL practices going forward. We experienced difficulty when Chicago Public Schools (CPS) transitioned our students to hybrid learning for the last quarter of the 2020-2021 school year. However, we still feel that we fulfilled our goal of giving our students more choice and voice in our classrooms both virtually and in-person.
Your target audience and how they benefited from the work of your group (students, grade level team, whole school, parents, etc.)
Our target audience were the students in each of our specific classrooms. For Samantha, that included both general education and special education preschool students. Given that our preschool programs are given a specific curriculum to follow, she felt that she was successful in embedding more choice and student agency while still using the curriculum with fidelity. For Benita, her audience included the third grade students in her classroom, as well as the 3rd grade level team. There was more choice and student voice as scholars decided from menus how to show their practice and performance in meeting Common Core State Standards. For Nicole, her audience consisted of fourth graders. Students in this 4th grade class were both ELL scholars and General education scholars. Mckays’ fourth graders are departmentalized. Scholars are familiar with CCSS, as well as the importance of being self-motivated within such an independent environment.
