How educator well-being data supported change at an urban middle school
By Lynn Jeudy, SEL Specialist
More SEL
“I just want everyone to feel supported,” the Principal told me as we stood in the middle of the library at Literacy Night, a mixer for multilingual learners and their families. Every September, the Speech and English as a New Language team would create an event for parents to learn how the school intentionally supports their students and connect with leadership and faculty in a more intimate setting. Amidst the music, food, and festive decorations, parents, students, younger siblings, and even alumni, moved through different literacy stations, collecting stamps as they completed activities in both English and Spanish. As she stamped literacy night “passports”, we talked about some of the initiatives that came out of a recent meeting about school culture and climate. Kindness challenges. Having juniors and seniors speak to middle school students. Professional Development for the teachers. And more SEL.
More SEL. For whom? And when? I truly wondered how this school could possibly do more of anything; they already did so much! But this Principal’s expression of her heart for her school community–for people to feel more supported–came from a deep place; the place that’s often tasked with managing the conflicting perspectives, contradictory perceptions, and competing priorities of the many stakeholders of a high school community. But it wouldn’t be until six months later that our team would begin to figure out what more was missing.
On Mission
Our school is a mixed model secondary school in NYC, serving approximately 700 students in grades 6-12. The school has a faculty/staff of about 100, with approximately 60 personnel for instruction. Intentionally built against the backdrop of a court complex, the founding staff’s goal was to serve students from the community to help them grow into leaders who advocate for themselves and their community. The school has a long history in the neighborhood. Generations of families attend the school, some alumni have returned as teachers and paraprofessionals, and several staff members are lovingly referred to as members of the “hard hat crew” --- people who were there from the beginning, overseeing the design and development of the current school building. The school identifies itself as a family, and rightfully so. It feels like a family. Community and celebrations are at the heart of how they operate, and a sincere point of pride for staff and students. The school’s core values and code of conduct espouse a missiion to help students and staff realize their potential every day.
Carrying out this mission, however, has not been easy, especially in recent years. Navigating a return to a version of ‘normal’ that is long gone has been a challenge for sure, although that challenge is not endemic to the team at our school. “The kids aren’t the same,” a teacher said to me once, referring to attitudes and behaviors students expressed in these “post-pandemic years.” And like every other school, regardless of the gravity of the challenges, this team is also not absolved from the core responsibility of preparing students for a future they simply do not know, to solve problems that we have yet to face, and to lead changes that we might be able to anticipate, but may never fully be prepared to manage. This is where we find the need to better support students and teachers, beyond pure academic content and skills. Social and emotional learning skills have been part of the core of our school for the past 6 years. SEL skills have been taught in a variety of ways. The school has invested in different curricula, and the students and staff have experienced different versions of an Advisory program, depending on the year and who was leading the body of work at the time. For the adults, there has been a variety of methods used to support SEL as well, through staff community circles and the use of the mood meter during grade team meetings, for example. But even with these intentional efforts, at different intensities, and at various times, for the SEL team, something was still missing. And it would be critical to find that missing piece in order to better organize, implement, and improve SEL at the school.
In determining our SEL goals for this year, the team decided on two things: (1) to prioritize explicit SEL instruction overall, not only embed SEL through Advisory, and (2) to improve their adult culture. We did not have an exact plan for how when we were setting these goals, but we knew that in order to improve the school culture overall, we needed to improve the adult culture first. The leadership team and the SEL team wanted many things for their students: to improve student-to-student interactions, improve student-teacher interactions, for students to improve how they evaluated their choices, and ultimately, engage in decision-making. The team also had dreams for their staff as well—to improve their self-awareness. To help them understand how they serve as implicit models for students, and the degree to which it mattered what they said and did, as well as what they did not say or do. The team wanted to see more kindness throughout the building, build more empathy and connection, and facilitate a learning environment and inspire a team of teachers and staff that would do it all on a continual basis. But doing this work is an arduous task and knowing that we have to be intentional to move the needle forward, the educator well-being data presented an opportunity to do a pulse-check on the SEL of the adults. If we wanted to better support students, we needed to start with the adults. And if we wanted to improve adult culture, we would need to first establish a baseline.
The Pulse Check
On a remote PD day, we told the teachers we wanted to take a pulse-check of where they were and learn more about how we could better support them throughout the school year. During their independent work time, after their grade team meetings, one of their assignments included completing an assessment of educator well-being. It was due by the end of the day, and there was a time in the day to complete it. We made sure to tell the teachers that it was encouraged, but not required, to take the assessment. ter all, we needed their feedback in order to make improvements. No one had any questions about the survey during this Zoom meeting. I dropped my email address in the chat, as well as a pdf of a slide deck with an overview of the assessment, for any future questions. The link to the survey was already in their agenda for the day. Ultimately, after a one-week extension from the original date of survey administration to get more people to complete it, approximately 50% of the instructional staff would take the assessment.
The Educator Well-being Survey is composed of three surveys: (1) the Emotion Focused Educator SEL Survey (EFESS), (2) the Yale Affective Experiences Scale (AES), and (3) the Yale Sources of Well-being Scale (SOW). Each survey focuses on different aspects of well-being, which is defined as “a sense of health and vitality that arise from your thoughts, emotions, actions, and experiences.” Educator wellbeing is linked with student outcomes, both social and emotional, and academic. On the EFESS, educators reported how often they engaged in classroom practices that supported students’ social and emotional learning, as well as how often they engaged in individual practices that supported their own social and emotional wellbeing. These practices included how they managed their own emotions, modeled social and emotional learning for students in real time, and the norms and expectations they set in the classroom. On the AES, educators rated how frequently they experienced different emotions on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being none of the time to 5 being all of the time. The emotions that teachers rated gave us a window into the collaborative, individual, and structural components of their work experience as educators. And finally, on the SOW, educators rated the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with specific statements about their experiences at school in different domains related to wellbeing. Each of these domains, or sources of wellbeing, fell into one of these two categories: relationships or conditions. For example, an educator would rate to what extent the statement “I feel like I make a difference in my students’ lives” is consistent their current experience (describes my experience “very well”, “moderately well”, or “does not describe my experience.”) The EWB would provide a baseline of educators' emotions, experiences, practices, and which sources of well-being impacted them the most.
Taking a Learner’s Stance
How do we leverage this information, within our existing structures and streams of work, to meet the school’s goals?
This was our driving question while investigating the results from our report. We were already in the second half of the school year. And as breaks, testing season, and the end of the year approached we would not have a lot of time, nor would it be valuable, to begin to create new things to do. It was important to the team to find simple ways to address the results so we would not become overwhelmed, and honestly, increase our chances of success. Schools have enough work to do, and sometimes the challenge is that some, or all, of their “doing” is not aligned. Starting small and testing change ideas in the spaces we already have access to would quite literally, shrink the change. Making the work compatible with who we are, the way we do our work, and our vision for the future of our children is crucial to being able to make lasting, sustainable changes. At the heart of the data review sessions was a simultaneous desire to take a learner’s stance and make it easy to act on what we learned.
For each section of the survey, we asked ourselves even more specific questions about the data. For the Emotion Focused Educator SEL Survey, we asked ourselves what classroom practices did we want to see implemented in the school? What can we do to increase the percentage of teachers engaging in practices that support the school’s goals? The deeper question here was not about whether what teachers were doing was good or bad, but were the practices that people engaged in even what we wanted them to be doing? And were those practices effective for students? When we reviewed the Affective Experience Survey, we asked ourselves what experiences and emotions are most common for educators in our workplace? Which ones best positioned them to help meet school goals? And finally, for the third survey, the Sources of Wellbeing survey, we asked ourselves which were the highest-leveraged predictors and indicators of well-being for our staff? And how could we leverage our strengths to support us in the areas where our teachers were telling us that we needed to grow? Reviewing the results gave us a space for reflection, causing the team to ask themselves even more questions about how their staff and students were experiencing the school, and how well they as leaders were facilitating the environment and the experiences therein.
The most interesting data points we grappled with when we reviewed the sources of well-being were educator-student relationships and student performance. Educator-student relationships was one of the highest-rated sources of well-being, while students’ academic engagement and social emotional development received an average rating. One of the highest-rated predictors of educator-student relationships was the following statement: “I have positive 1-1 interactions with my students.” Although educator-student relationships were identified as a strength, student performance (academic, social and emotional) received mostly average ratings, especially for student SEL skills and student academic persistence. The team was curious about that gap. If teachers had strong relationships with students, why were students not performing as well as they could at school? If the learning and meaning making happens in the interactions between the teachers and students, and those interactions were positive, what was the quality of those interactions? And if the relationships truly are strong, how do we leverage them to help teach kids how to take intellectual risks and advocate for themselves? The questions we asked of the data and the ensuing conversations led to not only an examination of school practices and school culture, but a self-examination of the leadership as well.
What makes you say that?
In hindsight, it was not challenging to figure out where to start when we looked at what we were already doing. Our school had recently started meeting in instructional circles—small groups of about 6-8 educators from different grade teams and content areas—during weekly professional learning sessions. In these instructional circles, we were reading Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners (Ritchart, Church, & Morisson, 2011), and specifically working on implementing new thinking routines. The Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) prioritized having teachers ask students “What makes you say that?” which the authors describe as “a routine that helps students identify the basis of their thinking by asking them to elaborate on the thinking that lies behind their responses.” The ILT wanted to start with something that was easy and accessible for any educator to implement, and to further the school-wide conversation about effective questioning techniques and ways we can continue to engage students in rich classroom discussions. It was simple enough to adopt, and the hope was that with increased use, educators would promote more student-talk by pushing students to elaborate on and express their thinking.
In Making Thinking Visible, the authors label the relationship between teachers and students specifically as a learning relationship. The idea of this learning relationship found its way to our SEL team meetings and struck a chord with the group. While investigating our EWB results and determining how to use them, we have also been grappling with restorative justice (RJ, and how to strengthen its implementation in the school. One of the key insights our RJ coach shared during an introductory meeting with our team was that if we were going to practice restorative justice, we needed to have something to restore back to. It was literally in the name! And it was something to consider…what was our baseline for the quality of relationships in the building?
So it was against this backdrop that we decided to have teachers engage in intervisitations within their instructional circle. Their task was to see their colleagues in action, how they implemented the thinking routine, and how the students responded to their teacher's inquiry of why they said what they said. Our theory of action was that if school wide we were all engaging in something new, we would all be more open to others seeing how we handled it. Intervisitation, even though we could not mandate it, would be an opportunity for teachers to see that they are not alone, and see what their colleagues contribute to the school community. It would be the culminating activity in our circles, bringing theory to practice, all while learning together. Perhaps as an SEL team we could learn from the teachers how to best close the gap between teachers' perceptions of their relationships with students and their resulting academic performance—-this quality relationship gap.
One of the things that I personally appreciated from these sessions was that the educators were able to step out of the day-to-day of the work and truly reflect on their practice, therefore building self-awareness—an SEL skill! Even if it wasn’t the same staff community circles that they had held in the past, ones that centered intentionally on community building and sharing personal stories, the educators still were sharing personal stories from their classrooms, from their daily interactions with their students, who were in many ways personal to them; their fears, their worries, their joys, and even their aha moments were all in the space. And after completing the series of intervisitations, teachers also brought novel attempts at facilitating learning, revising instructional activities, and giving and eliciting feedback, into the space, all in service of supporting student success. Educators even reported using the thinking routine with their own colleagues. In some ways, one might argue that more than ever we were doing adult SEL. For whatever the reason, we–the proverbial “we” ---have become convinced that SEL, and developing SEL, whether for adults or children, is all feels and only feels. But some of the best conversations we had were not about the way adults were building better connections and relationships with students, they were about how teachers were strategizing in different areas of their classroom to have more impactful interactions with kids. To learn more from kids. To better listen to what kids were saying. And to be more responsive to their understanding. This is key to instruction. These conversations were about skills and understandings that we needed to have as adults in order to best serve our students and support their progress.
The Organizing Principle
Although the intervisitation was a brief project, it was also an experiment in intentional alignment. If our mission is to help teachers and students realize their potential, then we have to organize ourselves, our people, and our day-to-day activities in service of that outcome. When you ask a student, or anyone really, “what makes you say that?” you express a curiosity in them. You take an interest in young people when you take the time to engage with their ideas, with what they have to say. This creates an opportunity for students to elaborate on and express their thinking, and gives teachers an opportunity to gauge learning. But when teachers express a genuine interest in their students, they also create opportunities to deepen connections and strengthen the learning relationship. This is more SEL for both the student and the teacher. And the leadership facilitated this experience for their teams.
More SEL is to intentionally use the development of students’ SEL as one of the organizing principles in your school. Simply put, it’s alignment. Schools, like every other organization, need alignment in order to amplify their impact. If the core principles of high quality SEL are to be a central figure in the school–its organizing principle–then all teams, all adults need to be working towards the same goal. Schools are, by design, educational spaces. By the same metric, they are also socializing spaces and developmental spaces. It’s not at all contradictory if their organizing principle is the social and emotional development of the people they are educating. After all, you don’t teach math; you teach students math.
Schooling is a process, and students are the only people who experience every aspect of it. They are the best positioned to spot inconsistencies and contradictions, and they are often the most impacted by it. If a school wants to make progress, all of its efforts need to be aligned towards the goal. The goal needs to be clear to everyone, people need to know how their activities contribute towards the goal, as well as how other team members' activities contribute towards the goal. Everyone needs to speak the same language. One of the key things we discovered during this process was that maybe we weren’t all speaking the same language, around SEL or around some of the other aspects of the school. Doing “more SEL” for us ultimately meant finding ways to intentionally close the gap between our stated values and the lived experiences of the staff and students in our care.
Lynn Jeudy is an educator in New York City, committed to student success and well-being.
