What do students need their teacher to know and be able to do to address social and emotional learning? Dr. Maggie Broderick, the faculty lead for Social Emotional Learning at National University explores this question and others with Steve. She explores the issue that “where a teacher lives and works”, impacts the approach to social emotional teaching. What’s possible in a school that doesn’t have SEL curriculum or resources?
Visit the National University website here.
Email Dr. Maggie Broderick: mbroderick@ncu.edu
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Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.000] – Steve [Intro]
Hello, and welcome to the Teacher Edition of Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud. Teaching is a complex and rewarding journey, and I’m always eager to explore the many ways teachers engage students in their learning. This podcast is dedicated to supporting you, the teacher, as you inspire and guide your students. Thanks for joining me. I’m excited you’re here.
[00:00:29.640] – Steve
Teacher First Responding to Students’ Human Needs. Joining the podcast today is Dr. Maggie Broderick, an Associate Professor at National University, where she is the faculty lead for Social Emotional Learning and Curriculum and instruction. She also serves as a content expert in writing curriculum, and she is a provider of professional development activities. Maggie has over 20 years of experience in the field of education, including eight years of teaching experience in the Pittsburgh public schools, an additional K-12 and higher education teaching experience in various contexts. Welcome, Maggie. Glad to have you here.
[00:01:15.290] – Maggie
Thanks, Steve. I’m so happy to be here today.
[00:01:18.210] – Steve
I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the focus on SEL skills in National University’s education program.
[00:01:28.260] – Maggie
Sure. Well, SEL is super important these days. I’m so glad you’re thinking about it. I am, too. I actually recently heard, I think it’s still true, statistically, I’ll double check, that National is the largest credentular of California teachers. They’re in San Diego, but we’re largely online. We have our single-subject, secondary and multiple-subject, Elementary California credentialing, which is incredible to think about all those teachers out there. Super important responsibility. But I have a small role in a couple of pockets that I think are really important. I’m the course lead for our SEL emphasis in our Inspired Teaching and Learning program. Basically, what happens there is once people do get that California teaching credential, either for primary or secondary teaching, they can take three other courses in an emphasis. I call it an emphasis. One of those four choices is my SEL one. There’s also a STEM/steam one, an ESL one, and an EdTech-focused one. I think it’s super cool because then they get their master’s degree and they are ready with an extra component on top of their credential and almost a specialization. They also get a little bit of their chops, as we say in the music world, for research because we do a little bit of an action research component because we really need to connect that research and practice.
[00:02:51.750] – Maggie
But I’m really proud to be part of that program. Like you were saying about SEL, our numbers are really up across the board. We have PhD, EDD, master’s programs, you name it, with SEL involved. I’m so glad because it’s really important and what we need these days.
[00:03:06.600] – Steve
How would you describe what students need their teachers to know and be able to do to address SEL needs? I’m wondering, does it fit the label that I worked with previously of the needs of the whole child?
[00:03:23.610] – Maggie
I love that. I think it’s exactly right. We think about whole human education at National, and I go way back. I feel like I’ve read a lot of books over the past 50 something years, and there’s a book that’s really talked about a lot, I think from the ’90s, “All I Really Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.”
[00:03:42.070] – Steve
Oh, I remember it. I used it in the keynotes that I did.
[00:03:46.050] – Maggie
Did you? I love that. And it was just a simple thing, and I thought it was exactly speaking to what you’re asking. So for me, I twist that as a teacher educator to all I really needed to know I learned in early childhood education, understanding of early childhood education, because it’s really the same idea. I mean, that three-year-old… I’ve taught people all the way through, and I’m also a parent. That three-year-old is really a human just like that 50-year or that 20-year-old or that whatever age, or I’ve had a student who was in her 80s.
[00:04:18.910] – Steve
And the 15-year-old. [laughter]
[00:04:20.280] – Maggie
[laughter] Yes, all of the above. All human, right? We are all human. It’s still the same person. We just have developmental growth and changes. I always try to humble, especially my doctoral students, but master students as well, who maybe they’re principals of schools, or maybe they’re a high school calculus teacher, or maybe they teach adult learners some fancy business school thing. We can learn a lot from how early childhood education folks think about humans. We think about, for example, an illustration of the whole child, like you said, all the different things, and we meet them where they are. We don’t say, you have to be 15 today when you’re three. Certain things are developmental and universal. Other things are unique to individual. But a picture, like an illustration of a child, I think I learned this in my first early childhood class, with cognitive social emotional, mental, physical. That’s all part of your learning. It’s not just your cognitive, and it all goes together. And SEL is that. In my mind, it’s the same thing. And so when we think about that three-year-old and that maybe they’re feeling something awkward in their physical state right now, and that’s making it so they can’t learn as well to do something else, or they’re not able to, I don’t know, just follow the directions right now.
[00:05:43.140] – Maggie
And we say, okay, well, what are we going to do to make that better for them? Oh, they can’t reach this on the shelf. Let’s get them a step stool. Or, oh, they’re feeling some pain. Let’s adjust and figure out what we need to do for that person. It’s the same. We are human. If somebody is feeling emotional pain, they’ve been through a rough time, if somebody is too stressed, it’s the same. So these things that are in our other states, our social, emotional, or physical, whatever, it’s going to impact what’s happening with our learning in our cognitive state. So we really have to think holistically.
[00:06:12.360] – Steve
In an earlier discussion about SEL, you used the phrase, “where the teacher lives matters.” Would you unpack that for us?
[00:06:20.340] – Maggie
Sure. Well, what’s interesting about being an online educator is I actually have students everywhere. So yesterday, I met with a student in American Samoa, which was super cool. I’ve had two from American Samoa, strangely enough. It’s not that large. It looks like a beautiful place, but not that large of a place. I’ve had students from, let’s say, the deep south, and I’m in Pittsburgh, in the north. I’ve had students from California and people abroad, maybe somebody teaching English in Thailand, literally almost everywhere. Even if we just look within the United States, just very simply, it’s incredibly large and diverse in many ways. People think about diversity, equity, inclusion as a buzzword about individuals being diverse or maybe a community. But honestly, from place to place it is. I can give you a really good example. I was a curriculum director last year, and I’ve written some curricula for teacher education. There’s a course that I wrote. In the course, I tried to be general because it was online. It’s for literally everybody who wants to take that course. I had a teacher in Florida who mentioned, hey, this is going to be tricky for me.
[00:07:28.150] – Maggie
The political landscape is just tricky. I don’t know how to deal with the questions posed to me in the course. It made me really reflect. I thought, gosh, it varies from state to state, district to district, school district, every place, area to area, urban, suburban, rural. There’s also an intersectionality. I like Kimberly Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality within us, like humans. But it’s true because you may find yourself in any number of situations. You might be in an urban place, but it is in a region where the political stuff is one way versus another way and vice versa. There’s almost intersectionality there, and it’s multifaceted. You really do have to think about the words you might choose and the ways you might do things. My mom always liked to say, they call it the serenity prayer, but it’s just a saying, really. You have to accept some things and you can’t change certain things and all of the wording there. I’m sure lots of people are familiar. I think that’s probably what we need to do. It’s tricky because you might live in a place where people reactionary and thinking, oh, SEL is meaning something else than it really is, and you have to just meet people where they are and deal with where you are.
[00:08:37.850] – Maggie
It’s really quite tricky, but I like to think about that serenity prayer a little bit. Except the things you cannot change, wisdom to know the difference, and change the things that you can, and start small because you can do some things, and sometimes they might be just in a different way than somebody else in a different context.
[00:08:54.280] – Steve
Well, let’s take that a little more specific then. If I’m a teacher and I’m working in a system that that doesn’t address SEL with any curriculum or resources, what can the teacher do to best respond to needs of students?
[00:09:10.870] – Maggie
Yeah, it’s so tricky. I felt for that teacher in Florida. She really wanted to do well in my course, which asked one thing of her and in her role as a teacher, and we needed to just talk on the phone and figure out what will this mean inside of you as a teacher and what action can you take and will you take? I have a doctoral student right now addressing exactly the same thing and we came to the adage, “a rose by any other name smells as sweet.” Isn’t that from Shakespeare?
[00:09:38.950] – Steve
I don’t know where it’s from, but it’s right on.
[00:09:40.770] – Maggie
Might be Shakespeare, right? I don’t know. I’m not an English teacher. But anyway, I think that that is true when we think about SEL, because if people are reacting to the term and conflating it, perhaps, and maybe there might be some lack of awareness or jumping to… It’s almost like football I’m on this team and you’re on that team. If this is on your team, I’m from Pittsburgh, so it’s an analogy here that works. But anyway, if you say something, sometimes people jump to a conclusion. Sometimes we may have to rephrase the way we’re doing something or using a different way. But really, SEL is just a framework for understanding inter and intrapersonal interactions, reflection, self-awareness. That self-awareness component is key. My colleague Dr. Amy Lynn and I have done some work on this in the last few years, and it’s really a holistic thing. It doesn’t have to be called the SEL. I, as a young teacher, did things that would be called SEL, and I didn’t have a name for it. I just was like, This is my heart. This is what I think is right, my values, and how I want to see the world.
[00:10:49.800] – Maggie
Then I said, oh, there’s a word for this? That’s cool. But basically, you need to set it up in the classroom climate, and it can begin with the teacher. It can start very small, and you bloom because it really is contagious. If people say, “Hey, those kids are super engaged. What is he doing? What is she doing? What’s happening in that classroom?” They go, Oh, I see. Okay, maybe I’ll try that. I’ll try that thing, this or that. It’s not just a program. It’s basically just a way of thinking about relationships and the culture and the climate of a school, including families, community, all of our diverse students, and just understanding that we’re all human. If you call it a different name, it’s a rose by a different name, it still smells as sweet. I didn’t know the name for it until more recently, and it was still my heart then, too.
[00:11:34.350] – Steve
The action can have the positive impact without us having to put a different title on it.
[00:11:44.610] – Maggie
100%. It’s much more about actions speak louder than words, and it is actually a feeling more than anything, which is hard to define. Having words to define is helpful, but if you’re not allowed to use those words for whatever reason or you want to use different ones, you’re still doing it.
[00:12:01.230] – Steve
What’s important for teachers to be considering regarding their own social emotional well-being and that of their colleagues?
[00:12:11.320] – Maggie
Teaching is hard. I mean, you and I both know. We’ve stuck around, we’ve We’ve heard a lot of stories. I feel for teachers going through… I remember crying. I remember being… It’s very difficult. It was difficult 30 years ago. It’s difficult now for some of the same and some different reasons. We have huge attrition numbers. If you look at the stats, a lot of research papers and dissertations start with the problem to be addressed is that a certain percentage of teachers leave within the first five years. It’s really not an easy thing to step into. If you don’t have the support, it’s even harder. I do believe it’s gotten harder these days in a lot of ways. We have a very busy world. Students have a lot of demands and expectations on them, and they live in this constant noise, as do all of us. It’s a very noisy space. There are really scary things in the world, trauma and bad things that people go through, school shootings and Alice drills and thinking about maybe political climates and things where social justice, all kinds of things to be concerned with. But on the flip side of the coin, we also have in our busy world more tools, which is super.
[00:13:26.590] – Maggie
I love the four Cs that they came up with maybe 20 years ago, 21st century education. Four Cs, communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking. When we think about that with SEL and we think about the whole person, we have some tools these days to make sense of our constantly changing and evolving landscape and times. Because we’ve got to be super flexible. If we aren’t getting our emotional needs met, how are we supposed to do that? If you hurt your leg, I think of that gymnast years ago hurt her leg and still power through and like, whoa, that’s asking a lot. If we’re hurt, then we’re asked to provide mental labor and do all these things, it’s too much. We have to support the teachers and give them what they need. Then hopefully, they can support themselves by just going for a walk, reflecting, doing what they need. I go for long walks, whatever they need. It actually makes me more productive than sitting at the computer teaching all day. Then we talk a lot about teacher reflection, but it’s so much more than just, “how did that lesson go?” That was 30 years ago, “hey, how did your lesson go?
[00:14:31.690] – Maggie
What would you do differently?” Now it’s more like, “How are my students feeling? What was their emotional state? What was my emotional state?” We really need the support – SEL infused in the culture, really would help with that to help teachers feel the support they need so they’re not just running on empty, trying to provide emotional support to those who need it. We really need to support each other in that and realize that everything else stems from there.
[00:14:55.520] – Steve
As we wrap up, any closing thoughts, something you want to share with teachers that my questions didn’t bring out?
[00:15:03.460] – Maggie
Well, I guess it’s funny. You always hear people say if they get a little bit older, if they say they’re not 24 years old anymore, let’s just say, I’m not. I would say if you had a time machine to a decade or two from now and you saw the kids grown up like I do, I have the pleasure of doing these days. I live down the block from somebody. I taught their kids, and I see them now, and they’re 30 something years old. I’m like, wow. If you had that time machine, that is incredibly rewarding. But the difficult thing is it’s really a marathon. It’s really a long term thing. I like to cook. I’m a person who enjoys cooking. In the fall, I’ll set my crockpot and I’ll have a meal go all day. I’ll say, oh, that smells so good. It’s going to take time. You have to understand that you’re going to wait a long time for this. It is that a job, and that’s hard. That’s a hard thing. Somebody who’s 50 can say, hey, I see my students in They’re 30 now and look at this. That’s really hard to see that forest through the trees, I guess you’d say.
[00:16:06.670] – Maggie
Basically, you’re not alone. Understand that this is the thing that takes a long time, a slow cook, so to speak, and that teaching humans is about those humans as they grow up as people, not just about them learning their math facts or whatever, which is important, but about developing that whole person. So just understand, if you had a time machine and you could look ahead 20 years from now, that would feel pretty darn good. So just keep that in themselves.
[00:16:33.290] – Steve
I love your example because I’m at the age where I am way out there looking pretty far. And my first year of teaching, a student whom led me to need to learn a lot, follows me on LinkedIn and he’s a consultant and we recorded a podcast together last year.
[00:17:00.760] – Maggie
Wow. See? It’s full circle.
[00:17:03.890] – Steve
I can tell you early in my teaching career, I wouldn’t have looked out to the future and expected that to be one. So knowing those celebrations are there for us as teachers whenever we get to see that impact is great. Well, I appreciate you joining us. What’s the best way that listers might follow up with you if they have questions or want to get some more information?
[00:17:33.020] – Maggie
Sure. I love to connect with people, especially on anything I get very excited about the things I’m doing, is research and stuff. I’m on LinkedIn. Definitely look me up on LinkedIn. They can email mbroaderick@nu.edu. That’s National University. Or if you want to geek out a little bit and look at some publications or collaborate, I’m on Researchgate, which is a Facebook for researchers and you can just Google Scholar – look up my name on Google Scholar and see what you find there. But those are great ways to stay in touch. I’d love to pair up and figure out what folks are doing out there.
[00:18:06.970] – Steve
Alright. We’ll be sure to put your email address in the podcast lead-in. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
[00:18:13.190] – Maggie
Thanks. It’s a pleasure, Steve.
[00:18:16.480] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
