The author of “Teaching with the HEART in Mind,”  Dr. Lorea Martínez, who was a special education teacher and school administrator and worked with children and adults internationally, provides reinforcement for the value of purposefully planning for embedding SEL skills in the classroom, beyond teaching the SEL curriculum. She guides educators to provide the necessary resources and structures to support teachers’ social and emotional capacity; and go beyond the SEL curriculum to include the conditions that make learning and growth possible for all students.

Read “3 Misconceptions about SEL” here.

Contact Lorea and find her resources here.

Watch Lorea’s video on Teacher Stress here.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.970] – Steve [Intro]

Hello and welcome to the Teacher Edition of Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud. The complexity of teaching is both challenging and rewarding, and my curiosity has peaked whenever I explore with teachers the multiple pathways for facilitating student engagement in the exciting world of learning. This podcast looks to serve teachers as they motivate and support their learners. Thanks for listening. I’m delighted that you’re here.

[00:00:38.010] – Steve

Teachers Building Students’ SEL Skills. The author of Teaching with the Heart and Mind is joining our podcast today. Dr. Lorea Martínez was a special education teacher and school administrator who has worked with children and adults internationally. She has conducted extensive research in the SEL field with focus on SEL implementation. She works with principles, emotional intelligence, teacher preparation, and school climate. She frequently blogs about how to incorporate SEL in teaching practices, leadership, and parenting. Welcome, Maria.

[00:01:19.770] – Lorea

Hi, Steve. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:22.140] – Steve

I’m wondering if you’d share how your teaching experiences in special education built towards your work with SEL.

[00:01:30.930] – Lorea

Yeah. So about, I would say maybe 14 years ago, I was coaching principals to look at student achievement data in order to increase academic results. And as I was sitting there with these principles, I realized that there was a set of skills that we were missing in order to really support students to do their best work and at the same time, increase academic results. And having my background in special education, I remember that my students, of course, they needed help with their academic fluency, and they needed to review their reading comprehension skills and their fractions, but the place where they got stuck the most, it was with their emotions. Sometimes they were completely overwhelmed because they had so much work to do, they didn’t know where to start, or they felt different in the classroom because they were neurodiverse and they had a different way of processing information. Sometimes they had a hard time making friendships or keeping friendships. So as I was coaching these principles, I said, wait a minute, we are missing a set of skills. And that’s how I came to the field of social-emotional learning. And I can tell you that at the time, I didn’t even know there was a field called the SEL, but I had that intuition that something else needed to be out there that defined these things that I knew I had taught my students without knowing that that was social-emotional learning.

[00:03:10.670] – Lorea

And once I found the field of SEL, it was so joyful because I truly found my life’s work. And for the last 10 years, I’ve been solely focused on supporting teachers and schools with social emotional learning. And I’ve seen the impact that this work can have on students and adults so I’m glad that I’m able to share it with everybody.

[00:03:38.330] – Steve

So in your earliest work, when you didn’t know what it was that you were doing, is that fair to say, was that focused on your survival and your student success?

[00:03:50.630] – Lorea

It was interesting because at the time, I was also working on my doctoral dissertation, and I was trying to find what were the concepts that really defined this work. And I remember submitting my master’s thesis, and I think I called it at the time, “personal skills.” That’s the best that I could come up with. And one of my advisors said, You know what? I know what you mean, but that’s not the concept. You need to do a little more research, which I did for then my doctoral dissertation. And that’s how I found later on that it was actually there was a field and they were researchers, but I did not have the name of what it was.

[00:04:36.730] – Steve

You recognized that your students needed those skills in order for you to do the other parts of teaching that you were being requested to do.

[00:04:47.030] – Lorea

Exactly. And it was as a special education teacher, you really spend, I would say, quite a bit of time helping kids to cope with what it means to be a neurodiverse student in a general education setting. So a lot of that work today, I think that it is being called by, you might say, social skills or coping skills. But when I was in school, really, we didn’t have the right language to define these skills. It was something that I think it came naturally to special ed teachers that we did because we knew that it was such an important part for students in order to be successful in the classroom.

[00:05:33.170] – Steve

I’m wondering if you could give us a starter definition for what it means for a teacher to have an SEL focus within her classroom.

[00:05:45.580] – Lorea

Yes. So I would say there are two aspects of how you might look at social-emotional learning when you are in the classroom. One is looking at the individual skill level. So really paying attention to your students and thinking about how they are practicing or applying social-emotional skills. And those skills go from being able to name your emotions, to have skills, to manage a conflict, to be able to apply empathy, to make good decisions. So paying attention to what’s the skill level that your students have in your classroom. So that’s one aspect of it. But the other aspect is really thinking about what are the conditions that you are creating for students to be successful? And that entails looking at what’s the teaching practices that you have and how are you connecting those to the skills that your students have or don’t have? And I’ll give you an example. Many times, we ask students to do a pair-share or work in groups in order to solve a problem or do a science project. And we do a really good job with prepping students for the academic needs of that exercise. But we don’t do a lot of work prepping students for the social aspect of working in a group.

[00:07:20.110] – Lorea

And students also need to be taught explicitly how to have an academic disagreement with another student or what to do when they are feeling frustrated because there’s a classmate that took the lead on the project and they are not leaving any space for anybody else to have an opinion or to bring up an idea. So when we do this work intentionally in SEL, we are also helping students to be able to almost fully participate in the classroom experience you create for them because you are also helping them not not only with the academic fluency that they need, but also with the social-emotional skills they need in order to, again, fully participate and engage in the activities and the pedagogy that you are presenting to them.

[00:08:15.740] – Steve

So the SEL skill allows them to maximize their engagement in the academic activity and then to be able to gain the academic at the same time.

[00:08:30.140] – Lorea

Exactly. And that’s why one of the false dichotomies is that we often hear is that when you are teaching SEL, you are wasting time because you need to be focused on really teaching the state standards. And that false dichotomy is  because when you are teaching those SEL skills to students, you said you are maximizing engagement, you are maximizing the student’s ability to actually learn that content in meaningful ways. Some of the things that I love teaching to educators is what are the pieces, what are the nuggets that we know from effective neuroscience? And one of them is the important role that emotions play in learning. So I think that when teachers realize, wow, if my students are not emotionally connected to the content, actually, they are not able to learn in meaningful ways, I think that it changes the paradigm where we actually want to bring emotion into the classroom, we want our students to have that emotional connection to what we are teaching because we know that then learning can be more engaging, more meaningful, and also more self-driven because it’s relevant to them at a personal level.

[00:09:54.740] – Steve

So I read a blog that you wrote about misconceptions that exist based around SEL focus in classrooms. I pulled a couple of statements out that caught my attention. I’d like to give those to you and just let you respond to them. The first one I pulled was, SEL needs to be focused on creating a rich environment for connecting, sharing, and learning, not only compliance.

[00:10:23.610] – Lorea

Yes. Sometimes SEL is seen as being able to get students to stay still and be quiet. And that’s not how learning happens. Maybe, I don’t know, 40 years ago, people thought that that’s how it happened today. Based on research, we know that that’s not the case. Learning is a social process. So we need to be talking about the things we learn. We need to be sharing and reflecting. So when we see SEL only as compliance, we are really limiting the benefits of SEL because all you are going to do is get students to follow directions. And I can tell you that, yes, that is a benefit of social emotional learning, but that’s a small piece. I think that if you are really embedding SEL in your classroom, you are planting the seeds for students to be self-motivated, to be engaged with the content, and to be active participants in their own learning process, not only being able to follow directions.

[00:11:50.600] – Steve

Next one that I pulled – teachers need time and space to develop their own social and emotional capacity.

[00:11:58.540] – Lorea

Yes. So I would say that the first few years of SEL being implemented in some of the largest urban school districts in the US, they skipped the teacher. They went straight to the student. And that was okay, right? Sometimes in education, we have that sense of urgency. But what these districts realized is that teachers needed to develop their own social-emotional skills. First, because they are models for the students, we know that we teach so much with our behavior much more than with the things that we say or when we are intentionally teaching a lesson, is when we are walking in the hallway and maybe not looking at students, not making eye contact, not saying hi to the office manager. That’s what students see, and that’s what they are learning from. So I think there needs to be a space where educators can reflect on, how am I showing up as a teacher for my students, both when I’m teaching, but also when I’m not teaching. How am I showing up? And then the other aspect is that we don’t know how to teach SEL just because. There is a pedagogy of SEL the same way that you have methods for math and methods in the science of reading.

[00:13:33.290] – Lorea

There are certain best practices around how we teach SEL that teachers need to know and practice and be comfortable with it in order to teach SEL effectively. That’s what I mean when I say teachers need the time and space to develop their own social emotional capacity.

[00:13:53.310] – Steve

When I first read that, I know that I’ve been facilitating teacher professional learning communities where I needed to stop and teach the SEL skills before we could get on with the other work that it was that we were trying to do, just the way back in a classroom, I ran into the same issue with students.

[00:14:18.580] – Lorea

Absolutely. And the thing is that there is an aspect of this work that needs to be very explicit, right? And for us as adults, unless you went to a school when you were a kid where you learned SEL, we have learned these skills by trial and error. So there’s a piece of the social emotional capacity of the adults that also opens the door for growth as educators in these skills. We do have certain universities that are embedding these skills in their teaching credentials, but many teachers don’t arrive in the classroom with an understanding of what SEL is or how they practice these skills in their own lives. So if that doesn’t happen there, it needs to happen in our schools and districts.

[00:15:13.650] – Steve

And the last one that I pulled, SEL requires teacher intentionality beyond any SEL curriculum.

[00:15:22.220] – Lorea

Yes. So sometimes SEL is seen as the the booklet or the curriculum, off the self curriculum that you can pull, you teach your lessons, you follow the script, and you are done. But the reality is that no curriculum is going to be able to see the students that you have in your classroom. The curriculum doesn’t know that Paul is dealing with their parents getting divorced, where somebody else is dealing with maybe financial uncertainty in their household. So SEL needs to be really connected to the challenges, the issues that your students in your class are dealing with. Because if it’s something abstract that you are teaching out of context, it doesn’t really help students to see SEL as life skills. These SEL skills are not a destination on their own, like something that you teach and then you put a check on the checklist. These are skills that help us deal with challenges in our lives and also to be the people that we want to be. So really needs to be contextualized, it needs to be differentiated, and it needs to deal with the real issues that your students are facing.

[00:16:47.880] – Steve

I’m wondering if you would have some recommendations for teachers who might be working in a school that doesn’t have a SEL program or SEL curriculum, in other words, the teacher is out on his or her own. Some thoughts, recommendations for those teachers?

[00:17:07.770] – Lorea

Yes. Actually, I’m glad that you are asking the question, because when I wrote “Teaching with The Heart and Mind,” this is the teacher that I picture in my mind. I was writing the book for a teacher who would be by themselves in their school trying to do this work. So I would say, grab a copy of Teaching With the Heart and Mind as a starter, but also think about what is the emotional experience you want to provide for your students. And I can tell you from all the teachers that I have observed teaching SEL, that when a teacher makes a commitment to do this work, even if they are on their own, other teachers are going to see the difference in their students. And then they want to know, what are you doing in your classroom? So even if you are by yourself, I think that that should not be a deal breaker, but really a motivation to really cultivate the classroom that you wish you had when you were a kid, to really create the space for students to thrive, to be challenged, to be motivated, and to have that meaningful connection with other kids and with that adult in the classroom.

[00:18:26.240] – Lorea

And above all, I think that when you think about teachers being champions for kids that can really make a difference in a child’s life, to be that adult that a child can go to if they have a challenge, I think that it requires some vulnerability and some planning some intentionality, but at the same time, I think the benefits are so worth it. I think they are really visible right away when you start doing this work.

[00:18:57.170] – Steve

I did some writing and a podcast in the past that looked at what I called, what is your classroom management curriculum? And the focus was getting teachers to recognize that whatever they were doing from a classroom management standpoint was actually, in effect, teaching a curriculum just the way their math curriculum or science curriculum was. As I was just listening to you, I’m thinking that those teachers who seem to stand out in what happens in their classrooms with students are really teachers who have that SEL as part of their decision-making, their design of instruction, how they respond to things that happen in their classroom. The reality is, I’m teaching SEL all day long and my interactions with my students. The curriculum, the time that I’m looking at a specific SEL skill might be my direct instruction moment to label that skill and let kids know what it is. But it’s really my modeling of it and the ability to bring kids back to be conscious of what it was that just happened or what it is that we’re doing there is where the real learning comes from.

[00:20:17.650] – Lorea

Absolutely. I think it’s a little bit changing the perspective and seeing SEL as a lens for teaching and learning. Anything that you do in your classroom can have that lens once you have developed and you have a model of what those skills are in your mind, and also that those nuggets of how the brain actually learns. If you put those two together, I think it’s so powerful because then it doesn’t feel like this is something else that is being added on my plate. This is actually how I teach in my classroom. This is how my students relate to each other. And it’s something that doesn’t happen overnight. And also it doesn’t need to feel like you need to do 100 things at the same time. You can start small with something that is important to you as an educator. And once you start that process, I think there’s no looking back. I have never met a teacher who has told me, I did SEL, and now I’m going to go back to how I taught before. I’ve never heard anybody say that to me.

[00:21:33.250] – Steve

Well, thank you. I will place the link to the article on misconceptions in the lead-in to this podcast for folks. Would you tell people the best way that they might be able to reach out to you, find the other resources that you have available, maybe even raise a question or two that they have with you?

[00:21:55.180] – Lorea

Yes, absolutely. They can find me on my website at loreamartinez.com and I have a newsletter that I publish bi-weekly. They can sign up for that. And there’s a contact page. I always respond to all the questions I receive. So please feel free to send me questions. I would love to hear from you. And on my website, you’ll find information about the book and where you can purchase it. I also have an online course to develop educators’ social-emotional skills. And exciting It’s exciting news that today also I’m launching my YouTube channel. And the first video this week is on Educator Stress. So if you are on YouTube, just go ahead and subscribe, and I’ll be publishing new videos every couple of weeks. A lot of resources for all different learners.

[00:22:49.540] – Steve

Thanks so much.

[00:22:51.320] – Lorea

Thank you, Steve. My pleasure.

[00:22:55.710] – 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.

Listen as Dr. Lorea Martínez, Columbia University Teachers College faculty member, founder of HEART in Mind, and author of “Teaching With the Heart in Mind,” provides guidelines for supporting teachers in building students’ social-emotional learning skills. Identify how developing your own SEL skills supports your leadership and instructional coaching with staff.

Honor Your Emotions

Elect Your Responses

Apply Empathy

Reignite Your Relationships

Transform with Purpose

Read Lorea’s article, “Leading From the Heart” here.

Visit Lorea’s website and find her resources here.

Find Lorea’s YouTube Channel and watch her video, “5 Strategies for Educator Stress” here.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:01.330] – Steve [Intro]

Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you have a challenge to guide continuous teacher growth that promotes student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from our experienced guests and insights that I’ve gathered across many years. I’m thrilled you’re here. Thanks for listening.

[00:00:28.670] – Steve

Leading with empathy and inclusivity. Our podcast guest today is Dr. Lorea Martínez, a faculty member at Columbia University Teachers College, educating aspiring principles’ in emotional intelligence. She is the founder of Heart in Mind, a company dedicated to helping schools and organizations integrate social-emotional learning in their practices, products, and learning communities. She works to guide SEL implementation efforts, including training teachers and leadership teams, and providing guidance to educational technology and media companies to help them integrate SEL in their products. I reached out to Dr. Martínez after reading her ASCD post, Leading from the Heart. Welcome, Lorea.

[00:01:19.840] – Lorea

Thank you, Steve. So glad to be here.

[00:01:22.960] – Steve

I’m wondering, for starters, if you could connect your work with SEL and your book, “Teaching With the Heart in Mind” to the course that you teach for aspiring principles in emotional intelligence.

[00:01:37.060] – Lorea

Yes, it actually has been an interesting journey because when I first started in the SEL field, I thought that I would be mostly helping teachers so they could support students. And as I was getting deep into the work, what I realized is the skills of the adults were very important. So for a period of time, I focused on being able to build the capacity of the teachers so they could also develop those same social-emotional skills that they were trying to teach to their students. But in doing this work, I saw that principals played a very essential role in making sure that SEL was really happening at their schools and they model with their leadership how how to be an effective leader, how to be a good instructional coach. And that’s what brought me to really focus also on principles and leadership. So the course that I teach at Columbia University Teachers College is really focused on building that emotional intelligence of aspiring principles. So these are teachers, coaches that are getting their credential to become school administrators. And I can tell you that they need those skills not only to be effective leaders, but really to manage all the challenges that we are seeing in our educational landscape today.

[00:03:07.600] – Steve

Well, the subtitle on the article that you posted, especially, jumped out at me, and it was part of me reading on and getting in touch with you. And that subtitle said, “for women, especially, leading from the heart is a strength, not a weakness.” Can you explore that statement further for us?

[00:03:29.470] – Lorea

Absolutely. In my experience working in schools, I’ve seen that when women come to a position of leadership, sometimes they feel inclined to follow what I would say are traditional leadership styles, where They are trying to be competent, they are trying to show up as professionals, they want to get things done, but they tend to focus on maybe leadership styles that are more what we would assign to a traditional roles. And women, naturally, tend to value things like collaboration or having meaningful connections with their teachers, with the parents in the community. So I think that when women come to those leadership positions, it’s important to really reflect on what are their values, what’s the leader they want to be to others, and really be sincere and honest with themselves and hold on to those values, because we know that emotional intelligence is such an important component of effective and transformational leadership. So we don’t want women to lose almost like that secret sauce when they are leaders in their schools.

[00:04:42.580] – Steve

So if I got it, there’s the possibility that people come into that leadership with that natural inclination, that natural strength, but somehow get a perceived message that that’s not what it takes to be an effective of leader. And so in effect, they withhold the skillset that they have.

[00:05:05.240] – Lorea

Absolutely. And I started the article sharing a story about one of my former students at Columbia, and she was told by her supervisor, “you are too nice to be a principal.” So she was sitting in this class, we were talking about emotions, and she was struggling with that message because what we were trying to say is, you need to be in touch with your emotions if you want to be an effective leader. And at the same time, she had been told, oh, you are too nice. So we had a very rich and meaningful conversation about what it means to also be in that, have that transition when you are really trying to show up as yourself, but you are almost fighting against a system that has a different expectation from what actually transformational leadership is.

[00:05:59.780] – Steve

That’s as sad as the new teachers who a whole lot of years back were told to make sure they didn’t smile before Christmas. Sent a bunch of new teachers down the wrong path. Your article is built around a heart in mind process, and you use HEART as an acronym for important skills in social and emotional capacity. So I’m wondering if we could take that and walk through it one at a time. So the H in heart stands for honoring your emotions.

[00:06:41.140] – Lorea

Yes. So honoring emotions is the foundation, really, of emotional intelligence. And it means that you are able to name, to interpret, and to communicate your feelings. And in the field of social emotional learning, we try to not categorize emotions as positive or negative, but really we look at emotions as data, as information that our body produces in order to send us signals. Emotions are trying to tell us, well, there’s something here that you need to pay attention to. So honoring your emotions really is to come to those feelings that you experience on a daily basis with an open mind, with a little bit of curiosity and say, oh, I’m experiencing some frustration or I’m getting very disappointed with this particular person. And just to use it as data in order to guide how you are going to approach it, how you are going to make decisions in your life. And I feel like for us adults, this is a skill that is very important, and it’s very difficult because there is a lot of unlearning that we have to do unless you went to a school where SEL was taught explicitly, this is something that we have been learning just by trial and error.

[00:08:06.410] – Lorea

And I can tell you I’ve made a lot of errors in my life. So the idea here is that you are, again, unlearning some of the misconceptions you might have about emotions and then trying to have that open mind.

[00:08:21.560] – Steve

So the misconception is that my emotions get in my way instead of my emotions are important information for me to have.

[00:08:33.170] – Lorea

Exactly. So over time, I think we have different patterns but we may have learned that in order to be effective in our roles in education, we might need to bottle up our emotions. You show up, people don’t know what’s happening to you. And what happens in those situations is that unless you take the time to process your feelings, they will show up. And many times, they show up in ways that you don’t intend and having some negative consequences. So it’s a much healthier approach to say, okay, I have this emotional agility to really understand, identify my emotions, interpret why am I having these feelings, and then just transform and move forward. You don’t have to get stuck on your emotions, but really, you have to use that information to help you make decisions.

[00:09:27.100] – Steve

So the E in heart is elect your responses.

[00:09:33.980] – Lorea

Yes. And that entails pretty much all the coping skills, all your self-management skills. And I want to highlight here that the verb, “elect” is important because we have choices when it comes to our thoughts, our emotions, and our behaviors. And I can tell you that this skill has been almost liberating for or the educators that I work with and the principals, because they realize that with their behaviors, for example, maybe they have had a certain way of going about their lives or executing their roles. But with this skill, we pay a little more attention to how those three things are interconnected. So how our emotions impact our thoughts and our behaviors, it’s really a triangle, and we are trying to figure out, well, are my behaviors really clear or am I functioning on autopilot? So a lot of the reflection here is looking at, are my behavior patterns really helping me in my role, in the things that I’m trying to get done, or are they getting in the way? And then we practice together how to develop new behaviors so you can have more tools in your toolbox in order to go about your life.

[00:10:59.640] – Steve

You’re reminding me in my early work with myself as a teacher and then as a teacher-trainer, the recognition that I’m getting angry about something that’s happening in my classroom. The concept that I have a set of responses I could elect from rather than a spontaneous response is going to tend to get me a lot further.

[00:11:27.450] – Lorea

Absolutely. Emotion, if you separate the word emotion, if you separate the word E and motion, really, emotions put us into action. And this is where our prefrontal cortex needs to come into place and really think about, is that the best way to move forward? Is that the best course of action? And again, this is something that requires practice, but I think that it can be very liberating when we’re bringing into our cognition and our awareness that there are many ways in which we can respond to different situations.

[00:12:06.640] – Steve

The A in heart stands for apply empathy.

[00:12:11.270] – Lorea

Yes. So empathy is that ability to recognize the emotions and the feelings in others. And that’s important because in education, you have probably heard of compassion fatigue or empathy fatigue in our educators. And that’s when educators are really connecting so much with the emotions of their students, or maybe for a principal, with the levels of stress that the teachers are experiencing, that they themselves experience almost like a burnout, like fatigue. And what happens with empathy is that you need to find almost the right balance. When we see that happening, it’s because we are almost taking making the feelings of others on our shoulders. We are really making the feelings of others ours. But a healthier way to approach it is to be there for the other person without – really, you are connecting with that feeling, but you are creating a little bit of a separation between the experience of another person and yourself. And another aspect of empathy is empathy towards oneself. And that’s a concept that is very important in the heart in mind model, because in my experience working for educators for my entire career for almost 20 years, I have observed that self-empathy is a difficult concept for educators.

[00:13:48.770] – Lorea

Educators tend to have such high expectations about their students’ behaviors and their students’ performance, their own work as teachers. They want to make a difference, but when they are in a situation where things are not turning out the way they expected or they make a mistake, they tend to be very hard on themselves. I believe that if we embed our educational system with a little more self-compassion and self-empathy, that can support the well-being of individuals and also of the system itself.

[00:14:26.210] – Steve

The R in HEART stands for reignite your relationships?

[00:14:32.010] – Lorea

Yeah. So this has to do with your networks, how you build and maintain positive relationships in your life. And the relationships can be a source of connection, a source of meaningful support. It’s almost like imagining the village that is supporting the work that you do as an individual. But relationships, there are sometimes you meet people that you connect right away, you have some chemistry, and those relationships feel easy. But there are other times that you have to work a little bit at it in order to maintain or to create that relationship. And that’s why the verb here is to reignite, almost seeing relationships as a fire, where sometimes you have to put a little bit of kindle in the fire in order for things to start burning. So really thinking about relationships not just as a unidirectional, but also as a way that you can cultivate those meaningful relationships in your life.

[00:15:42.040] – Steve

So is it pretty similar to the teacher in the classroom is unlikely to maximize learning without the ability to create a relationship with students? Would you say the same is true then if I’m an instructional coach or an administrator in the building, some teachers are going to be real easy to find those relationships that are going to happen naturally, but there’s other teachers that, in effect, is it fair to say a purposeful plan?

[00:16:18.370] – Lorea

Absolutely. And I think that when you see it that way, things become less personal in the sense that you are not making the other person bad in in your mind, but you are also not blaming yourself. You are just acknowledging that, yes, there are certain relationships that are easier, others that I’m going to have to put a little more effort. And especially in that relationship with students, it’s important to keep that in mind, because in our teaching careers, we’re going to have many students that at first we don’t connect, but it’s finding those moments of connection, being purposeful about how we build those meaningful relationships.

[00:17:03.490] – Steve

Can I push you a little bit to define how you use the word connection there? Tell me a little more about what you mean when you say find those connections.

[00:17:13.020] – Lorea

Yeah. So finding connection to me is finding moments where you can have a conversation with somebody where you have something in common or you are finding points of connection at an emotional level. I’m thinking that you can talk with students about things that are non-school related, for example. What’s their favorite sport, the TV show that they are watching, what they like to do on their spare time, and really being intentional about maybe sharing something about yourself that is important or that connects with what the student is saying. So that’s where I think about that connection, but it’s also how you build trust in your relationships, how you feel like a sense of being in relationship with each other.

[00:18:11.260] – Steve

You triggered for me the word that I frequently use when I’m addressing this with coaches working with teachers or teachers working with students is, “knowing.” If I know people, the connections will likely be found. But if I don’t commit to knowing people, getting to know people, then I can’t find the connection. Am I on track there?

[00:18:39.640] – Lorea

Absolutely. I think that in order to know people, back to our first skill, you have to have some curiosity. And curiosity is a very important emotion in learning, both for the teacher and for the student. When you approach somebody with a sense of curiosity, that means that you are open to what they have to share with you. And that’s a place where maybe you had made some assumptions about this particular person, and then you may be surprised of what you find. And of course, if you’re a high school teacher and you have 100 plus students, it might feel very hard. And at the same time, I can tell you that everything we know from research points to the importance of relationships. Anything that we can do to get to know our students better is going to be a vehicle for students to have meaningful learning in the classroom.

[00:19:44.250] – Steve

I love that you got to the word curiosity. It’s one I use with coaches all the time. If an instructional coach enters the conversation with a teacher with curiosity, they’re on the way. You’ve pushed that understanding for me now that that’s really a foundation of getting to relationships as if I approach meeting the person with curiosity. Cool. T – the last letter at heart is transform with purpose.

[00:20:19.320] – Lorea

Yes. So this is probably my favorite skill in the model, and I think that it brings everything else into context. So transforming with purpose is being able to connect who you are as an individual, your values, the things that are important to you with what happens around you. What are the problems that you see in your local, in your global community that you want to work to solve? So when we are transforming with purpose, that means that we are finding our “why,” we are finding a sense of direction in our life. And I believe two things. One, this is a lifelong process. So even for educators, this is an exercise that I do with my principals, with my teachers, because sometimes we come to education with a certain idea and motivation, but that changes over time. So I think that a way to re-energize in our roles in education is to revisit this sense of purpose, to really be able to put into words, why am I here? What am I trying to do? Why am I spending my hours doing this work? And the second thing is, I feel like this is a skill that is very much lacking in our schools, especially in our secondary classrooms and that’s why we see students so disengaged and demotivated, because because they don’t have a sense of purpose.

[00:21:55.060] – Lorea

That’s something that has not been spoken about, cultivated, addressed. So students don’t see the connections between what they are learning in schools and what they want to do in their lives. Maybe sometimes the promise is when they go to college or when they get to the workplace, they’ll be able to do the thing that they want to do. But we don’t have to wait. I think that students are so smart, and they already know that there are problems. I think that it’s a lot about building their agency and their ability to see themselves as active, as change agents in their communities.

[00:22:43.870] – Steve

I have to tell you, what’s going through my mind is the interconnectedness of what teachers know they need to make happen with their students and principals and coaches and school leaders having to, in effect, model that same thing among the staff. I think a lot of what we’re calling burnout among teachers now is quite similar to you’re saying students being demotivated.

[00:23:16.260] – Lorea

Yes. I have to say that I see the challenges that we have as having two different sources, if you will. One is, at the individual level, we need to continue to cultivate these skills intentionally. We cannot assume that we can move forward with the same skills that we used in the past and expect similar or better results. Because after the pandemic, the challenges we are encountering with the way that the world is today as individuals, we need to continue to cultivate this social emotional skills. So that’s one source. But the other part is how much the context. Our social, cultural, political, what happens in the leadership team in your building, that’s going to impact how you show up in the workplace. And we cannot just ask coaches, principals, educators to continue to do this work as individuals if we don’t look at the conditions that are creating the stress, the burnout out the disengagement. Those two things, both the individual and I would say the context, the organizational aspects, need to work in combination in order to make healthier school environments for everybody.

[00:24:45.960] – Steve

So it’s people coaching the SEL skills of each other within that school environment, both as individuals and collaboratives collaboratively in the way that we work with each other.

[00:25:03.400] – Lorea

Absolutely.

[00:25:05.040] – Steve

Well, you’ve given us a lot to reflect on. I will place the link to your article in the podcast lead-in. You want to tell folks a little bit about the best ways that they connect with you and learn more about the work that you’re doing?

[00:25:22.330] – Lorea

Yes, absolutely. They can go check on my website, is loreamartinez.com, and they I’ve been writing and blogging for almost 10 years. I have a ton of SEL related content on website. Of course, they can purchase a copy of “Teaching with the Heart in Mind.” I have an online course to develop adult social-emotional skills that they can check out on my website as well. And big news, today, I launched my YouTube channel. So now people can also find me on on YouTube. Today’s episode was on educator stress, of all things, and videos will be available every two weeks. So that’s another source of pre-content and truly information for educators, principals, and coaches.

[00:26:17.330] – Steve

I will be an early subscriber.

[00:26:19.880] – Lorea

Please do.

[00:26:20.740] – Steve

Excited that I found out about it. Terrific. We’ll post the link to your website in the podcast lead-in to make it easy for folks to find as well. Thank you so much.

[00:26:32.000] – Lorea

Thank you, Steve. It was my pleasure.

[00:26:36.080] – 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.