Whole Child Learning in a Tech-Driven World

Purpose & objective

More than ever, it’s important students are learning more than the core subject areas. As educators, we must teach soft skills like character education, mental wellness, leadership, resilience, and conflict resolution. It’s hard to find the time or the space to do it in the core curriculum, so this session will help teachers teach topics organically and infuse these topics within everyday curriculum. Through organic teaching opportunities, educators will learn best practices for sustainable learning objectives and take home digital and offline resources to use tomorrow. These supplemental resources for 1st-12th grade are focused on compassion, character education, mental wellness, leadership, and resilience. We will explore the skills, qualities, and attributes we would like students to possess at age 25 and discuss core competencies, challenges, and solutions for implementing whole child strategies within the classroom and school. Educators will learn how to support students to ensure our students are healthy, feel safe, challenged, engaged, and supported from K to 12.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs was arranged to illustrate the foundational requirement of one need in order to successfully strive and obtain the next. If a student is not healthy, then how can that child be expected to be engaged or challenged in classroom activities? If the child does not feel physically or emotionally safe, then how can that child truly be expected to think freely, collaborate with others, and explore their boundaries? This session will open up discussion to find ways, through technology and whole child approach to learning to start building a solid foundation to prepare students for the future.

EVERFI conducted research through a survey of 2,491 teachers who had used an EVERFI product, and their experience with social & emotional learning through technology. Below are some of the relevant findings:
71% say digital education can engage the unengaged
64% say digital education allows SEL to extend beyond the classroom.
87% of teachers say teaching SEL digitally makes sense for students now when young people spend more time online than ever
Nearly nine-in-ten teachers say digital education can provide feedback about their students’ SEL skills.

After this session, educators will be able to:
Define and analyze the core competencies and degrees of implementation to teach whole child education
Implement strategies to address whole child education
Create organic teaching opportunities through experiential learning

Outline

Opening (5 Minutes)
Introduction to presenter(s) and agenda

Gallery Walk (15 minutes)
Participants will walk around the room and on posterboard brainstorm answers to each question:
What does it mean for our students to feel healthy?
What does it mean for our students to feel safe?
What does it mean for our students to feel engaged?
What does it mean for our students to feel supported?
What does it mean for our students to feel challenged?
After 2 minutes, educators walk to the next poster and answer the next question question

Discussion (12 Minutes)
Why is teaching Whole Child Important? Share key statistics from PPT.
A whole child approach to education is defined by policies, practices, and relationships that ensure each child, in each school, in each community, is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.
It’s easy to say, “let’s implement more whole child into our class and curricula” but there are a lot of factors that could inhibit success.

Implementation of Whole Child (5 Minutes)
Organic Opportunities
Experiential Learning Cycle - we’ll discuss this in a bit
Dedicated Time
Daily Rituals, focused lessons, morning meetings
Classroom Culture
State Standards that address SEL and whole child
School Culture: where teachers, students & families are invested in teaching whole child
With each implementation stage, ask the teacher to define what they perceive that stage to mean for them?
What does the teacher have the most control over?
What is the easiest stage to implement? What is the most impactful? Are they the same?

Experiential Learning Cycle Video & Activity (25 Minutes)
Organic Opportunities is an effort to look for teachable moments. To progress to a whole child approach teaching, a child must foundationally feel emotionally healthy. But how do we incorporate emotional health in everyday learning? Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle gives us an example of expanding our teaching to include emotional responses.
Concrete Experiences: finishing a lesson, giving a class presentation, a fight broke out, tattle-telling, bullying, community engagement, etc. Concrete experience is something that has been identified as happening.
Observation & Reflection: Pausing, and with intentionality asking what was observed, Reflecting on how it made individuals feel. What was experienced?
Abstract Realization: AKA zooming out. When else have you experienced something similar? When might you experience something similar? When have you felt this way before? When else have you seen this type of leadership? When might you use this skill? Etc. This could also be using metaphor or inanimate objects to express how one is feeling- everyone finds a rock on the playground and come back in prepared to talk about how this rock represents how you felt about X activity, or how it represents you, etc.
Active Experimentation: Take what you have learned and apply it to a new experience. Did you learn that collectively the class felt safe when x happened? Did you learn that the kiddos feel happiest around the color yellow? What can you do as a community to take what you have learned and add it to your environment?
Experiential Activity

EVERFI Solutions to Whole Child Challenges (20 minutes)
A solution to help with these challenges is utilizing EVERFI resources -- which give you the tools to achieve a whole child approach. Whether this is through specific critical skill content or resources found available within the content (like discussion questions and offline lesson plans) you will have the tools and content to start to create a whole child approach within in your classroom.

Q&A (5 Minutes)

Supporting research

http://everfi.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/NW_Teaching-SEL-Digitally-White-Paper-4.pdf

http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/siteASCD/policy/CCSS-and-Whole-Child-one-pager.pdf

https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html