Virtual Social Emotional Learning

 

There is a huge need for mental health right now. Our world is going through a unique and difficult time that no one today has gone through before. As educators, we should be aware of this need in order to take care of our students to set them up for good learning opportunities and environments. While considering the time that we are in as preservice teachers, it is important to learn about how to do this well in the circumstances that we are in.

A lot of schools across the country are still doing classes online in order to stop the spread of COVID-19. This being said, there has to be a whole lot of creativity from teachers to make this work. In our class, we were challenged to make a zoom lesson that focuses on Social Emotional Learning.

For my lesson, I created a middle school lesson that focused on reminding students to be repeating positive thoughts to themselves instead of negative ones. They learned about mantras and created one themselves while tying in lines and colors that represented their mantras. Students are so isolated right now, and that can make your headspace very dangerous. At the end of the project, I encouraged them to hang them up in an area that would remind them of their manta. Making this lesson helped me to explore all the opportunities of online learning and the importance of focusing on SEL right now.

As teachers, we need to be checking in with students’ social and emotional health, so apart from this lesson, it would be good to reach out as ask how each student is doing. With middle school students especially, there is a lot of development and discovery of who they are and they are in that very moldable stage of their lives. There are negative pressures with social media and many other possible COVID-19 related trails for them at this time.

When looking for resources for art teaching right now I found a website called Art Ed NJ (https://www.artsednj.org/distance-learning-strategies-all-disciplines/). This resource gives a list of great applications to video chat with students, read aloud book videos, links to interactive art museum websites, and many more. It is important to get out there and look at what other art teachers are doing online. I am blown away by some of the creativity! For the teachers that are in school, there is great support on Facebook groups like “Art on a Cart” where people share what’s going well with pushing into classrooms and also ask questions when things aren’t going well.

There are many ways and reasons to support our students at this time.