Sarah Gams, the SCDE Student Learning and Development Program Manager and the 2021 SC Teacher of the Year discusses what it looks like to attend to the needs of learners at various levels. She also shares tips for establishing a culture of collaboration at the start of the year.
Why do you think that tending to the emotional side of students is as important as the academic side?
I think you can ask any teacher and they will tell you we teach people. We teach children. We meet students where they are and take them where they need to go. I think that instinctually we understand as educators that the path to academics is through social emotional skills and how we reach our students in their communities and families. So the question is: How are we connecting to our students? That is the pathway to academics.
We can't get to the content unless all those other needs are met. It's Maslow’s over Bloom’s. This is not new research. This is just more exact. We know more about the student brain and how it develops. Social emotional skills help us teach our content by opening pathways to have social interaction. We can do that with group work, acknowledging students and who they are as people, providing multiple avenues of success with multiple forms of assessment, using multiple methods of instruction. Social emotional skills are why best practice instructional strategies work so well. I think it is absolutely the pathway to academics.
What do you think that looks like at the beginning of the school year?
There are a lot of ways to look at this. At the school level, many of our schools are opening with assemblies in the gym. Most schools work in a full day of engaging activities, getting to know each other, book studies, connecting activities, and other forms of engagement. Taking that day to celebrate the culture and community of your school really starts connecting your students to the school, to teachers, and to each other.
At the classroom level, for me it looks like collaborative work, welcoming activities, and ice breaker activities so they can get to know me and each other. After you've established the culture of your classroom, the norms for our class come from the modeling during those welcoming activities. I’m modeling active listening, speaking respectfully, and asking clarifying questions as we engage in those. The activities I designed to incorporate those skills help build our norms. Then when you get to the academic part, you have to prove that you’re just as inclusive and caring about their academic success as you do about them as a person. For my class, I started assigning something I knew my students would have success with no matter where they were: creative writing, memoirs, and short stories. I set the tone of how we are going to work together based on our conversations on those first drafts. Every student had an individual conference. I used specific compliments on what they did well in writing. I gave them a choice of what they could do in their second draft to move them along in their writing. We made that decision together. Then the second draft came back. So I set the tone of being a partner, resource, and facilitator on this academic journey. That tone coupled with an assignment hat they could all grasp and manage makes it a physical statement of how class will look this year and how we will support each other. Unless a growth mindset is reflected in how we instruct and grade, students won’t believe us when we say it’s important.
What are best practices in systemically building relationships and maintaining those throughout the course of the year?
I think the beauty of teaching is that it’s so creative. I like trying new things every year. The classroom is my creative space: engaging in the struggle of learning. To keep it sustained, I think it's important to understand this is not a “one teacher” effort. So that collaborative environment in schools is important: teachers thinking through rubrics or looking at assessments together, such as multiple-choice tests. Teachers asking each other: does the test reflect what the next step in a multiple-choice test is if a student gets an answer wrong? Wrong answers are more interesting because I know what we need to do based on the mistake: build up critical reading skills, deal with vocabulary issues, or a strengthen skimming skills. All of that is systemic and deeply academic but it must be done collaboratively with fellow teachers so that it is equitable across classes. We are all learning more about our students and lifting all of us up in that academic space. The conversation with other teachers about what students need and how we can move them forward is the common denominator for successful schools and classrooms that are thriving, vibrant, and engaged in productive struggle.
How do you think administrators and leaders can support teachers so they can meet the needs of their students?
In my research of how our social emotional needs impact our work, I came across Camille Farrington's white paper on academic mindsets. She says there are four academic mindsets that if you can cultivate, you provide a space for healing and ideas to flourish and schools to thrive. They are:
- I belong in this community.
- I can succeed at this.
- My ability and my competency grow with my effort.
- This work has value for me.
If we think about those four academic mindsets and how they appear in teachers’ contexts, how would teachers answer those questions? Do teachers feel like they are part of a community? Are they included in the decision-making process? Do they have autonomy in making decisions on retakes, assessment, and classroom instruction? Administrators must make education possible for teachers to make them feel successful in what they do. Have a few things for a school focus, not 50. I think we must acknowledge teachers are exhausted post-COVID. We created a whole new way to instruct, which was an incredible feat. In that, our feeling of competence was tested. For administrators, creating that environment so we feel our ability and competence grow with effort, even if we fail, is crucial. Recognizing the effort and growth is important. Teachers wants to be in classrooms. We chose this profession to be with students. Our work inherently holds that deep, innate value. But we also need to feel valued and that value needs to be visible, like being included in the decision making process or being transparent about how the decisions are made. Developing those academic mindsets and creating space for those mindsets to flourish is what administrators can do for teachers.
Learn more about Sarah Gams's experiences with meeting the needs of all learners by listening to more of her conversation here:
https://anchor.fm/additional-resources/personalizesc/episodes/Ep--36---Meeting-the-Needs-of-Learners-A-Conversation-with-Sarah-Gams-e1n5o71
