At last month’s Teacher Inquiry in Action Forum, attendees walked away with new ideas about what teacher-led learning looks like and sounds like.  From using video to strengthen collaboration and instruction to understanding the connection between academic learning and social...

The wordle above illustrates the OUSD SEL teacher scholars' reflections on their all-day Mills Teacher Scholars experience. As we support our teacher scholars from across the East Bay to engage in making sense of the Common Core standards, we are hearing a repeated refrain: student success hinges on their social emotional learning (SEL) competencies. Indeed, there is wide-spread agreement  that the SEL competencies are foundational to achieving the communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity goals embedded in the Common Core State Standards. But how do teachers support this competency building while developing content understanding? Mills Teacher Scholars is excited to partner with OUSD’s Social Emotional Learning and Leadership Development and Developmental Studies Center to explore this question with a group of dynamic SEL teacher leaders from Caring School Communities demonstration schools. In late January seventeen K-6 OUSD teachers from Parker, Emerson, Crocker Highlands and Garfield elementary schools began a year-long series of collaborative inquiry sessions that focus on two essential questions: What conditions do we need in place to support collaborative adult learning communities that build understanding? How do the Caring School Community Curriculum and the OUSD SEL standards support students’ academic content development? Focus on conversations that promote understanding The all-day January session at Mills College at Northeastern University provided opportunities for teachers to notice, name and better understand how social emotional learning and building academic content knowledge overlap for both adults and students. SEL teacher scholars deconstructed a video of a powerful teacher learning conversation, identifying the adults’ SEL competencies and discourse moves, then participated in a learning discussion themselves. Throughout the session the teacher scholars surfaced the conditions and agreements necessary for teachers to engage in learning conversations together.

Suki Mositer and Joanna Katz look intently at an iPhone that sits between them on the table, their headphones allowing them to listen to the video data without disrupting their colleagues. They smile as they hear Suki’s s student describe...

Vivian Gussey Paley, a long time, highly esteemed teacher and author writes, “As we seek to learn more about a child we demonstrate the acts of observing, listening, questioning, wondering. When we are curious about a child’s words or our answers to these words the child feels respected. The child is respected. ‘What are these ideas that are so interesting to the teacher? I must be somebody with good ideas.’ ” Most teachers go into teaching with a vibrant interest in how children think and develop their ideas. Successful teachers are especially adept at communicating this genuine interest to their students. For Paley, a teacher’s use of data to understand her student’s learning--which for her was any form of evidence she could find that showed her what sense her students were making of the work they were doing-- is an essential part of good teaching. Yet many teachers have “data” fatigue. Currently, the very word brings a range of associations most of which are connected with the standardized testing movement. Very few teachers with whom we speak at the outset of our project link data with authentic information about student learning.