By Fong Marcolongo, Director of Training and Capacity Building
We believe: “Practice makes better.”
We reject the idea of having to be perfect.
In the last year, we have been working and learning to navigate this new world. There were many moments of sadness and fear. We mourned the time we had with our youth and clients. We mourned the in-person connection and was terrified that our methodology would not transfer to screens.
As facilitators and trainers, we have many “aha” moments in our sessions.
- What do we do when our screens freeze?
- What do we do when our activity falls flat?
- What do we say and how did we navigate it?
Social emotional learning to the rescue! Our ability to be self aware—and how we choose to self-manage—during these moments have helped us become stronger virtual leaders while deepening our relationships with our community and students.
Two SEL Tools We Love
Here are two tools we have discovered this year that supported us in our own social emotional learning journey.
SEL facilitation multi-tool
The Atlas of Emotions is an interactive online tool for understanding our emotions and reactions. Our team had been waffling with how we can be more expansive when talking about social emotional learning. When we found this, we geeked on it for hours. We are also using it in facilitation debriefs. We are also trying to identify, understand, pivot to, and address our experiences of fear.
Next-level feeling chart
Feel is a series of artworks by E. Trent Thompson. They’re collected in a book with poems by Arielle Estoria. We love the beautiful images representing different emotions. This is a great tool to incorporate into your virtual teaching spaces.
Try these out and tell us how it goes!
For more activities to build SEL, check out our Ice Breakers and Team Builders to Build Social-Emotional Skills curriculum box!
