Even with trainees “connecting” essentially during the pandemic, it quickly became clear that we required to do more to cultivate connections both in the remote setting and– once it was safe– in the class. With social psychological learning (SEL) becoming a progressively essential focal point for lots of districts, it made sense for us to develop this aspect of our instructional offering.

If the worldwide pandemic and school shutdowns taught us anything, its that we may have been taking teacher-student and student-student connections for given pre-COVID. With many or all students experiencing in-classroom learning, relationships, bonds, and connections are just bound to happen naturally.

5 unanticipated wins

For the brand-new school year, we began rolling out an SEL curriculum districtwide with a focus on creating more powerful bonds with and in between students across all grades. We put a significant emphasis on this rollout, with COVID as the primary catalyst for the effort. We set aside cash for one grade school to pilot 7 Mindsets, and after that we generated several other vendors and used a very formalized procedure to select our SEL curriculum.

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Todd Nickelsen, Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning, Jackson County School SystemTodd Nickelsen is the Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning for the Jackson County School System in Georgia.