Hello, teacher friends. Okay. This week we're gonna talk about SEL Social Emotional Learning. Now, depending on how long you've been in education, SEL can be one of those things where you're like. Duh. Like, yeah, that's what we're supposed to be doing. Or it could be like the bane of your existence. 'cause you have some scripted curriculum that has just been dumped on you that you need to go through.

More like a checkoff box than kind of Yeah, I did my SEL for the day like. That's like the worst approach to possibly have something you're absolutely not trained in doing. Right? We hand out these thought reflection worksheets to students, like somehow We've all been trained in, you know, CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, which we're not.

Okay. So in this whole episode, I'm gonna unpack it. Am I for SEL. Absolutely. 100% yes. But we are making it too complicated and we are making it we're doing ourselves and our students a disservice by making it this kind of scripted curriculum. Checkoff. This is what I did today. Okay? It is something that should be authentic, that building emotional intelligence into your teaching practice empowers you, empowers your students in basically.

You just have a better experience of everything, including life. Some of you may know one of my nerdy things is that I'm actually certified as a life coach in eq, which is emotional intelligence. I don't actually coach people, life coach people anymore. I took the course and got the certification because I wanted to improve my own EQ and understand how I worked.

So in this episode, we're gonna get into it, okay? I am gonna give you a whole. Roadmap. I'm gonna talk to you about what real emotional intelligence looks like in in practice. We're gonna just touch on why some of these SEO scripted curriculums while well-intentioned fall flat. I can give you some empowering, doable EQ habits to start right now about how teachers can develop habits to build authentic emotional intelligence, connection, empathy.

In around with students without giving you something extra to do and contributing to your burnout. Okay? So if that all sounds good, I will see you on the inside. I promise you I will not, no doubt on the data. It is something I'm really passionate about, but I'm gonna keep it short as I can. Actionable.

You are gonna walk away. Feeling better about yourself and what you're doing. Okay, I promise it. I will see you on the inside. Welcome to the Teacher Self-Care and Life Balance podcast, where we focus all things personal development to help teachers feel empowered to thrive inside and outside of the classroom.

If you are passionate about education, but tired of it taking over your whole life. You have found your new home in the podcast universe, you'll love it here. I'm Grace Stevens, your host, and let's get going with today's show. All right. Start with a story. Let me tell you about why I felt compelled to do this episode.

So here's an example of everything I see. Wrong. Okay. I was a substitute teaching. It was my first time at this particular school. It was a charter school. It was an academy. And from the outside seemed like they were doing everything so well. They just really had everything going on. And the principal first and only time this has ever happened to me, the principal met me at the front and wanted to give me a tour of the whole campus and their program and their philosophy and all the things they would.

Doing, and here's the lunchroom and here's all the supplies and the free coffee, and here's how we set up, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so we go, I'm nervous, right? Because I know school starts at eight and I had got there, of course, seven 30, but sat quietly in the parking lot until I was asked to report to Judy at 7 45.

He came out at eight and started showing me around, well, I was already nervous, like, oh my gosh, don't I need to start teaching now? And. Please have, you know, 20 seconds to look at the, the lesson plan before I get going. And he reassured me, oh my gosh, no. You know what? We're gonna go in the classroom. You can observe, because the first 30 minutes for this particular cohort, it was second grade is their SEL for the day.

Every class gets an SEL lesson every single day with our specialist. Okay? So I go in at second grade. There are kids sitting on a mat doing, as you would expect, touching each other, rolling around whatever. A lady is standing there with her PowerPoint Presentation obviously is a scripted curriculum.

She reads them a little story about somebody being proud of themselves and then ask them, turn and talk to your partner. Tell us a time where you were proud of yourself. And I ought to tell you nobody was really on task. Nobody was really talking about what they were supposed to be talking about. She called on a few people, nobody volunteered.

And then most of the lesson was spent redirecting students hands to yourself. Apple Source, show everybody how we have respect. Okay? They were doing all the things right. They were checking it off. They had bought the curriculum. They had posters on the wall about how they respect themselves, how they respect others, how they had teamwork, blah, blah, blah.

Okay. This lesson, I gotta tell you, absolute waste of 30 minutes. That was my first impression, like, oh my gosh, that we could have spent something else doing something else in that 30 minutes, and this lady was gone from room to room. Wrote, just not, the kids were not invested in that curriculum at all.

They already knew what was gonna happen for that 30 minutes. They were just gonna goof off. Okay. All that to say, I start teaching, it was second grade. It was strange to me that second graders changed rooms every period. I was teaching math and I had six groups of second grade to teach that day. It was like they were in middle school.

They had to transition rooms, but they weren't allowed to transition by themselves. You had to take them outside, wait for the other class to line up, hand them over, all of that, handing over, walking back to class, going back to class, getting kids settled. Took 15 minutes. 15 minutes from every period. Okay, whatever.

This school runs the way they wanna run. I'm not here to, they didn't hire me as a consultant, like pick up the lesson plans, grace and do what you're supposed to do. Okay. So I'm trying to teach the math and behavior was not great. Some kids were absolutely acting out and they always do for subs. It's okay.

I am okay with kids acting out. I am okay. I know that. Particularly for some students, you know, it's strange. It's weird to have a new teacher. They get anxious, they're not showing up as their best selves. So I have good classroom management skills. Okay. All the things. Some kids get done with a worksheet very early, some don't get done at all.

A couple of kids are really struggling, it seems. They have a very limited English proficiency and the instructions that I was giving. I didn't speak their language. However, I did notice they were sitting next to students who did speak their language. There had been some thought put into where they sat actually, so you could help your buddy.

Okay? So while I was walking around helping different students, I asked one student who was absolutely, you know, was finished. I said, Hey, could you help your buddy for a second to have a chance to get back to him? He spoke Vietnamese. I didn't speak Vietnamese, and the student says to me, no, no, no. I'm gonna do, I can do this.

But okay, so he got out his Chromebook and wanted to do something else. So I look at the table, can anybody else help the student, please? And they're just, let's just say there was very little classroom community. I didn't find those students helpful to me. I didn't find them helpful to each other. If I was their teacher, I would've been mortified.

I. There are posters all over the room about how we help each other and how we show respect. They weren't showing respect to me, they weren't showing respect to each other. They were not I wanna say they didn't really have a classroom community. There's cooperation, kindness, teamwork, all those things.

That beautiful sense of community was totally lacking. Now, you could say to me, it was this particular cohort. Listen, I had six groups of kids that day. This same situation was a replicated all day. It was a culture problem. This academy was doing lip service to culture, but they had done nothing to actually promote it.

Buying the curriculum doesn't cut it. Okay. You gotta. Have a culture of it. Now, I can't change your campus culture in one podcast episode, but I can bring awareness to this fact that if your school has not purchased SEL social emotional learning curriculum, hasn't dedicated time to it, whatever, it doesn't mean you are behind.

Right. It's good teaching. That's part one. Good teaching classroom community connections, having kids feel respectful and respected. That's all down to you and above and beyond that, I think. That it is time for some of us maybe to push back if we are being asked to do certain things like handout reflection sheets to students and kind of manage that, like I call that playing therapist without a license.

Okay, let me give you another example. I was in TK class. Beautiful classroom culture, beautiful school culture. This school is crushing it. Love to be with these kids, and I'm in the room and there's all these little squishy little things and a poster and one of the. I said, what are these things? And the kid says, those are Kim emojis or something.

They're like little things that like talk about their emotions. They're like little, not hand puppets. They were like little squishy things. But I looked at the poster. There must have been 40 emotions on that poster. These kids were four and hardly any of them spoke English. So there was that. But ask an adult if they can name 40 emotions that they're feeling, and I'm telling you they cannot.

Now, I promised you I wouldn't nerd out on the data, but I can tell you something real basic. That even if you read Brene Brown's work, I'm sure many of you know who Brene Brown is. She's a researcher, a psychologist, a highly bestselling author. She wrote a book, she's written many books, but the one in particular I'm thinking of is this book Atlas of the Heart.

And I'll never forget when I started reading it, I was shocked that your average American could name three emotions, happy, sad, angry. Okay. I remember years ago, myself, I should be embarrassed to tell you this, but this is why I got involved in learning more about emotional intelligence. I was asked by a coach who I had, how I was feeling, and I was having a hard time.

Well, I think, I think this. I think that, no. You are intellectualizing your feelings. What are you feeling right now? And I had to repeatedly ask every week it would be the same deal. Like, what are you feeling right now? And I'd have to say, what are my choices? And she only gave me five. 'cause I was overwhelmed by those.

Okay. So asking a child to, you know, circle or go on a feelings wheel, like let's keep it simple. Okay. If they are able to fill out a reflection sheet, that's great, but many students aren't. Now a reflection sheet you might, is really based in cognitive behavioral therapy. It's the whole idea of, first came a thought, then came a feeling, then came an action.

Okay. And with a reflection sheet, a lot of. Times what we're asking students to do without them knowing. It is re-engineer that in reverse. Okay. What did you do? I hit Johnny. What were you feeling? You know when you hit Johnny? Oh, I was angry or I was frustrated. Okay. Sometimes a lot of kids question mark.

Dunno. Dunno why I did it. What were you thinking about Johnny that made you do that? You see what I'm saying? Like we're not trained in, in coaching kids on how to do that, and they certainly don't have enough awareness to do that. And certainly turn and talk to your partner with a scripted curriculum is not gonna give them that.

You know, what is going to give them that? What is gonna give them That is authentic conversations and authentic modeling. I'm here to tell you if you are a seasoned educator, a good teacher, maybe it just comes naturally to you. If you are a good teacher, you already do this. You don't need to feel terrible about not having reflection sheets, social moaning, learn emotional learning curriculum, right?

That is all sold to you by people trying to make money. Okay. No one's given it to you for free. Maybe they're giving you a little bit, but I'm telling you, if your school bought it, it costs them money, the posters, all the things. I'm not saying it's not a good thing. It is an awesome thing to have kids get in touch with their feelings, understand the connection between how they're acting, what they're thinking, what they were feeling.

This is all the basis of what we call. Eq, which is emotional intelligence as opposed to iq, which is, you know, measuring your intelligence. It's your emotional intelligence. And there are plenty of studies that show that in the long run, in the real world where we don't sit down and take tests as part of our regular, you know, scheduled duties.

A bigger indicator of your success at work, in school and life is. Your eq, your emotional intelligence more than your iq. So let's break it down. Basically, what is emotional intelligence? All right, her, Daniel Goldman, who really is like the, the, the, the granddaddy who really coined this term, there are five main components that make up your emotional intelligence, self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation.

Empathy and social skills. Okay, now, there isn't a teacher anywhere who will not tell you how critical all of those things are for kids' success. Adult success. Again, self-awareness. Self-regulation, motivation. Empathy and social skills. All right. I've looked at many studies. The Castle analysis shows an 11% increase in academic achievement with students who have a high social emotional learning.

Right. They have better attendance, fewer suspensions, improved classroom behavior. Okay. Now put this against, and then in the workplace it's even more, it's like 58% of Let's have a look. Yeah, I know. I had the statistics somewhere. Your eyes are gonna glaze over. Nobody's gonna go fat. Check me. Trust me. The literature is there.

Go Google it if you want. Go fact check. What percentage of you know, se of social emotional learning, EQ is the big, you know, term for it? How does that affect your workplace success? It's a huge component of your workplace success. Okay. But I wanna remind you of this again, only 36% of adults can accurately identify their own emotions.

Okay, so if we can't name our own feelings, how are we going to teach this to kids? Okay, so it starts with us, but we gotta do it a little differently. So here's what I would say. First off, get familiar with your own emotions. This is work that needs to happen outside of the classroom. Okay? Why? So that you can be a better teacher.

Sure. But the bigger. Thing is really, and think about my whole podcast goal, self-care, avoiding burnout, right? Having higher emotional intelligence really protects you from burnout, okay? It's gonna help you, of course, with your classroom management, parent communication, boundary setting. Navigating staff dynamics.

Okay? These are all things that I coach you on. These are all things that my books and my programs talk about in really empowering you with these self-care tools, right? It's the ultimate, you know, self-care flex right here is. Improving your emotional intelligence. So how can we do this? Let me give you just a couple of ways.

These are easy ways, but it comes down again in the classroom. If you can focus on improving your own and then modeling it. It's gonna be better than just handing out a worksheet wrote and not even kind of looking at it or not even knowing what to do with it. Okay. Let me give you an example of what it says.

Modeling it right? I had no shame in telling a class and they knew. Okay, I am gonna say it. Do I say every episode? Do I, do I do I get it into every episode? 'cause this is my mission. What am I gonna say? Your energy teaches more than your lesson plans. When you are getting frustrated and annoyed and easily triggered, and kids know they're getting on your last nerve, it's not like they don't know.

Okay. Co-regulation, friends, it's not like they don't know and And rise to the occasion or lower to the occasion appropriately. Okay. Take a pause, take a breath. There's nothing wrong with saying, huh? You know what? I'm getting really frustrated right now and you can probably sense that. Let's take a break.

Let's change the energy in the room. Let's, whatever, right? Old school, when kids were getting on your nose, we'd be like, put your head in your desk quietly. Okay. We don't do that anymore. You know, maybe we need instead of a, you know, a brain break, we need a brain boost. We just need something to change your energy.

Let's have a dance party. Let's put on a, depending on your grade, let's get up and do, yeah, let's put on a go Noodle. Let's. Whatever. Okay. You know what the mood changes are in your room. Okay. Or you could literally just take a, a rest. You could say, you know what? This is, wow, I'm getting really frustrated.

This lesson is not going well. We've gotta cover the material. Let's take a quick break. We'll come back to it in 10 minutes. Hey, who wants to do a Kahoot? Who wants to do a gym kit, who wants to have five minutes of, of free choice on their Chromebook, doing something that is, you know, educational related.

Okay. So there's a way that you can do that. It's not like your kids don't know that you're getting frustrated or annoyed and need a timeout. That is the perfect example of just, even though I don't know why we feel compelled not to do this as a teacher. I remember when I had a student teacher one time, the lesson was going.

Just bad. Just not going well, kids weren't engaged and she was just going on and on. She was not gonna stop. And I wanted to jump in so many times, but she was being observed. Okay. And you know, I was used to diving in and rescuing her, but it was killing me. Like, okay, don't even the kids were turning around and look at me wide eyes like do something.

But you know, I just let her go. She was being deserved. And I'll never forget afterwards that the observer said to me she only stopped 'cause she had to take the kids to lunch. And I remember the, the lady observing her, right, like her mentor from the university, whatever, said to me afterwards, wow, she wasn't gonna stop no matter what.

I mean, does that like, woo, has that kind of made some of you your stomach turn? Do you ever feel like that? Sometimes I'm not gonna stop. No matter what stop, you've gotta stop. If it's not going well, you gotta stop. You are gonna take a breath and you are gonna ask what's going on here? You ask that part yourself, right?

That's part of self-awareness, right? That part you're asking internally. But to have a moment to ask yourself that, to regroup, you need to stop the lesson, get the kids involved in something else. So I would regularly do that. I would say, Hey, you know what, I'm sure you can sense, Ugh, I'm getting frustrated.

I'm losing the plot. Like, let just, let's all take a break. Let's everybody you know, do X, Y, or Z, whatever. Let me have a minute to regroup and we'll come back to it. Okay? That is modeling self-regulation, self-awareness. Okay. What? So that's the first thing. Just understand that. Being human and, and letting you kids see that side of you, that you are human is gonna be better than again, your scripted worksheet.

Okay, so let's look at how can you work on improving your own social emotional intelligence. Let me give you a few. Hints. Okay, so the first thing is now you can go online, you can take assessments. Sometimes I still do this in some of my programs. I have an assessment that I can give 'cause I'm trained to give it whatever.

I have to tell you, the first time I took the assessment, it didn't me measure us in all five areas, right? Self-awareness, managing emotions, motivating one's, self empathy, and social skills. And I high, I scored really high on self-awareness. And I scored really high on motivating myself, and then I was really shocked that I didn't score very well.

Well, I did like it's, it wasn't a developmental priority, right? Which is another way of saying, oh my God, you're really bad at that. But could be improved was like managing emotions. And you know, empathy, which I was really surprised because I thought those were my strengths. So now that makes me really laugh that I scored really, really high on self-awareness when apparently, according to this quiz survey, which had been scientifically validated, apparently I didn't know myself that well 'cause I'm not as empathetic 'cause I think I am, which.

Kind of crazy. Now that is an old assessment. Maybe I should, I took it years ago. Maybe I should take it. Again, because I really feel that that is one of my strengths. It's something that has totally driven my burnout, right? A complete lack of. Inability to set boundaries because I feel like I'm empathetic and I never made that connection.

That if you really care about people you do set healthy boundaries. Okay, so that's an aside. So what are some things you can do? One is model it. Okay. Stop, breathe, ask. Talked about this strategy before. When things are overwhelming, when things are spiral, just stop. Stop. Don't be the teacher who's not gonna stop no matter what, until the bell goes right.

Stop. Take a breath and ask yourselves. I'll ask yourself, what am I feeling right? What do I need right now? What is going on with me right now? Okay. And you can model the language. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. Let's gonna take, let's take a break. Okay. When you're engaging with the student and it's just not going well, right?

The first key is, you know, don't engage. Right? But sometimes you have to try and negotiate meaning with students, or you have to try and unravel the. Playground mystery, drama like we're detectives, right? And you know what? I can sense we're getting frustrated with each other right now. Let's take a breath.

Let's take a break and we're gonna revisit this later. Okay? So model it. Okay? So stop, breathe, ask. Okay, so you can hit the pause button. Number two, name it to tame it, right? Improve your emotional vocabulary. I am gonna put together a resource for you. Like a wheel, like a wheel like pro. Maybe you even have one in your classroom.

The emotions wheel, you never really looked at it. I prefer to look at it like this scale, not a wheel that goes around, but this scale I call it the emotional scale. And at the top everybody would know would be joy, appreciation, empowerment, love. And then at the. Bottom would be like fear, despair, powerlessness, right?

Which is even a lower kind of emotion than hatred or reigned or sadness or grief, right? So there's this emotional scale, and usually I've seen different variations of it, but usually there would be about 12 different steps in that. And so if you can improve your own emotional vocabulary, you will understand.

One of the things I do teach in my program is moving up the emotional scale. You can't go from despair to joy. You just can't, but you can feel a little better, right? You can move two steps up the emotional scale, but if you can't name it, it's hard to know how to move ahead. So I would practice two or three times a day just checking in with yourself, huh?

What am I feeling right now? And we might just have a limited vocabulary, tired, fed up. Right. Just, but get used to look at the scale, look at your choices, and get more, kind of just improve the va that vocabulary. Okay. Sorry I even interrupted myself that I'm gonna make a resource with like the emotional scale and I've another few exercises and I'm gonna send it out to everybody.

On my list. It's not real. There's no real way to attach it to a podcast. So I'm gonna tell you this, if you are not one of my subscribers, if you're not on my email list, you know why not? I give away so many free resources. Let me tell you the best way to get on it because this is a resource everybody probably needs if you go to grace stevens.com and that is Stevens with a v, right?

S-T-E-V-E-N-S. So grace stevens.com/. Say no or one word, S-A-Y-N-O. So grace stevens.com/say, no you, and sign up. I will send you a complete PDF on setting healthy boundaries. How to, it will coach you through these exercises. We'll coach you through dipping ditching your least favorite duty. I don't, there is not one educator, administrator person out there who could not do a better job of saying no without guilt, right?

Or. Yes, with limitations, okay? We can't say no to everything, but we can set limitations on things we do say yes to. So go ahead, get that, and then once you are on my list, or if you are already on my list because you bought one of my books or did something else, don't need to opt in again, but I will send you these resources.

I. As soon as I've published this episode. Okay. So name it to tame it, right? Stop, breathe, and ask. Have emotional check-ins, not just for you, but for your students. So you might already do this. Okay. I was in a lovely classroom where a lot of the kids, it was a severe special education class, and many of the students were nonverbal, but they all had this board on the wall where they could check in, and there were just th, you know, three or four options about how they were feeling, how they were feeling when they got to school.

When they came to school. They would go touch it. Were they feeling okay? Were they feeling tired? Were they feeling this? Were they feeling that? So if you do a kind of circle time or a morning meeting, a perfect way to get kids to just check in on themselves and let you know where they're at. Okay. What are you feeling?

What do you need? Okay. I. Number four, set emotional boundaries. Okay? You're not responsible for everything, okay? I have so many episodes on setting boundaries, and a lot of them are about boundaries with your time, but many of them are on boundaries with people. That seems to be the thing that wears us out the most, okay?

You have got to get into this mindset where you can care deeply about people without carrying it all. I am gonna say that again because I feel that for a lot of us, our empathy, because we understand that people, all the students in our rooms all have a different story. Everybody shows up to work every, all the parents, everybody has something else going on in their lives that we can't see.

And we're so empathetic to that. And we are fixers by nature and we feel it's all on us, and it isn't. The only thing that does is burn us out. So I'm gonna remind you again. If you need to write this down, write it down. You can care deeply without carrying it all. Just because you don't carry it all because you set some emotional boundaries for yourself.

It doesn't mean you don't care. Okay. The inverse is true. Yeah. I'm go. I could say any number of cliches here. You can't pour from an empty cup, okay? If you are exhausted, stressed out, overwhelmed, you are just crabby and resentful, and that's not helpful for anybody. I. Okay. And then the last thing I would say easier said than done is practice some perspective taking.

Right. A huge part of emotional intelligence is not only this empathy, but this social awareness. Okay. And this is something that we have to really try and explicitly teach children. Right. It is a big part of our job is that some students are totally, you know. Unaware of other people and their feelings and it needs to be explicit, explicitly taught, but the simple way is just to keep an open mind.

Try and be curious. I always tell students, try and be like a scientist, right? Remember, oh, we're used to being text detectives, right? Remember I taught the littles how to read, be a text detective. You know, unpack the text, but look for context clues in the text. You know, in real life we gotta explicitly teach kids to look for context clues.

What way, in what way? Was this student, this friend who you've just fallen out with, they were probably giving you clues that they were frustrated that they were done, that they didn't wanna engage in this way anymore before they lashed out at you. What clues did you miss? Be curious, right? Curiosity over judgment.

I always tell adults, but for kids, I always tell 'em, look for the clues. Right? In the case of adults, if there's conflict, if you're finding yourself being judgy about people being triggered by people, just ask yourself, what else could be true for this person right now? Right? Yes. They are not being kind to me.

Yes, they are being inflexible. Maybe they're even being rude. What else could be true for them? Right? What else could be going on for them right now? That's for your own kind of perspective taking. And remember to explicitly teach kids to look for clues. What clues were your friends giving? Look around.

What else could be true? Well, he just didn't wanna share 'cause he's always that way. What else could be true? Maybe he was excited about playing with somebody else that he hasn't played with in a while. Right. Try and talk these things through with students just like you would with your own kids at home, okay?

Sometimes we make it too complicated. You don't need a worksheet. It's okay to say to a student, you know what it is okay to be mad, right? You, you gotta validate kids' feelings. You've gotta, I, wow. I've done episodes on validating adults. You have got to validate students' feelings, okay? Their feelings are real for them, and if they can articulate, I was mad.

Okay? It is okay to be mad. You know what? It's not okay to be, it's not okay to be hands-on. It's not okay to be mean. It's not okay to hurt somebody because you're mad. What else could you do with those feelings? Okay. Those are appropriate conversations. It's a short sentence. It's okay to be mad, right?

Validate it is okay to feel what you are feeling if they can name it. I'm so frustrated right now. Okay. It's okay to be frustrated, but it's not cool to give up. Like let's find a way to persevere. What could we do right now to not be frustrated? Do you need a break? Do we need this? Do we need that? Like kind of problem solve.

The child, get them involved. Get the student involved. What do you think you need right now? Okay. Give them some choices if they seem too overwhelmed to come up with anything. And then the last quick win, rather than handing out. A worksheet, turn and talk to your partner about the last time you were proud.

Rather than that, I would love to see you give a lesson or circles of influence and circles of control that is at the root of so much of this is helping kids and yourself focus on what you can control. Your power lies in what you can control. And even the simplest of exercises, if you just for little kids, put two hula hoops on the floor, right?

And give them picture cards. What can we control? Can we control the weather? No. Can we control putting on our coat before we go out to recess? Yes, we can. Right? When we are with our friends, can we control how our friend acts? No. Can we control what we do? Yes. Okay. Going through, look back at some of my other episodes on empowerment and circle of influence.

Circle of control. These lessons can be as complicated or as easy as you need. I have taught these lessons from kindergarten. I have lesson plans all the way middle school, high school for these, if you look in my TPT store, which is, I've not looked at in. I dunno, months and months and months. Hopefully it's still up and running.

Who knows? I pay no attention to it. But there are lesson plans in there. If you are a regular TPT and you want some complete lesson plans and resources and other things, I probably are around the time that I talk to students about test anxiety and those things. So let me tell you an episode. You can also go back and listen to, all right, episode 89, you can go back to that one, six.

Teacher tips to slay student testing anxiety. And on that episode there is also a link to my TPT store, but you can just go into TPT. Like I said, if you're a TPT and just Grace Stevens Happy classrooms that should bring up my store. Is that funny that I had to even go look that up. Okay. All, so let's wrap it up there, my friends.

Let me just summarize for you, you are doing better than you think. Okay? You don't need to have the perfect curriculum. You don't need to have 30 minutes carved out a day. It isn't something we just, Ooh, social emotional learning. I. Check it off the box, done that for the day. That is not how it's supposed to be.

That is purely performative. That's doing it for the sake of doing it, for the sake of telling people we do it. That's not authentic. Being authentic is just practicing yourself, building your own emotional literacy, and then it becomes more emo, it becomes more authentic what you do. In the classroom with your students about building a classroom community, about teaching students how to be aware of their emotions and what is appropriate and what isn't.

Okay? You don't need to be a junior therapist. You got other things to be doing. Alright? So again, if you are on my list, I will send you some resources that I'm gonna sit down and make right now. Now I've committed to it. It will get done if you're not on my list. You know, why not? I'm not, I'm not a spammer.

I'm not sending out rubbish, I promise you. So you can go to grace stevens.com/say no, and you'll get the, the excellent complete PDF guide on it's whole exercises, walks you through how to ditch some duties. And then I'll also send you. My weekly, actually biweekly every two weeks. Podcast, email, and then I will attach the.

Whatever I make in a minute to help you with your SEL learning to that. Okay? Alright. It is summer. If you're listening in real time. I hope everything is going amazingly. I hope you are resting. I hope you are recharging. I hope you are regrouping. And until next time, create your own path. Bring your own sunshine.

Ah, take a breath, take those. Savor everything. Savor finishing your coffee without it getting cold. Savor eating lunch whenever you want to. Savor, turning off that alarm. Hopefully all the little joys of summer. I hope you savor them all and I will see you again real soon.