July 05, 2023

Building Social Emotional Climate in the Classroom

31 minutes

Children need to be calm and able to manage their emotions if they’re going to learn, but they can’t do that without tools to help them handle their emotions – especially the kind of yucky emotions that can really disrupt a student’s day or even a teacher’s day.

In today’s episode, Jess Moorhead, a teacher from Memphis, TN, joins the podcast to explain some of the ways she helps her students develop socially and emotionally. Listen to the episode to learn about how Jess lays the groundwork for her students during the first two weeks of the year, then continues to set the tone every day to help her students develop the strategies they need to both verbalize and manage their feelings.

Topics Discussed in This Episode

[00:00:40] Jessica’s background

[00:01:55] Jess’s dogs

[00:02:40] Strategies for social and emotional development in the classroom

[00:04:45] How Jess handles the first two weeks of the year

[00:06:33] What happens after investing the first couple of weeks in social skills

[00:07:35] Setting the tone in the classroom daily

[00:11:45] Where children’s yucky feelings can come from

[00:15:16] Normalizing kids’ feelings and giving them strategies for managing them

[00:17:14] Making those strategies work for students

[00:19:07] A situation Jess had with a child doing group work

[00:24:05] Moving from one strategy to another when the first one doesn’t work