Dr. Lorea Martínez Pérez is the award-winning founder of HEART in Mind Consulting, a company dedicated to helping schools and organizations integrate Social Emotional Learning in their practices, products, and learning communities. She has worked with schools, districts, and organizations to guide SEL implementation efforts, including training teachers and leadership teams, and provided guidance to educational technology and media companies to help them integrate SEL in their products.

An educator who has worked with children and adults internationally, Dr. Martínez is a faculty member at Columbia University Teachers College, educating aspiring principals in Emotional Intelligence. She has conducted extensive research in the SEL field with a focus on SEL implementation, principals’ Emotional Intelligence, teacher preparation, and school climate. She frequently blogs about how to incorporate SEL in teaching practices, leadership, and parenting.

She received her Doctor of Philosophy, magna cum laude, in Quality and Innovation in Education from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In 2014, she was awarded the American Education Research Association Graduate Student Award for Excellence in SEL Research from the SEL Special Interest Group.

Dr. Martínez started her career as a special education teacher and administrator. A native of the Costa Brava in Spain, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters.

Buy her book, Teaching with the HEART in Mind: A Complete Educator’s Guide to Social Emotional Learning.

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FocusED Show Notes with Lorea Martinez

Don’t miss what Lorea says about teaching SEL: “We wouldn’t let reading teachers teach the skills of reading without knowing how to read well themselves.”

Lorea talks about the need to practice SEL in front of students. They don’t just learn because we teach them the skills. They learn because we show them.

This conversation doesn’t gloss over the incredible needs in schools today, both socially and academically.

Lorea talked about the system changes that need to be made for SEL to work.

Dr. Martinez talks about the fact that we’re teaching teachers how to teach students but we’re ignoring the fact that we also need to help teachers to help themselves.

Don’t miss what she says about her HEART acronym.

We discuss the need for teachers and leaders to process their emotions so that they don’t come up against a wall when they’ve swallowed them for too long.

The E in HEART is “elect your responses,” which is about our behavioral patterns and making better choices than what we do on autopilot.

Lorea provides listeners with specific strategies to use. Don’t miss what she says about taking the weather report with popsicle sticks.

We discuss the need for leaders to have real conversations about how people feel.

We love the fact that she highlights the need for leaders to celebrate and praise the staff. We have to continue to find the positive moments and bright spots.

Joe follows up to underscore the importance of praise, using our specific praise model, and the way we need to be very intentional about celebrations and individual accomplishments.

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