In many classrooms, May is not just another month. It’s four weeks that require a special mindset to get our students and ourselves over the finish line as the school year winds down. Listen to this episode on the May Mindset and what’s required to get through this unique month with skill and grace.

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Sara Silber is an award-winning elementary school teacher and a lead mentor with 30 years of classroom experience. Sara has written two blogposts, for BehaviorFlip’s Blog-“Social Emotional Growth Maps” and “A Teacher’s Journey Through Hacking School Discipline.” More recently, she authored a chapter in the inspiring book Thank You, Teacher. Sara enjoys working with her students and helping them grow and become independent learners. When she is not teaching or planning, she is finding ways to support her colleagues. She loves to share her expertise, funny stories and other things that happen in the life of a teacher.

Almut K. Zieher, Ph.D., is an associate research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Dr. Zieher received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, her M.A. in Special Education, and her B.A. in Elementary Education from the University of New Mexico. Dr. Zieher’s experiences as a general and special education teacher lead her to study how teachers learn and engage in social and emotional behaviors to increase their well-being and pedagogical effectiveness. She uses social, emotional and mindfulness approaches to inform training and measure development. Previously she developed and deployed mindfulness training using the skills from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy with pre-service teachers. Currently, she is developing an indirect self-report measure of teachers’ mindfulness to better understand how the mechanisms of mindfulness work. Additionally, Dr. Zieher is focused on improving measures of SEL implementation, including developing a checklist for measuring elementary school teacher’s social and emotional teaching and a teacher self-report measure of emotion-focused SEL implementation.

Meredith Newlin is entering her 17th year teaching secondary English. Her passion and purpose are to help motivate and inspire educators to rediscover—and keep— their joy for the teaching profession.