The Thriving Classroom: Engaging the Whole Learner

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This  6-part series will prepare you to support the development of social and emotional skills in their classrooms. Get introduced to Outward Bound’s educational framework for social-emotional development, engage in activities that promote SEL skill building, and learn practices you can implement into your teaching.

 


Included Sessions

This session introduces participants to foundational content for their journey through several sessions.

This session prepares teachers to promote student engagement and teach social-emotional development skills using games and activities.  Expert Outward Bound facilitators will model activities participants can use in their educational environments and share tips and techniques for designing and facilitating effective learning experiences.  

At Outward Bound, social-emotional skills are taught explicitly, and they are also woven into the fabric of the program.  As students go about daily tasks, travel, play, and explore, our instructors implement practices that support their social and emotional growth.  This session defines eight key practices and gives educators a path to supporting social-emotional skill development in their own classroom. 

It’s been said that instructing Outward Bound is the art of asking questions. Questions are what make an experience, brief or long, into more than merely a happening. Not all questions are created equal. This session helps to identify reasons for inquiry, patterns in questioning, and methods for devising questions.  Participants will develop questions that engage, challenge and lead to deeper learning and awareness.  

Good learning is sticky! Sticky is not about answers, and it is neither fast nor efficient. It is about productive struggle and meaning making, most often connecting in conversation with other people. Promoting Discussion helps us to create a culture of back and forth dialogue. It provides methods for facilitation and practice to help with both planned and improvised discussion. Discussion promotes and can even become its own social-emotional skill.  

In this final session, participants reflect on the variety of approaches to social-emotional development they have explored in The Thriving Classroom and make tangible plans for implementing practices to engage and support the learners in their classrooms and support students’ social and emotional needs in their classrooms.