By Daniel Goleman
Media www.rajawalisiber.com – Initially, we set out to talk about Social Emotional Learning (SEL) at a time when millions of kids have been home, attending school online and missing out on valuable time with their peers. But we quickly realized COVID is far from the only thing kids and educators are grappling with—racial inequity, trauma, isolation, social unrest, and overworked parents are a significant part of the equation.
In this episode we talk with Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Linda Lantieri, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) specialist, Amber Pleasant and early career High School teacher, Ben Chase— three people actively involved with implementing and evaluating SEL in the classroom.
Our Guests
Ben Chase
Ben is a second year English teacher at Noble High School (public school) in Southern Maine. He proudly teaches in that school’s alternative program, Multiple Pathways, where they have permission to do school differently and to use the word “love.” He is surrounded by amazing educators, both in the program and down the hall, who he learns from everyday. Additionally, he is a student (and a fellow) in the Master of Arts in Teaching, Teacher Leadership program at Mount Holyoke College. If you’d like to get in touch, you can reach him at chase.b.nh@gmail.com.
Amber Pleasant
Linda Lantieri
Linda Lantieri, MA has been in the field of education for almost 50 years in a variety of capacities: classroom teacher, assistant principal, director of a middle school in East Harlem, and faculty member at Hunter College and presently at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a Fulbright Scholar and internationally known speaker in the areas of Social and Emotional Learning, Contemplative Teaching and Learning and Spirituality in k-12 Education.
Linda has recently cofounded the Transformative Educational Leadership (TEL) Program for educational leaders who desire to lead from the inside out by integrating Mindfulness and Social, Emotional & Ethical Learning through an equity lens in the service of systematic change in education. She currently serves as the Senior Program Advisor for TEL.
Linda is also one of the co-founders and presently a Senior District Advisor for the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). She is also core faculty of the Spirituality Mind Body Intensive which is part of a special M.A. Degree Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has been involved with designing and leading the concentration in k-12 Spirituality in Education since its beginning in 2014.
Linda is the author of numerous articles and book chapters and coauthor of Waging Peace in Our Schools (Beacon Press, 1996) editor of Schools with Spirit: Nurturing the Inner Lives of Children and Teachers (Beacon Press, 2001), author of Building Emotional Intelligence: Practices to Cultivate Inner Resilience in Children (Sounds True, 2008, 2014) and coauthor of Nurturing Gratitude From the Inside Out: 30 Activities for Grades k-8 (Greater Good Science Center, 2017). She is a Senior Scholar at the Fetzer Institute and a Fellow of the George Lucas Educational Foundation.