A ‘caring approach’
Allentown School District prioritizes social-emotional learning
During their intervention and enrichment period, Linda Reagan’s sixth grade students form a circle in their Trexler Middle School classroom and pass a mini basketball to determine whose turn it is to speak.
Together, they tackle big questions: What do you want to be when you grow up? How will you change the world?
It’s during this daily circle time that middle school students throughout the district learn about themselves and their teachers, and build the foundation of mutual respect needed for academic learning to occur.
“It’s not my job to be their friend, but they’re going to buy into adjectives and adverbs and figurative language, if they know that I care about them,” said Reagan, an English teacher.
This exercise is just one of the many social-emotional learning practices Allentown School District is using this school year. Known as SEL, the practice is all about how students manage their emotions and build skills to help them learn and achieve. It can be especially important in urban districts like
“As educators, we spend a great deal of time with our students, and being in Allentown, we know that our students have experienced a lot of trauma for a lot of different reasons. It’s our responsibility to show them that care.”
— Erica Simmons, school counselor at Sheridan Elementary
Allentown, where students often experience poverty and trauma, administrators said.
ASD’s new SEL efforts include mandated calming corners in all classrooms and staffwide training on trauma-informed practices. Administrators said these efforts build on the district’s SEL work in recent years, especially restorative practices.
“Some schools have done it in pockets, but now it’s been identified as a priority,” Tiffany Polek, ASD’s director of student services, said. “We’re all focused on moving in the same direction.”
This year is the first time ASD’s district and building plans are aligned following a climate survey that helped identify social-emotional learning as an area for the district to improve in the next three years.
But the district began implementing restorative practices — or how to use relationships to manage conflict and repair harm — more than three years ago. About 90% of district staff are trained in restorative practices through the International Institute of Restorative Practices in Bethlehem.
“In restorative practices, the first question you should ask is, ‘What happened?’ as opposed to, ‘Why did you do that?’ ” said Stacey Gilmartin, school climate coordinator for ASD. “It’s just a whole different approach to the problem. It’s just a more caring approach to finding out what happened.”
The district provides monthly guides to help teachers strategically focus on SEL competencies and using restorative practices. November’s district theme is gratitude, focusing on self- and social-awareness.
Polek said the district is focusing on growing its SEL efforts in part to combat the emotional toll the pandemic has had on students.
Several studies have shown children began feeling more anxious and depressed during the height of the pandemic, as they spent time in isolation during quarantine. And while the long-term impacts of the pandemic remain to be seen, students are still reporting depression and anxiety as learning barriers, according to a fall 2022 report from YouthTruth, a nonprofit that surveys K-12 students and families for school districts.
SEL initiatives were also noted as a priority for ASD by former Superintendent John Stanford’s administration, Polek said. Acting Superintendent Carol Birks,
who took over for Stanford last month, said she will continue to prioritize SEL.
“Focusing on the whole child, it’s going to be a major focus of mine,” Birks said. “[It’s how we] empower staff to work with our
kids, as well as help people self-regulate, and manage their own inner man and behaviors.”
One way the district is helping students to self-regulate is through calming corners. These designated classroom areas may have bean bag chairs or fuzzy rugs, as well as different options for self-soothing, such as coloring books or squeeze balls. They offer
respite for students so they don’t have to leave the classroom to calm down when they may be having a tough time emotionally.
“That’s kind of allowing students to practice that really important self-regulating: ‘This is the way I’m feeling. I’m feeling out of control. How do I get myself back to a calm state?’ and using their calm down corner is a way to do that,” said Erica Simmons, school counselor at Sheridan Elementary.
It’s important teachers don’t use calming corners as a punishment, but rather as a place for students to remove themselves from stress briefly so they can eventually rejoin their classmates, Simmons said. Calming corners can also be a place for students to use mindfulness techniques, such as breathing exercises.
Simmons said calming corners can become a part of classroom culture, and teachers may have to model how to use them properly so students can learn how to best take advantage of the space.
Also new to ASD this year is trauma-informed training as a districtwide initiative.
Each school enlisted staff members to attend trauma-informed training with the Carbon Lehigh Intermediate Unit 21 resiliency team in spring 2022. These staffers then returned to their schools this fall to share what they learned during professional development days.
Training has already been completed at 13 schools, and the district is aiming to have all schools trained by December, or March at the latest, Polek said.
Simmons was one of the building trainers for Sheridan.
She said part of staff trauma-informed training requires them to reflect on trauma they may have experienced and develop safety plans for how to cope and take care of themselves.
“We’re finding that everyone has experienced some trauma, and [it’s] just acknowledging that and realizing that, and then helping to shift the view to looking at students, looking at behavior, looking at responses through a trauma-informed lens,” Simmons said.
Simmons said her students at Sheridan have experienced homelessness, food insecurity, physical abuse or violence in their neighborhoods, which is the case for students throughout the district.
Staff members are being trained on how to best respond to some of these traumatic experiences by learning about how trauma impacts the brain and how to view student triggers as a way to gather information about the student.
“As educators, we spend a great deal of time with our students, and being in Allentown, we know that our students have experienced a lot of trauma for a lot of different reasons,” Simmons said. “It’s our responsibility to show them that care, to show them that support, to listen to them, to help teach them those regulation strategies.”