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Matt:
Hello SEL education community, my name is Matt Pearsall. I am the community manager here in the SEL and education community and I am really excited to be able to share with you today at the beginning the inauguration of our of our new speaker series when we start- we're having a regular series of community members and other people coming in and talking to us giving brief talks around various different topics on social emotional learning and I am not only excited to be kicking off this event but also really excited to be able to kick off at this event featuring somebody who had a chance to meet here before A long time SEL champion in the SEL education community, Lynn Thomas. And so we're gonna be talking about supporting learner variability and without further ado I wanto kind of introduce you all to Lynn Lynn can you tell everybody a little bit about yourself before we jump in?

Lynn:
Hi I'm Lynn Thomas I'd love to Matt. I'm really happy to be here. Really excited about speaking to everybody I'm an ed secondary school english teacher from dunville ontario and I'm also an HP Teaching Fellow and I really advocate for mental health support and mental wellness and social emotional learning. I'm really excited to be here today.

Great! And so this topic of supporting learner variability one of the things on it that I really appreciated when I heard that you wanted to talk about this was that this is something that we all, we, every educator deals with every single day and so kind of hearing how you this connection you found in a little bit you were telling me about it before we started got me really excited. So can you tell us a little bit more about about this this this tool that you've been using and and why it's so exciting?

Well yes definitely. I'm really excited to share it with you so um it's a tool that was introduced to me through being an HP Teaching Fellow and it's something that has been created by Digital Promise who are a non-profit organization who research and try and fill the digital learning gap. And the wonderful thing about it is like learner variability as we all know our kids come to school with all kinds of stuff in their backpack and everybody learns different and we try to adjust and do everything in our programs to try and support all those students and that's a real feat how do you do it for you know 30 odd kids in a room and that kind of thing and a lot of times it can be overwhelming when we try and think about well but how do I account for trauma? How do I account for social emotional learning? how do I account for any cognitive issues? How do I account for background knowledge? You know English language learner, there's so many things that it can feel overwhelming.

And how do you put all that together so the really cool thing about it - and it's called the Learner Variability Navigator - is that it does put all those things together and I love the fact that a lot of times we often think about when we want to do a social emotional learning activity it's very explicit and what I love about this is it offers strategies that are based on research to support any of the different variables or factors that affect learning. And it gives you teaching strategies and methodologies that support those things so you can build it as a thread throughout your program, like every single day and every single lesson without feeling like you're adding more. You know it's switching to how you teach something as opposed to teaching one more thing. And I think that sometimes can really you know it's it's a hard thing to figure out how to do. And you know what are those things it supports so well.

Matt: I think we got you got muted there Lynn there we go you're back

Lynn: okay so I'm having trouble picking which screen I want. That's the one. I got it. Okay sharing. Okay is it right can you see the Learner Variability Navigator? Yep okay.

So this is the Digital Promise's Learner Variability Project. As I said, Digital Promise is an independent nonprofit and their mission is to accelerate innovation and improve opportunities for learning. So basically, what they've done is they've taken research and put it at our fingertips. This is open source and free for all educators. So, you can see as we move down through their research, they've defined basically four pillars that are the main areas that they look at.

So you know here we have social emotional learning, and but we also have content cognition and student background. And then what they did is created looked at those pillars and looked at them in these different models. So they've broken it down basically into kind of numeracy and literacy, which basically they can hit on every single subject. Right, so for ease and because it's the one I'm most familiar with. So you know we'll have a look at the grade 7-12 model and explore the factors. So the first time I saw this, I was blown away by this part so here you can see the four pillars divided in the columns and you can see the factors that they discovered affected learning the most what's really marvelous is when I hover over any one of these factors you can see how some fade out and highlight and it shows automatically right there visually how they're interconnected. And I thought that was just brilliant because sometimes we would forget like you know I wouldn't have thought reading fluency would be affected that much by social emotional learning right and it really emphasized the importance of integrating everything together to support the whole child. And you know you can see like hearing is a factor you know it. I thought it was marvelous, but it gets better.

So on any one of these I can click on and it will take me to a summary page. And then basically outlines what the factor is here it can go it goes into a little more deeper explanation about those connections you know critical literacy so it talks about why is emotion why does critical literacy get affected by emotion you know why does competition get affected so those it really helps. It's, it's like the best teacher PDA out there, I think also.

And again explains all the main ideas so in emotion and if you continue down the page it gives you lots of opportunities to learn more. And I like this - the view measures and references. And it's a little different on for each of the factors, but what's wonderful is one you could dig into the references if you wanted to, but it also gives you measures. So sometimes, these are specific sorts of assessments that you could use in the classroom sometimes they're more specialized where it might be your school psychologist or something like that would deliver and interpret these sorts of assessments but there's a lot of them that the classroom teacher could utilize to then give themselves a better base of understanding so then if we go back and as I said sometimes there's a couple of different measures in there and and then you can see it goes into what are the strategies for this factor and before we get into there I will go back up to the top and you'll notice here we have strategies. So I'll show you that and again here we can see all the different areas down the left hand side and on the right hand side we see all the various strategies again that have been extensively researched and you can see just by the color coding what ones support each of the different factors and for example we can look at annotating. And again like before when I click on annotating I'm taken to a summary page that gives me an overview of what is this strategy and what is it like. But it's really awesome because it then gives me a perfect like a lovely example of it in action in a classroom. It also on the right hand side gives me an example of a technology tool that does a really good job in supporting this specific factor, so you know if you want to need to want to etcetera integrate technology you can find out what ones are really good at supporting that factor.

And as before you there's a ton of examples so you can really learn how are people using this strategy in their classroom and find something that really works for you and learn about it better and even dig into more research if you want to go down rabbit hole, which I have you know so and you can really find out different strategies and what they look like and how successful they can be and work in the classroom.

And finally up here in explorers what's really cool is you can create your own workspace and I'm just gonna show you directly the workspace that I created and what it does. Basically, it's you can go and select five or six factors that maybe you want to focus in on. You know, your class needs etc and that's what I did with this where I was given a new course to start this year our whole board is shifting our grade english courses to indigenous literature and so looking at that coming into coming back to school this year obviously I had a lot of things that I had to think about so I selected specific factors that I thought were going to be really important. So background knowledge because it's kind of lacking critical literacy always important in the english classroom but I also looked at given the emotions and adverse experiences and it's great because this workspace you can give annotation notes so you know I thought okay there's a lot of things that might be triggering just because of the subject matter this year emotions are probably going to be a big factor because of coming out of you know isolation etc and you can share the workspace so you could collaborate with colleagues wow you can just share it straight as a view viewing piece and the strategies that it came up with now it gives me a really great panorama I guess strategies that I can use and build on in my classroom so I know I'm supporting those different factors throughout what I'm teaching, no matter what the content material is.

This is really cool. This is, it's amazing yeah - the depth and breadth has just been phenomenal and the learning possibilities like as a teacher to see how those things are connected and learn the strategies that can support so many different things at the same time is just phenomenal. Yeah I think I mean one of the most powerful things I think from this is I hear a lot, I hear people saying "Well how do we move social motion learning into the classroom?" and I think there's a lot of real there's a lot of high level ways that we talk about that a lot but this really makes it very concrete it's like here's this teaching strategy that that probably most educators will recognize They'll say "oh I already do that, yeah like a gallery walk." How many of us do gallery walks all the time? Well now it's like, "Oh look at that, it supports emotion and it supports motivation. Wow, I wouldn't have thought that." Yeah right - or a guided inquiry. Like, "oh it didn't occur to me that that could be a social emotional learning tool."

Lynn: Yeah and and when when when when we kind of are aware of that then we can be a lot more intentional about how we're approaching it and saying that I'm not just doing this as an academic exercise I'm doing it as a social emotional learning exercise at the same time.

Yeah. Yeah, and I thought it was really cool you know obviously we still need those explicit times where you know maybe we're looking at the vocabulary and the social emotional word wheel or you know and that check-in and that kind of thing but to then carry it throughout the day in the various ways that you teach I think is just phenomenal. Yeah, wow. I really appreciate you you sharing this with us. I think I'd like to ask just one one question here at the end before we before we wrap up and say that that for people approaching this for the first time, what's the what's the where should they start? What's the what's the what's the first place they should go to, you know, What I - just again - it's pretty straightforward how they have it set up is just go to the Learner Variability Project, and I believe you put that n the chat for people to grab and I also gave you a link to a slideshow. Oh yeah let me put that I I made surrounding the learner Navigator Yeah sorry the Learner Variability Navigator and there's a ton of links in there and one specific link at the end resources is basically kind of a one-pager of how to get started and how to create your own workspace. And it's like a one-pager and there's a ton more examples of workspaces that are really really helpful to see how people have utilized it like one teacher used it and sent the link home of her workspace because it explained to the parents all the different strategies and factors

That is a really cool yeah really neat idea because I feel like that's that's something that that's often a real that's a it's a gap in communication between families and educators about about why are we doing things what are the what are the reasons what are the reasons that we do this why does education look different than it used to that sort of those sort of conversations though yeah exactly exactly. So you know there's a wide array of ways that you can use it you know for for your own learning to improve your own practice but also to reach out and make connections with your parents and community

Matt: Well thank you so much for sharing this Lynn, I know the thing I'm going to dig into in this as soon as we get off of here is I'm going to go look at the assessment tools that are laid out in there because that is something that I come that comes up all the time about what are some different ways that we can assess things that are that are they can be done alongside academics. This would be is going to be really useful to a lot of people. That's where I'm headed, yeah for sure.

Lynn: And like I said you could get lost going down the rabbit hole in this Navigator, but it's well worth it.

Matt: Cool! Well again Lynn, thank you so much. I really appreciate you joining us, and for those of you watching at home, I just wanna remind everyone that this is the this is the first of our of our social emotional learning kind of speaker series we're having in the SEL and education community you can continue the conversation right here you see the link to our group. We'd love to see you there. We'll be doing more of these. We've got another one coming up a week from from today with JV Johnson talking about emotional motion management. So, without further ado thank you very much, and we will see you all next week take care everybody. Thank you, Lynn.

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Learner Variability Navigator | Learner Variability Project

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Matt: Hello SEL education community, my name is Matt Pearsall.

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What are some things you are already doing in your schools/classrooms that support this design principle?

How would you like for your school/teachers/students to grow in this area?

What connections do you see to this design principle and the MCP Rubric?

What factors/strategies related to this design principle from the LVN are critical for your students?

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Use professional judgment to determine which instructional practices are most appropriate for a given class of learners.

Celebrate areas of strength while honestly acknowledging opportunities for growth.

Return to this rubric at regular intervals, noting growth and lessons learned. In particular, consider:

An observer using this rubric should:

Ask educators and learners to explain or clarify classroom practices whose purpose is not immediately apparent.

Use the rubric as a starting point for discussion and collaboration with each educator observed.

Understand that a single observation is an incomplete snapshot of any classroom environment and endeavor to return for multiple observations and discussions throughout a school year.

Every educator is different. With that said, our experience suggests:

Effective implementation takes time. It generally takes educators several months after launch to implement the key elements of our model successfully, at which point they will enter the Implementing band.

Once educators meet all criteria of the Implementing Band, they can become Distinguished Modern Classroom Educators (DMCEs), receive graduate credit from MCP, and begin to empower others as Expert Modern Classroom Mentors.

Some educators who complete Modern Classrooms training may choose to use certain elements of our model, but not all. Although these educators are not eligible to become DMCEs, we trust their judgment to determine whether and how blended, self-paced, mastery-based practices can best respond to learners' learning needs.

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Implementation and Growth Rubric - Modern Classrooms Project

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Our implementation and growth rubric is a great tool to use for reflection. This rubric can start conversations about what is going well in your Modern Classroom and areas to improve upon. Use this rubric to conduct a self-assessment or invite others in to see how your classroom is being run!

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providing an opportunity for each student to have their own voice by providing a variety of methods to allow them to share their thoughts; contributions, questions, etc.

share students thought anonymously for everyone to understand and view students thoughts

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MCP's design principle allows for teachers to meet individually and with small groups of students. This allows teachers to know students on multiple levels and allows each student to feel seen and heard.

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Common experiences, students being present in class knowing student strengths, and opportunities.