- Welcome to our board meeting! Thank you, Principal Espinoza, and your SYH team for hosting us tonight! We appreciate all the work it takes to collaborate with Ms. Vicedo to make a board meeting happen. Isn’t the Maida Torres-Stanovik a beautiful venue! For those of you who aren’t aware, Dr. Maida Torres was a beloved administrator in Sweetwater for many years and for whom this theater was named!
- Another couple of weeks with Sweetwater staff and students excelling:
- GJH student Luigi Gono was SD County Spelling Bee Runner-up! Can you spell S-P-E-C-T-A-C-U-L-A-R!
- Olympian Academic Decathletes who won 4th Place in State Academic Decathlon Championships for Div. II and students won 9 medals.
- ELH TitanBot won Sacramento Regional Championships in FIRST Robotics.
- Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher celebrated 80th Assembly District Women and Girls of the Year. Congratulations! We had quite a few honorees:
- BVH – Angela Arce, Thalia Bendorf, Caitlin Lange
- CPH – Rikie Guardado
- CVH – Evelyn Escamilla, Raquel Gomez, Angelie Walker
- ELH – Jamey Battle
- HH – Mihiri Kotikawatta
- MoH – Mai Villa
- Pal – Belinda Sanchez
- SoH – Viviana Reyes, Lizbeth Quinones, Olivia Sandoval
- SUH – Dianna Elizardo
- SUHI teacher Amee Cuellar Martinez, MoH teacher Jaye Carballo and principal Maribel Gavin
- At the SDCOE/PLNU job fair we met our first RISE scholar.
- I had the opportunity over the 4-day weekend to visit Yosemite for the first time! Besides the breathtaking beauty, taking even a quick trip like that provides more than enough time to think and reflect. Additionally, when one is in an environment that is unknown, one typically is more aware of surroundings and people. It’s always fascinating to people watch in places away from home. It made me think about how people choose to visit that location, from where do they travel and why then? What kinds of life experiences have they had?
- So, it made me reflect about “learning to walk in another’s shoes.” We’ve all heard that idea at some point in our lives. What does that concept mean for each of us personally and professionally? How might developing this capacity improve us and the world around us?
- In nurturing our capacity to put ourselves in another’s place, we gain the ability to respond to others’ emotions in a truly sensitive way. There is a certain level of compassion that can only be achieved through what is called empathy. To understand the predicament of another requires that we can imagine ourselves struggling through similar circumstances or to view the world from the perspectives of individuals who have backgrounds sometimes entirely different from our own. When we have empathy for someone else, our concern for their welfare is quite direct and tailored to their emotional reactions instead of ours. We feel their pain or we experience their joy. On a personal level, it’s quite a remarkable life encounter!
- What does having empathy or “learning to walk in another’s shoes” look like in an educational setting? The author of an article in Phi Delta Kappan with the same title says, “the capacity to make sense of another person’s thoughts and feelings underlies a host of social-emotional learning outcomes.” Right now in many educational circles, in addition to Sweetwater, the idea of social-emotional learning (SEL) is engendering tremendous energy and enthusiasm among educators. And, researchers are beginning to study and conclude that SEL shows real staying power! Author Hunter Gehlbach wrote, “Socially savvy students who manage their emotions adeptly tend to collaborate better with peers, relate better to their teachers, and get better grades. Students who learn these things will be well-prepared for adult life; companies like Google will want to hire these graduates.”
- He goes on to ask how do educators prioritize which social-emotional skills matter most? And, which of these skills can educators realistically affect? Can we really teach students to be more caring or purpose-driven or empathic?
- At the core of SEL lies a “single teachable capacity that anchors almost all of our social interactions; social perspectives taking, or the capacity to make sense of others’ thoughts and feelings.” This ability to “read” others, Gehlbach says, imagining their unique psychological experience, can provide the compass by which we navigate our social world. Another term for this is what we call empathy. If we develop this capacity to empathize, it allows us to interpret the motivations and behaviors of our friends and neighbors, to see situations from a stranger’s point of view, and to understand and appreciate values and beliefs different from our own.
- Research findings from the past 20 years suggest that when “people become more capable at perspective taking, they become less likely to stereotype others, they respond less aggressively when provoked, and they develop more positive relationships with others who hold beliefs that differ from their own.”
- Other findings support that improving this one capacity can cause ripple effects across many of the other qualities of social-emotional learning that we care about. As we can guess, in most cases engaging in empathy is much easier with our family, close friends, and children. The article goes on to say the most crucial step toward developing a stronger capacity for perspective taking, though, is to “muster the motivation to engage in it with people we don’t already care about.”
- Related research shows that social perspective taking can be learned in school. We have the opportunity to help build and cultivate this capacity in our students. HOW?
- Hunter Gehlbach offers three key strategies that can be incorporated into a teacher’s repertoire:
- Make it your habit to ask for multiple perspectives (through the repetition of everyday routines). Ask multiple students to give different responses to complex questions; have students play devil’s advocate or to restate each other’s points before responding to them.
- Encourage students to be social detectives, not judges. We can teach students to hold off on judging others and instead investigate the reasons for another person’s behavior, asking, “Why might she have done that?” or “What’s his version of what happened?”
- Provide opportunities for feedback as students learn to read others’ perspectives. Ensure students have many low-stakes opportunities to practice social perspective taking. For example, place students in situations where it’s OK to make mistakes and receive feedback that might otherwise be vague. Another example might be, at the beginning of class, ask students to jot down predictions as to which peers will make which arguments in the scheduled debate. Over time, this helps students think more critically about how they read others and the kinds of information they rely on in their perspective taking attempts.
- The author concludes stating once students are “in the habit of trying to gauge other people’s ways of looking at the world, they will inevitably become more empathic, more understanding, and more caring; they will become more thoughtful about how to navigate relationships; and they will become more likely to reach out across cultural groups rather than withdrawing into their own clique.”
- In my short time back in Sweetwater, I have observed many teachers in our district who use similar strategies in their classroom with a similar intent. Thank you for providing social perspectives taking opportunities for our students! These purposeful strategies will make a huge difference in our students’ lives!
- And if more of us, the adults, can improve upon these same empathic capacities, we most certainly will exceed our LCAP goal of creating a safe and healthy learning environment for each student (and adult) by building a culture of equity and a positive climate that promotes excellence throughout the district, into our community and our world.
- I want to close tonight with Advice from Yosemite:
- Expand your horizons
- Reach new heights
- Keep a sense of wonder
- Be an inspiration
- Cherish wilderness
- See beauty all around you
- Enjoy life’s peaks and valleys!