This year at South Forsyth, SFHS counselor, Corinna Spurlock has created a Social Emotional Learning (SEL) class for teachers to better understand their student’s emotions. This class is directed towards teachers to help them incorporate SEL into student’s learning.

The goal of the class is for teachers to be able to more understand their students’ emotions in a way that benefits the students’ experience at school. This will help the students’ passage through school by allowing teachers to be able to understand student’s emotional needs.

“We hope that by adding Social and Emotional Learning into daily instruction and Habitudes, we will be able to better engage students as well as to reduce stress and anxiety,” said Spurlock, the creator of the course.

The content teachers learn will be incorporated into habitudes, another new program at our school, which focuses self improvement.

The course will be focused on studying personal emotional intelligence (EQ), which is defined as the ability for someone to understand their own and other people’s emotions, by using the book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Graves, and the CASEL social-emotional learning competencies.

“Throughout the course, teachers will have opportunities to collaborate with other educators, participate in mental health and mindfulness workshops, and incorporate SEL into their lesson plans,” said Spurlock.

In the course, teachers will meet with Spurlock and learn about the foundations of SEL learning.

“Educators will specifically be targeting self-awareness and self-management strategies,” said Spurlock.

SEL has five main ideas, self-management, self-awareness, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. Teachers will be learning these and then adding them into habitudes and in their everyday learning plan.

Hopefully, this new program will result in a better style of learning that benefits the students and the teachers throughout their high school years.