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Credit: Courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education:
Images of Teachers and Students in Action.
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Deep Dive
Human interaction, SEL in curriculum key to curbing cyberbullying
Focusing on interpersonal skills, even amid the perceived anonymity of
the digital world, helps students learn to be more accountable in their
words and interactions, experts say.
Lauren Barack
Oct. 16, 2019
Mandy Manning has walked the halls of many schools in the year since
she was named 2018 National Teacher of the Year — and she often sees
the same thing: students spread out, not talking with each other but
looking at their devices.
Now back in the classroom as an English language development teacher
and department lead in the Newcomer Center at Joel E. Ferris High
School in Spokane, Washington, she is very interested in the role that
social-emotional learning (SEL) plays in the ways students engage,
whether they’re physically in front of each other or connecting online.
It’s an area Manning calls digital civility.
“Being face-to-face helps us be more accountable with what we say and
do,” Manning told Education Dive. “But online is anonymous, and we’re
not held accountable. Sometimes we say and do terrible things because
no one knows who we are, and we’re emboldened.”
The buffer the digital world puts between people can be bridged through
SEL skills, according to Manning and other education experts, helping
students remember the person at the other end of a digital connection.
Make a human connection
To Manning, human engagement — whether that’s two students sitting at
the same table in class or texting each other through their devices
after school — is about making a connection with someone else. That’s
why she believes bringing SEL skills like social awareness and
self-management into the online space can help students learn to
approach those interactions the way they would in person.
She said it’s important for students to bring the same care to their
online interactions, as these can impact the way they end up feeling at
school or home.
“[Online] bleeds into our human interactions,” Manning said. “Because
if I feel badly from something online, whether I am the victim or the
perpetrator, it impacts our real life.”
Manning said SEL skills can be easily woven into class time without
drawing too much attention to it by teachers or making students feel
something “touchy-feely” is taking place. To her, the key is giving
students a way to process their feelings and helping them feel heard,
which can then piggyback into any interaction they have.
In a classroom of 8th-graders she visited, students were upset about
something that had just happened during lunch. The teacher gave them
time to talk about what they’d seen and give voice to their feelings,
and the class was still able to finish the lesson with the students
feeling heard.
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