If there's one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear for educators, it's that Social-Emotional Learning needs to play a critical role in the education of our children. But transitioning to an SEL classroom takes time.

Our guest in today's bright idea segment, Lorea Martinez completed her doctoral dissertation on SEL, and she found that “lack of time” was the single most important reason why teachers wouldn’t adopt new practices in their classrooms, even when they knew those practices would greatly benefit their students.

Martinez also knows that many of us were not taught about emotions growing up.

"In our families or in our schools. We learned a lot of this by trial and error. And in many cases, there was a lot of error."

Further, Martinez says that most of us were trained to ignore or suppress our emotions because we thought they were interfering with our cognitive process. But what we know today from research is that the cognitive and emotional systems work together in order to make decisions, learn and retain information.

Now she's released a new book, titled HEART in Mind. Its goal is to be a roadmap for creating an SEL classroom.

To learn more about how to create an SEL classroom, listen to Episode 198 of Class Dismissed. You'll learn Martinez's key skills that are represented by the acronym HEART and more.

You can find Class Dismissed in your favorite podcast app or on iTunes.

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