SEL in Action
SEL in Action
Episode 10 with Ellen Mahoney (The Circulus Institute)
This week, I spoke with Ellen Mahoney, CEO and founder of The Circulus Institute. Ellen is passionate about fostering educator's social and emotional learning so they can support themselves and their students. We talk about the gaps in education for teachers and implications in the classroom.
You can find out more about Ellen's work and The Circulus Institute at @CirculusInst on twitter.
Hello, and welcome. You're listening to the SEL in action podcast the podcast where we discuss social and emotional learning and professional and educational settings. I'm your host, Heather Woods. And today we are talking to Ellen Mahoney, from the circulus Institute. She's the CEO and co founder, and really excited to talk about what circulus is and how it came to be. You know, how she started this to fill a gap. And thank you so much, Ellen, for being here. And yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today. So tell us a little bit about circulus.
Ellen Mahoney:Sure, yeah, we are. So circulus Institute is an organization that essentially helps educators develop their own Adult Social and Emotional competencies. And we do it through professional development courses. But our the main meat of our work is what we call the iseq, which is the international social and emotional competencies certification, which is a year long learning experience focused on skill building for teachers, school counselors, admin, and they work on a few different competence, main competencies, that are kind of umbrella competencies. So self awareness, social awareness, and cultural responsiveness. All the while they're they're getting feedback from their own students in the in the school to help their learning and help their skill building. And ultimately, they submit a project that takes all of that learning and that inner work and personal development that they've been doing, and puts it into action. You know, what kind of change can you make in your community now that you have embarked on a what we hope is a lifelong reflection journey as an educator. So yeah, that's what it is. And we work with people from all over the world. We're not just in the US, but we're got an international focus.
Heather Woods:Excellent. So you mentioned that you focus on Adult Social and Emotional Learning. So it's quite the shift of a lot of the focus of social emotional learning, right. Although the the castle definition mentions, you know, children and adults, most of the research and implementation really focuses on students, right. Yeah. So how did you come about kind of focusing on Adult social emotional learning?
Ellen Mahoney:Yeah, I was out in the field working, I have a sister organization called see change mentoring. And even though my background is in public educate my initial foray into education was in the public school system in the US. But the last seven years, I've worked with international schools overseas. And specifically, my whole focus for the last almost 20 years has been on relationship skills in schools. And in particular, adults ability to connect with young people appropriately and develop effectively. So that kids can learn and be well. So that's what I was doing. And I was visiting all these schools and helping them design mentoring programs and advisory programs and training everybody on that work and helping them see their children through the cultural context and all that kind of stuff. And I just felt like I was hitting a wall, you know, I could, I could design a perfect or I could design a really great mentoring program. And I could do some great professional development for everybody and forming relationships with educators and make them feel safe, etc, etc. But if they, if they weren't willing, or if they weren't given the space and time and supports, to work on their own inner stuff, you know, their their own personal development, their own relationship skills, and I can only get them so far. And I just felt like we were missing an opportunity to have a greater impact on students. So I thought, well, I'm going to spend the summers is a few years ago, I thought, let me spend the summer reading all the research, I can find there must be a solution here. And what I found was that number one, that most pre service training programs in the world don't include any kind of dis personal work, personal development, social emotional skill development work for adults, at the time, just three years ago, and it's still kind of the case. There's very few professional development opportunities for that kind of emotional work. And, you know, I dove into Patricia Jennings and you know, Mark Greenberg's work on Adult SEL in particular. And I was, you know, looking at a lot of the stuff from the learning Policy Institute here in the States. And all the research was saying that, yes, this is a gap. It's a gap in research. It's a gap in practice. And it is absolutely necessary if you're going to implement SEL effectively. So there was just so that was both frustrating. And then it also was like the, you know, the impetus for me to say, well, let's try and make a little headway here or, you know, so that was the idea. And, ultimately, yeah, I were I partnered up with this woman that has similar ideas, and kind of actually came with exactly the same place at the same time as I did. We joined forces me and we started developing this.
Heather Woods:Fantastic. So you mentioned getting student feedback during their learning process. And so what does that look like? And what impact Have you seen that have on, you know, your participants and learners experiences?
Ellen Mahoney:Yeah, well, it makes me think of a story I, we, so the, we are actually launching the international of the iseq. This summer. So we're going to see what that impact looks like. And we'll see what happens. But I'll tell you a story that kind of is one of the things that's informing sort of a inspirational moment I had with a student that informed some of this work. We were I was working in a school and in China in Beijing, so the International School, predominantly Chinese students, but also some foreign students as well. But faculty, all Western, mostly white, and then a Western curriculum, just to give you some context, so. So prior to circulus, I, usually schools would call me when their mentoring advisory programs were going terribly. Or, you know, they tried something and it didn't work. And it was really messy. And then they hired me to come in and clean it up. They said, they called me said, Listen, we have this increase with mental health issues with our students, which, you know, we're seeing around the world. And they said, We don't understand, because we actually have a lot of counselors, they're great. They're lovely people. You know, our teachers really care about the students. And we keep telling them, if you have a problem, come talk to us, but they won't come talk to us. And we think it might be because they're Chinese and so that maybe they don't value this kind of work. And I just thought, I don't know about that. But you know, what? You go in with an open mind, I have a feeling it's not that but we'll see, you know, so I went in there, and I spent a week with students just getting their feedback, which is often a step that's completely missed. When schools are collecting evidence on on how their programs are going, they might collect data, but I find this stuff that's missing is sitting down with the students and saying, you filled out these surveys, does this telling you a story, what stories is telling you what are we missing, you know, get your point of view from your own words. Anyway, at one point that week, the student said to me, miss, we love our teachers, they're great, you know, counselors, they're great. But have you seen how stressed out they are all the time? They're running around? Totally irritated? so stressed out? Why would I come to them with one of my problems? You know, and just further burden than they can handle. And it was such an eye opener for the school, you know, and that just really caught that was the sentiment that all the kids were saying. So anyway, that really was an eye opener, I think if I were to come in just directly and say that this school, you need to work on Adult social emotional competencies. And you know, here's how you do it a, b, and c, it wouldn't have, I don't think that the faculty would have been as invested as actually hearing the students say, I'm not I'm coming to you, I'm not coming to you not because of a cultural reason, but because of what maybe a school culture reason, but you know, but because of what I'm seeing in the adults, and it's keeping, asking for help. So
Heather Woods:that's, yeah, that's so powerful. And like you said, like, we don't often delve deeper into those kind of survey responses, right, and figure out the reasoning behind them. I mean, I see it in research all the time, when we rely so much on surveys, as opposed to, you know, more qualitative discussions. But yeah, it's so interesting to see, you know, that there was almost on the teachers part, some self awareness lacking right on how they're coming across. And yeah, it's so impactful. So you talked about certification. So what kind of would build that look like for educators and anyone that wants to take it?
Ellen Mahoney:Yeah, we're playing around with some things. I mean, right now it's available for individuals. And but we're, we think that the impact would is would be much stronger as far as impact on the actual school community, if we, if if educators do it as teams. So if you have like a whole department or you know, an SEL committee or something like that, where, because change obviously, is much harder to do if it's just you if you're the sole champion. So, so we're looking at, we're looking at that model, and we're looking at strategic partnerships for work that can help us do do that provide that opportunity for whole teams, in the meantime, had some known visuals, and we just were working with them, the school in Vietnam and a school in Malaysia, right now, that will start the process with us, although it's open to everybody. So, so the, you know, what it looks like is, I think that people will probably come into the certification from two different angles, one, which we think will be most of the case, in the very beginning, will be people that already loves social emotional learning and love this word like, Oh, I get to spend, yeah, I can't wait. Yeah, you have to start with those people, the champions that can really get the momentum going, of course, you want this for everybody, we want as many people as possible to have the opportunity to really work on a skill building. And then I think that we'll probably find some other people that are, you know, quote, unquote, doing social emotional learning in their school. And, and, you know, the schools decide, we want them to kind of, you know, get a start. And the way that this certification works is that the first course is is focused on self awareness. And it's a small, it's a short course, it's only three days. But the idea, we're giving them a general idea of what adult social emotional learning is. And then we're helping them think about how do you practice? How do you create a reflective practice, as an NGO, we're just getting them started. And then there's some other self awareness work that they're doing, including a lot of personal personal assessment, personal inventories that they can use, we're kind of giving them the tools, we're setting them up to get going. And at that point, they can continue on for the rest of the certification. Or they can say, not for me, and we'll try and figure out how to get them on board later. Yeah, yeah, that's sort of the general idea they collected, you know, it's competency based. So the idea is that if we really focus on the skill building, and not just the content of adult SEL, that they will have more agency in their work, there'll be more equity. You know, they, the, the hope is that they will transfer these skills to all parts of their school environment and their lives in general, which is interesting to evaluate. Because the transfer part is really difficult with adult social emotional competencies you can be, you can have great self management skills in one context and fell apart. And the other and we all know that this year, though, so yeah, and so they, they, but they collective, they have a portfolio that they keep all your and they're documenting their learning, we also put them in small, what we call peer support communities. So a team of other educators from around the world or within their school, and they all work together and encourage each other in the work that they're doing in problems. And then they have a coach as well, that supports them throughout the year. And, you know, provides feedback and encouragement and connects them to resources and that sort of thing. So our hope is that we have these courses, they're online, but we use all of the best practices and adult learning, which is another gap, I find them a lot of professional development for adults, you know, so in my my partner, Christina has amazing adult learning designer, she's really good. So, so she's been able to really create these great experiences. So yeah, you know, once you get the certification, you you can be a real leader, we say like you become an adult SEL leader, and you go back to your community, and you kind of get the word out about how important this work is, and hopefully create changes within your district or within your school community. So that more of them are encouraged to do this kind of work.
Heather Woods:Yeah. And it's, you know, I from the research standpoint that I'm coming from, you know, we see it again and again, particularly here in Canada with Bonnie Ledbeater, and the WITS program, you know, you need that one champion, you need that one person that's really advocating for it. But at the same time, the best situation is that whole school approach, right? So yeah, I totally see kind of where you're coming from with where you'd like to see this go to really have that impact. And, you know, it's not just about supporting our students, which is where we're, you know, seeing so much of it come from, it's really, we need to support our educators to be able to, you know, do the work, but also, you know, so that we don't have that situation that you're seeing where teachers are so stressed out, and that's been shown to the students and you know, that they're developing those coping skills and everything. So you mentioned you start with self awareness. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the competencies, because you guys talk about 10 competencies, which is a little bit different from, you know, the standard five social awareness. So, sorry, self awareness, self management, social awareness, relationship building and decision making. So I'm wondering if you can tell us, you know, what are the 10 that you've kind of identified? And, you know, how did you come up with 10?
Ellen Mahoney:Yeah, I'll tell you what the 10 are first, and then I'll tell you the, the Genesis story of it. Okay, so they are self awareness, well being and resilience skills, equity and anti bias, education, compassion, efficacy, cultural responsiveness, relationship skills, conflict resolution, perspective taking and active listening, was a lot. But, you know, when we were doing this research, or I should say, when we were consuming all of the research, we could to figure this out, we were really inspired by Jennings and Greenberg's research article, the prosocial classroom, actually identified slightly different competencies for adults than what the competencies are that castle, lays out, I mean, ultimately, as a, you know, it's all kind of the same rate, it's all idea written slightly differently, some, you know, etc. So, but they identified their competencies were self awareness and social awareness, just like castle cultural sensitivity, pro social values, which is like, you know, taking responsibility for your actions and being thoughtful about like, your impact on community and that kind of thing. And then self management, that's identified from the available research at the time, on educators on their well being and their impact on students learning, you know, classroom management, behavior, all of that kind of stuff. So I started from there, actually, because there really wasn't any other. I mean, there was very little research out there on the actual competencies that adults had to, to really work on. So I started from there. And then I, I, there's a, there's an organization called the Global online Academy, and they run a summit every summer, which I recommend to educators. It's a design summit. And you can go there during the summertime with an idea that you have for your school, you have you have a coach, you have a team, you have colleagues around you, and you work on, on whatever you're designing, they they influenced me and my partner a lot, actually, my partner comes from this organization, that's where she used to work. But they were a major influence, because they're all about competencies and competency based learning. So but a week, just thinking about, here's what the research says, let's think about the sort of the journey that an educator goes through in the classroom, and really try and nail down what these specific competencies are. So we have 10, because there's, there's certain specific things that we didn't want to get lost in terms like self awareness, if that makes sense. So, yeah, in like perspective, taking is more specific. Then social awareness in so that's sort of where we, we went with it and you know, ultimately, even in our work, we focus on three buckets, self awareness, social awareness, and, and cultural responsiveness. But underneath those are the other competencies.
Heather Woods:Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's so interesting, because that's one thing again, like we've talked about that, you know, I'm seeing in my own research, Like, what are these foundational things? And I've had some really interesting discussions with students and colleagues. Like one week, I was talking with my colleague and we were talking about, okay, so self awareness is really foundational for self management, and like, we're making that connection. And then I was talking to one of my students, and he was like, I think self awareness is foundational for social awareness, because you need to know yourself and where you're coming from. And I was like, Yes. And but then like, it's just all this thing, like, what's coming first, like, Where's the horse? And where's the cart? And yes, but they're so interconnected. And I was like, it really just highlights. You know, that it's a little bit complex, and it's a little bit messy. But I do like the approach that you're taking that, you know, these are the things that we really need to highlight. And these are the things that we need to talk about.
Ellen Mahoney:Yeah, but I would say other like, the the Yeah, I agree. And those conversations that you have with your colleagues are the same conversations where we've been having as well. And I think, ultimately, what we decided was that kind of what like, what your colleague said, is that we felt that, you know, it's the oxygen mask, like, you know, you have to put that on first, before you help someone else. So our thought was, let's start with the, the more like the self, the self part. And then we move to a social part, which is the, like, the social relationships part, which is a social, cultural piece. And a social has to come before the cultural, you know, according to our hypothesis, because how could you possibly be culturally responsive, if you're not socially aware, if you're not aware of how you come across to other people, and the impact of your words and your emotions on other people, and your relationship skills and that sort of thing, then you do the cultural responsiveness piece. But then from moving from self to social, then we say you move to community, only then can you really have the kind of impact you want to have on the community and really consider sort of more the systems of education and the systems that she worked within, in order to change them.
Heather Woods:Yeah, and I think it's an interesting, you know, like, you're thinking like this. And castle, I mean, it's like, the main thing in the states slash world for defining the social emotional learning within school systems, but the recent, I think, was 20 definition change, to really include that cultural community piece, and really being critical of the systems in place. Right, that, you know, influence our everyday existence and how it influences different people in different ways. You know, and I think, but then you've got this like, for, like, that's one of your buckets, is this cultural and piece, right? And I think, yeah, it's gonna be really interesting to see how that kind of translates into the research into the practice. And it's quite exciting. It's so it's so complex, you know, it's
Ellen Mahoney:Yeah. It's almost overwhelming when you think about the systems piece, but it's critical. And, yeah, it's going to be I look forward to more research being done, and I hope that we can share, you know, I we look forward to the opportunity for our work to be evaluated, because we, I mean, ultimately, this is, this is what I want to do forever. This is so important to me. I just want the adults heal, you know, I want Yeah, we're adults to heal whatever they need to heal from. And then the ones that choose to to dedicate their lives to young people's development, I want them to be supported, you know?
Heather Woods:Yeah, no, I think we definitely share that that passion. I mean, though, that's why I've kind of coined, you know, my research and then eventually This podcast was added, you know, the SEL and action kind of project because they're in teaching and so I teach in the Faculty of Education, but I teach graduate students. I don't teach teacher candidates and so I'm having graduate students from, you know, industry, I'm having teachers, I'm having admin, I'm having medical professionals, medical educators, a really wide range of students, and they're all you know, hungry for this information and seeing the impact. They can have in their their professions from kind of this adults perspective. So right now I teach about leadership and social emotional competencies, particularly in a remote context because of our current context, right. But it's so interesting, and it's really, they want to bring this back to their teams to their students, and, you know, kind of shift that thinking about who they are as leaders and the skills that, you know, they can possess and worked on, and that it's, it's a continual journey. And I think that's one thing that a lot of people tend to forget, right, is that these are skills. They're not traits. It's not, you know, something that is said and done after you leave, you know, in the research, sometimes it stops at grade eight, but or grade 12, right, like, these are things you can continually work on.
Ellen Mahoney:Yeah, that's a cool shift from thinking about these things as traits and moving to thinking of them as skills, which is what they are, is so important to me. And incredibly, I think it's empowering when when you help people understand that it's not like, Sure, I mean, we their temperament is an actual thing. Born with certain temperaments, of course, but these are all skills that anyone can build. And that's what's interesting about that is we, when we got started as an organization, we were building this SEL, adult SEL work, but then COVID hit. And so we quickly shifted to to just as soon as possible, get resilience development work out there for educators, which is one small part of adult SEL, I think sometimes will equate well being work with adult SEL and you and I know that that's, that is not they're not the same, they're well, being skills is definitely part of adult SEL, but it's not the But anyway, so we developed this resilience course called reclaiming your resilience, and which was a whole other really powerful, amazing experience. For even, you know, for us, as well as the educators we all learn together, you know, practicing what we preach. But the, like, our main thing with that, too, is that this is not, it's not that your colleague is more resilient, it's that he or she is taking action every day, and creating habits and developing skills that allows this person to to cope a little bit better, you know, and we all come at different places, we all Some of us have trauma in our lives. Some people don't. Some people have supports in our lives, some people don't. But this is what the research tells you is that at any developmental stage, no matter what every person can develop resilience. Because it's a skill set, not a trait. And I think that's really empowering. And I think back to what you're saying about your work with your own graduate students is that I think that there's a I think we're having a moment right now, I think COVID has, you know, made us get a little closer more quickly to this moment. But I think we're having him kind of reflecting on the way we show up for everybody every day and wanting to be well and wanting to be healthier, and thinking about our impact on other people and thinking about our own biases and prejudices and that sort of thing. And I do think that people are hungry for it, you know? And the more we can think about it as a competency development perspective, the less scary it is, the less overwhelming I think that personal development
Heather Woods:Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's one thing that, you know, that shift kind of mentally what happens when you start thinking about a skill, but then letting them know, like, I, my students will tell you, I'm very open with that, yes, I teach this stuff. I'm not an expert at this stuff. Like in terms of my own skills. You know, I, you know, can't meditate all the time. I can't practice mindfulness perfectly all the time. You know, my time management may be a little wonky, so it's, like, it's a journey. It's just taking those steps and acknowledging that it's something you can work on little bits at a time. And, and you mentioned something really interesting about, you know, the current pandemic context. In talking with educators, particularly in Alberta, some of the edge kiters that I was speaking to, for my research, we're talking about that when this all happened, it shifted. It was compassion before curriculum. And that kind of, you know, phrase just really stuck with me. And I think for so many educators, like you said, it just really flipped a switch where this needs to come first. And, but and I think in that process, a lot of them realize that, okay, I want to be there for my students. But then how am I here for myself, to be able to do this and support my students? It's been a really interesting discussions, I started collecting my data, right, as the pandemic hit. Wow, here in Canada. So it was really interesting to see. Kind of their shift in emphasis and thinking and, and everything. I'm still working through that data. But it's amazing. And those those stories, but yeah, it's just I think, yeah, the COVID has definitely sped up our focus on getting to this point, right. And you know, that, like you said, there, there are only a few kind of schools that are universities that really focus on social emotional learning. And I think it'll be interesting to see the next couple years, like, Is there a shift in how much we focus on social emotional learning in teacher education?
Ellen Mahoney:I really hope so, of course, and I hope that, you know, I was thinking about this the other day, that there's a lot of change that we want to see in schools, you know, here in the US, and it's, it's international as well, I think Lloyd was murdered, there was huge impetus to do anti racism work. And anti bias work, or it's not just do the work, but it's, it's sort of have that lens, as an educator, if you're working in an American context, for example. And, you know, my concern with with where we're at right now, with all of that work, which I which I believe in is that if we haven't had the support, and the opportunity in the space to develop the inner work, it will be a band aid approach, we will, you know, when to use an American reference, but like, we'll teach Alice Walker for a semester, and then we're going to go back to the white Western canon next year, because we haven't done that inner work. So in order for us to make transformational change, you know, in order for COVID, to really wake us up, you know, I think COVID woke us up, in many ways. And we started to reprioritize. Or to go back to what we first prioritize when we got into education in the first place. We have to do the inner work, which also includes the leaders, because I think the other thing, that you were just making me think about this, you know, same thing, when COVID hit, we heard the same thing, compassion before a curriculum kind of a perspective. But then also, well, I've got to take care of myself, in order to take care of others, which is was so hard to do this year, very painful thing to have that realization, and then be, you know, having to deal with parenting while you're educating and, you know, everything else that was going on. But I think, yeah, I think that there's this awakening, I think what happened also with teachers is that they, they prioritize, they wanted to prioritize the compassion, you wanted to prioritize self care. But then there are these systems in place structures in place in their schools that really limit that, you know, whether it's if your kids don't have access to, you know, reliable internet, and so it made it harder to connect with your kids, or be greater grading and discipline policies in your school was not conducive to supporting the context that your kids were were in as they were trying to learn, you know, etc, etc. So, again, I that's why I hope that this kind of competency work gets a little bit deeper and that leaders take this work as well. So that so that we can really make a lasting shift. And this is not just a one semester of Kumbaya, we go back to the old way. Yeah.
Heather Woods:Yeah, it's a I mean, it makes me think of you mentioned internet. So I'm part of a digital x equity research team here in Ontario. We're starting with Ontario and then hoping to go national. But, you know, everybody thinks of the United States and Canada, as you know, we have internet, well, we don't, we don't have very good internet. And so what we found is that so many teachers really struggled to connect, because their students don't have access. And so access included, whether it was affordable. So Canada is notorious for ridiculously expensive internet. And, as well, just access, because so much of our, within Ontario and across the country, so much of our population is not in city centers, it's rural. So, you know, the government may say, oh, everybody has internet, but we have five megabytes per second. That is not sufficient. for, you know, being able to connect with your students to be able to host your, your Google meats, or whatever platform that they're using. And really, you know, see your students connect with your students, if they're not able to download things or, you know, get your messages through, it's a problem in the current context, in building that connection. But also, you know, so much of my previous research has really focused on, okay, if we're implementing something in the classroom, you know, how effective is that? What's your self efficacy in doing that, and what they were saying is, particularly in relation to bullying, prevention programs, and intervention is, okay, will intervene, but then we report it higher up, and, you know, things kind of stopped there. So really what you're saying, with this, you know, we need to get the leaders we need to get, you know, bigger things. in place, I think this really highlights, you know, what you're saying is, we need to understand those systems, we need to get leaders on board, not only for SEL, but really looking at those systems in place, like having reliable internet to be able to connect, in situations like this, where Ontario is not going back to school this year. We're remaining remote. You know, so so how do we, you know, work around that, and, you know, really try to connect with our students, it's quite difficult. So it really highlights, you know, that it's not just SEL, there, there are lots of other things that we need to account for. And I think, yeah, that's, I mean, what gets my brain going, is looking at those systems in play, that are so much bigger than ourselves so much bigger than the community that really needs to be addressed to do this work effectively. And think about, you know, what does the remote mean, even for or virtual mean, for social emotional learning? Does it change things? I would say yes. In the course I teach right now, right? Like we're looking at kind of remote and flexible work research, to try and infer what might be the case in this kind of forced work from home situation. You know, and it's really focusing on communication and trust and how those things have to shift a little bit. You know, cuz communicating virtually is not. Yeah, especially if it's all text based.
Ellen Mahoney:Yeah, we, that's interesting that you bring that up, because in a previous life, well, not a previous life, it's still my life. But But before I started, my organization's about seven years, or I don't know, 10 years ago, I worked for this organization in the US called I mentor, which is an E mentoring a really a, what we would call now a blended mentoring program. That is, it's national, but I worked in the New York City Office. And the idea there was this is sort of before zoom was the thing that it is now. So yeah, and we use email as one way to connect with kids. So just to give you a little context, so we had we worked with young people in most of the boroughs in New York City, and all of them came from high poverty communities, in schools with the kind of schools that that serves young people living in high poverty. And we we connected them with mentors, adults, in the city professionals, and at the time in New York had one of the low Volunteer rates in the entire country in New York City, the entire interesting, really bad, primarily because people are so busy working thinking about their own careers that, you know, there's little little thinking about other other folks. So, um, and or Yeah, little time available to do more than sort of donating or a race or, you know, a one time thing on an ongoing trip was a lot to ask of a New Yorker at the time. And so and so we the way that we tried to bridge that gap was provide some opportunities to connect solely online. And so it was through emails that they would connect, but what we found was that we ended up doing a combo combo design. So it was, you would email once a week, and then once a month, you would see each other in person, that felt more doable for the volunteers. And then the question was, well, is is impactful for the students. And, and what we found was that in the beginning of their relationship, if if students saw their mentor in person within the first month, that the quality of their relationship was stronger, moving forward throughout the year, and those that they didn't have to necessarily meet every single month in person for things to work, but they did have to meet in the beginning to kind of establish trust in that initial connection. And the ones that didn't, that did not meet in person, within that first month really struggled for the rest of the year. So you know, what we found was that the E part of the mentoring definitely was impactful, they definitely could connect, but you had to have it with some in person work. also helps too. And this would be reallyhard. And I mean, I'm the mentoring working, Canada's very strong, and I in a lot of the work is around the rural communities, which is really challenging to reach. But, um, yeah, they the the one thing, one powerful thing, when you see your students in person, whether you're a teacher or a mentor, or you know, youth development worker, is, um, hopefully you get to see them in their own community, and provides you additional context. And if you're doing your social emotional work, hopefully, you know, deeper empathy and respect for their culture and all that. Yeah. So it's Yeah, it's a there's a lot for us to learn.
Heather Woods:Certainly, yeah. And I think, you know, this work has been happening for 20 plus years. But I think we're still just scratching the surface, right? And, and really understanding the impact. And, as you mentioned, really early on, like, you need to have the teachers with their own social emotional learning, social emotional competencies. And, you know, for this to work, and really get that kind of whole school approach. And I think they're really kind of cool. There's not quite a lot of research or understanding of what it looks like in practice and stuff. So the work you're doing is quite exciting. Yeah, it is exciting to see. But yeah, we're really excited about it. Yeah. And I think, yeah, it's, it's the start of something and I think it's, it's gonna have quite the impact. You know, maybe that's just my own bias and, you know, view of SEL. But, yeah, it's just, I I'm very excited to see how things go with your work, but also, you know, kind of grand scheme of things of how they last, you know, year and a bit has really, really changed things for us and how we think about education and how we think about ourselves and students. So yeah, I really excited that we got to meet and chat about this.
Ellen Mahoney:Absolutely. I love I love talking with you. I love I love hearing about your work, too. It's very interesting. So yeah, yeah, it's it's good stuff.
Heather Woods:Yeah. Any kind of Final thoughts about, you know, educators and social emotional learning?
Ellen Mahoney:Well, I would just say that, you know, if you're, if you're getting involved in this work, you know, whether as an adult that wants to develop their own social competencies, which we all have to do, or as researcher or a practitioner of SEL, I just want people to be sort of compassionate towards themselves and others because the process No, like you, no one's perfect. This isn't a judgment and only if we can be open and compassionate towards each other. And ourselves, will we really be able to learn? So I just I really, that's like my hope for everybody. It's been a hell of a year. So passion is we're trying to figure all of this out together. Yeah.
Heather Woods:Yeah, certainly. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me. And it's been, yeah, really great. And now I'm, like, super excited for digging into my SEL work today. Because it's all I do. But yeah, thank you so much, Ellen, for for taking the time today and really appreciate you telling the story of, you know, circulus and your your initiatives and passion moving forward. I think that that certainly comes through. And just the passion for, you know, not only our students but ourselves as educators, I think, and making sure we're taking care of ourselves and growing. And yeah, thank you so, so much. Thank you so much.
Ellen Mahoney:Thank you so much for having me on.
Heather Woods:Thank you. So you've been listening to the SEL in action podcast where we discuss social emotional learning and professional and educational settings. Thank you so much to Ellen Maharani today for speaking with me from the circulus Institute. And we hope to talk to you soon and keep on listening. Thank you so much, and have a great day.