The Case for SEL in Yeshivos & Jewish Schools | Darcheinu & Our Path SEL

I would love to introduce our first presentation and our first speakers and our speakers can uh can can join and come off of mute right now as well. The first talk that we have scheduled for today is called the case for and yes our speakers who are participating in this uh in this talk are going to be Rabbi Avi Landau who's the director of education at Ammudim. We have Mashira Burkowitz, program director at Darenu and our pathcl. And we have Rabbi Ellie Farcus, who is in my opinion the early professional uh standout in the early professionals and associate therapist as well. I'll pass it along to you guys and take it away for our first talk. Um, okay. Well, I thank you for the uh beautiful introduction. Um, okay. Again, so we're uh our topic that we're going to discuss today is the case for yeshivas. So the question we we all have is why do we need social emotional learning? Let's take an example. There's a seventh grade boy named Yoni. His father lost his job. His home has become stress a stressful place. He isn't coping well. He's letting it out in school. He's letting it out in his friends. He's letting it out everywhere. Like what skills can we give this child in our school setting? What can we truly give him to cope, to manage, to really develop past this point in his life and really do well in school and do well in that environment? >> Wow, I really feel for Yankee. >> I want to now take a look at Shandi. So Shandi is your superstar recycle girl. Lots of friends, does well in school, has a great relationship with her family, has a nice healthy functional family. She's even angio. She's been accepted into the seminary of her choice. Yet Shandandy, like anyone else, struggles with emotion regulation sometimes. Sometimes she gets into conflicts with her friends or her mother. Sometimes she needs to recognize peer pressure for what it is and be able to use her assertiveness skills and her positive decision-making skills to make the right choices. Dareno and Arbath are comprehensive social emotional learning curricula for the Jewish schools. Darinu is designed to be taught in a bak in the yeshiva day school. It is endorsed by the varashiva of the Torah Masora and under the guidance of rebellia Britney. Um and it is really tailored to the needs of our firm schools. It has Torah content in every single session. Our path is for a modern Orthodox school or for a community day school. It's culturally Jewish but it's non ideologically based. Our mission is to create healthy kids to become healthy teens to become healthy adults. What are what are our statistics? So research shows that this is our personal research that we do for our program as well as in general research for comprehensive programs. Kids do better in every single realm when they take a comprehensive course. What are our goals? So, we have three goals that we're talking about here. We want to number one, arm our students with the skills. As you can see from the stats, they show that it works. We want to arm them with the skills to be healthy and again so they can become healthy teens, healthy adults. They can handle all the different challenges that come their way, the regular everyday things as well as the big ones. Goal number two, we want to establish a safe space and a safe sp and a safe person. We want them to feel comfortable and we talk about that in the first session how we create this space, but our students feel like they can share in this class. They can relax a little bit, talk about what's going on right now for them as well as open up to their teacher both in the classroom and outside of the classroom about what's going on in their lives. Goal number three, identify students that are red flagged and send them for help. Again, because of the relaxedness and openness and the sharing of the conversation in the classroom as well as the kind of topics that we talk about, um the students are really open up about what's going on and the teacher is able to see who needs help and send them to school guidance as well as to make outside referrals. Where are we? So, at this stage of of ARPACL, we are in about 100 schools in close to 20 states and in four countries. What do we teach? what's taught in a social emotional learning curriculum. So there are three skills that we're talking about and all the other skills fall under these three categories. Goal number one is personal skill set. That's everything I need to be a healthy person. So that's all your emotion regulation, self-awareness, healthy decision-m all of that. Then we move into your social skills. Now that I'm a healthy person, let me think about, oh, what do I want in a friend? How can I be a good friend? And that's all of your communication skills, social skills, conflict resolution, assertiveness training, etc. Then we move into number three. Now, what can I do to make sure I only conduct myself in a healthy way? How do I resist unhealthy behaviors? What are the consequences of unhealthy behaviors? How do I recognize peer pressure and say no to it? How does it work? Okay, so everything is online. It is thousands and thousands of pages. It is an interactive, very thorough curriculum. A school partners with us. We train and we supervise their teachers. It's designed to be taught as a once a week class for about 35 to 40 minutes. There's a separate boys and girls curricula for both programs. We also have a post high school program being currently used in yeshivos and seminaries. We additionally we have parent communication. So, we have weekly parent newsletters as well as parent letters to be sent home to let the parents know what their students are learning. What are people saying? So, parents, students, teachers, all see that it's successful and they are loving it. I'm going to turn it over to Banda for a moment to kind of show you live what it's like to be teaching a new course. >> Thank you so much, Mrs. Burkowitz. Thank you Farcus. It's a pleasure to be here. I just want to share one sample activity we might do. You can see on your screen one of the worksheets has a black dot in the middle of a large white piece of paper. Pretty famous exercise you can do with the students. Very visually nice in action with the students where you ask them, "What do you see? What do you see on the whiteboard?" Some might say a black dot. Some might say a white a black circle. They might describe it in different ways. And what we want to try to draw their attention to is all the white that's around that black dot. In life, when we want to try to develop coping skills, we have to remember that what draws our attention the most is the pain, is the difficulty. We stub our toe. That's what we're focused on. That black dot, it's it it shows itself. It presents itself with emphasis, and that's what draws our attention, but we don't want to forget all the white, all the good that's in our lives at the same time that we might be struggling with a particular thing. So just one small example of how we use the visual stimulation, the worksheets, the board and the actual content of the curriculum to make these points. We also have an from scratch developed animated series which is fantastic. There's a sample on our website of this as well. It's really extremely stimulating for the students from 5th through 12th grade. They all love it and we would encourage you to come check it out on our website. >> Let's go back to Shandi for a minute. She's now married. She has children. She's a pro at using those eye statements that she's learned in sixth grade, 7th grade, 9th grade, 12th grade. Her healthy sense of self enables her to transition nicely between stages in life, whether it's pregnancy, child birth, etc. She's developing these skills in her children, setting healthy boundaries, and instilling awesome social and emotional learning skills into her children. Thankfully, that is hopefully being reinforced with the Dainu or RPCL curriculum they're learning at their school. Thank you all for listening. Um, please get in touch with us, darina.org. There's our email information, our number. We would love to hear from you here at FSA and partner with you in enabling and allowing there to be social emotional learning going on in our yeshivas, our schools, and really building the next generation into a healthier, better, you know, more able people. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Thank you for being our first people jumping in on these nine talks here with a very short amount of time to give us such fascinating information. If I could just ask a quick followup on some of this as well. There's so much content that that is important about this topic. There's so much information that people would want to connect to on this. What would you say is the best direct approach for a yeshiva or a school who does want to start integrating into their programs? What is the like first step they should be taking to ensure that is something they bring into their spaces as well? >> I can just talk briefly on this and I'm happy to open it up to my colleagues as well. I think that it's really important to consider that the most important part of SEAL is actually not in the acronym of social emotional learning, but it's the curriculum part, social emotional learning curriculum. Um, when we want to teach math, we don't do math month. We teach math all year long and then we build on those fundamentals year after year after year. And it's through that repetition, that redundancy that really we end up with students who walk away understanding math skills. SEAL and all other topics are all the same. We want to make sure that there are those foundational uh elements that are given over to the students on a regular basis. Some schools might want to do it for just a shorter amount of time, uh a more intense, shorter period of time, but we work with all schools and customize it for them. So, if there's a school that would want to kind of try it out uh in a more limited fashion with one grade, a shorter amount of time, we can potentially customize and work all that out with schools. Every school is a little bit different, but ultimately establishing it as a robust curriculum, which is what we're offering, is I think a really important first step to then imagine it being effective. [Music]