NEW REPORT "How to Sell SEL: Parents and the Politics of Social-Emotional Learning" by Adam Tyner, The Fordham Institute

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast for episode #155 with Adam Tyner from the Thomas Fordham Institute[i] (an organization that promotes educational excellence for every child in America via quality research, analysis, and commentary) on his newly released report How to Sell SEL: Parents and the Politics of Social and Emotional Learning. Watch this interview on YouTube here https://youtu.be/BWe04ByXOpk Access the Online Report here https://sel.fordhaminstitute.org/ Access past episodes here https://www.achieveit360.com/episodes/  On this episode, you will learn: The TOP 5 Findings from Adam Tyner's NEW REPORT "Parents and the Politics of Social-Emotional Learning"   I'm Andrea Samadi, author, and educator from Toronto, Canada, now in Arizona, and like many of our listeners, have been fascinated with learning and understanding the science behind high performance strategies in our schools, sports, and workplace environments with ideas that we can all use, understand and implement immediately. We do this by covering the science-based evidence behind social and emotional learning (for schools) and emotional intelligence training (in the workplace). Our podcast provides tools, resources and ideas for parents, teachers, and employees to improve well-being, achievement and productivity using simple neuroscience as it relates to our cognitive (the skills our brain uses to think, read, remember, pay attention), social and interpersonal relationships (with ourselves and others) and emotional learning (where we recognize and manage our emotions, demonstrate empathy and cope with frustration and stress). This past week, as I was researching and learning new ideas for upcoming episodes, I saw a notification come through my phone from Twitter that caught my attention. It was from Victoria McDougald, from the Fordham Institute in Washington DC and she let me know that they were about to release a new report that explores how parents view SEL and how they want it taught in schools. We have all seen how the mental-health challenges imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic have made it more urgent to better support students’ social and emotional learning needs while also advancing their academic learning, so I put down what I was doing and wrote her back immediately. This topic is urgent, timely and important. Every day I see emails about trainings in our schools to support our students SEL needs and the challenges we have all faced are not going away, they are changing and persisting in a way I don’t think any of us imagined. The challenge that I have seen from the very beginning of watching SEL being implemented in schools across the US (starting in 2014 with just 8 States to our present day where all 50 States have some sort of SEL implementation plan) is that educators saw the importance of SEL, but didn’t know where to begin, they weren’t sure which program to use, how to integrate the SEL competencies into the curriculum. Following many of the early SEL webinars, I noticed this was a common theme. This is why we launched The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast in June 2019 to gather ideas, strategies and best practices for those interested in learning more about this topic, with easy-to-understand implementation strategies and ideas for our schools and workplaces. The topics we cover on this podcast were going to be an Introduction to SEL Course with a well-known educational publisher, but when this direction changed, I decided to put this content out into the world, for free, to help support educators and those in the workplace. I had no idea that this podcast would gain a global following, going into 153 countries and approaching 100,000 downloads (over 8K downloads/month) as we noticed that educators and those in the workplace were looking for new ways to sharpen their saw—with these skills that are not new, but are newly important. If this is how educators were feeling