What to Look For in an SEL Curriculum

Jason Johnson:
All right. Well, welcome, everybody, to our webinar on what to look for in an SEL program as well as a discussion about the WhyTry material and kind of our place in the SEL world. My name’s Jason Johnson. I’m going to serve as I guess the moderator or the host, and we’re thrilled to have with us two of my favorite humans. We’ve got Cory Anderson and Bruce Bushnell joining us. Now, I’m going to embarrass them both just a little bit and I’m going to tell the people a little bit about who we have. 

Jason Johnson:
We’ve got Bruce Bushnell. Bruce has centered his career around promoting youth success. He’s an award-winning school counselor. He was actually named Counselor of the Year for the state of Utah, was also honored at the White House, receiving the national recognition for his counseling interventions. He’s been a member of the executive high school relations board, senior vice president of the Alpine Counseling Association, et cetera, et cetera. He now helps youth succeed by presenting WhyTry key notes and trainings throughout the country and helping train on the topic of social-emotional learning throughout the country. Bruce has fans everywhere. He’s been doing this for a long time and he’s really good at it. Welcome, Bruce.

Bruce Bushnell:
Hey, I’m excited to be here. Thanks, Jason. 

Jason Johnson:
And then with us, we have Cory Anderson. Cory has spent nearly two decades as an educator, beginning as a teacher and then as an administrator. He’s been an assistant principal at a middle school, he’s served as a principal at two different elementary schools, pioneered and started one of the two public STEM programs in the state of Utah. He’s helped consult with the State Office of Education on creating STEM standards for schools. Cory we are thrilled to have as part of the WhyTry family now for, what’s it been, a year, year and a half?

Cory Anderson:
About a year and a few months [crosstalk 00:01:59].

Jason Johnson:
A year and a few months. So he’s now teaching, training and consulting on social-emotional learning throughout the country as well, and then my name is Jason Johnson. My background is I’m a school psych. I’ve been with WhyTry for about five years as well, and love what I do, love to be able to work with all of you. Today, we’re going to be talking a little bit, I’m going to draw on these gentlemens’ experience and we’re going to talk a little bit about what makes up, what they look for as educators in an SEL program, go over some points that they’ve identified as being important to SEL and then we’re actually going to have them demo a little bit and show how the WhyTry material lines up with that list that they’ve identified as important items.

Jason Johnson:
I’m excited to hear from them. Let’s just jump into it right now. I want to start a little bit by hearing what your experience with SEL has been historically. Specifically, I’m wondering how you two have seen social-emotional learning change over the years while you’ve been involved in education? Maybe we could start with Bruce and then hear from Cory after.

Bruce Bushnell:
That’ll be great. I’m the oldest in WhyTry. I’m the grandpa at WhyTry. I began as a teacher for three years and became a counselor in a junior high then a high school. So for 26 years I worked in education, and then came to WhyTry and this is my 16th year in WhyTry. So if you add that up, I think that’s 42 years. It’s hard to remember back that far. I’m just going to give a brief what I remember. 

Bruce Bushnell:
The first time I ever remember hearing about the actual SEL or social-emotional learning or education was probably in the late ’90s, early 2000s. When I started as a counselor, we talked about life skills and things that you need to be successful for a career and a variety of things. We taught skills like decision-making, goal-setting, problem-solving, but I think SEL really came on in the late ’90s, middle ’90s, and it’s really grown since then. 

Bruce Bushnell:
When I came on to WhyTry, we kind of had a battle sometimes. We’d go out and a lot of times we got pushback. People, because of I think standard testing, the pressure to test for the test, No Child Left Behind, a lot of times it was more of a time that people didn’t want to give up their time to teach social-emotional life skills. There was definitely some areas, some administrations and districts and schools that embraced social-emotional education early, but it’s really evolved and started to get real momentum over the last 10, 15 years. Since this pandemic, I think it’s really changed.

Bruce Bushnell:
We had a webinar in the summer with the principal of the Washington Principals’ Association, and he was the president of that association. He said it’s come to the time that really the number one priority I have as the president over all the principals is that we need to make SEL a top priority, and just like a standard core of any subject. And he said we need to focus in that on the relationships. He said it’s not just something we put, it’s nice, it’s over here, it’s something that we really address. It’s always been something I’ve been excited about because I felt like it’s one of the keys to helping students be successful in academics and in life. 

Bruce Bushnell:
I’ll just close with this. I saw a presentation of an SEL curriculum and got really excited and brought it back to our high school, because the year before we lost 56 sophomores, just dropped out of our school. Some of them went to a packet program, but it was kind of a glorified way of being on the records but not really being in school. We lost 56 sophomores. After we embraced this SEL curriculum, the very next year we lost a total of six. I saw the change and the difference, and I got really passionate about it, so I’m excited to talk about what we think helps make a very robust and positive SEL curriculum.

Jason Johnson:
Awesome. Thanks, Bruce. Cory?

Cory Anderson:
Yeah. I mean, I would probably just echo a little bit what Bruce said there. I think the biggest change over the last two, three decades with regards to SEL is the priority that it’s taken. Back way back when I was a student in school, it wasn’t even referred to. I’m sure the most comparable thing would just be character education. I think educators in schools always wanted to develop positive characteristics in their students, but that was usually done through dialogue or monthly themes or quotes in the morning announcements. I really think teachers and educators were probably just left to their own life expertise and experiences to guide their students however they saw fit, and ultimately, if students had issues beyond what was perceived as probably normal, they would be referred to SPED, special education, to let an expert deal with it.

Cory Anderson:
I know there’s a little bit of a negative connotation to that, how I framed that, but I believe that’s generally how it was looked at. But it’s changed kind of even with my own attitude. When I first entered education, it was just like Bruce said, it’s like, “Well, I don’t really have time for that. I have all these expectations with regards to academics, I can’t put time to that.” But as Bruce said with NickleBee, suddenly we started really analyzing when students were learning and when they weren’t. I think we started to realize that a lot of times when students are struggling, the answer was not always academic. The answer really tied into social and emotional.

Cory Anderson:
So as a school, as a system, through PBIS and RTI, and now under the umbrella of MTSS, we had to really start looking at a systematic way of approaching social and emotional learning. As a teacher, I think I had so many things I was dealing with, I did not fully understand how much need there was. It wasn’t until I became a principal and I started doing home visits with school resource officers and social workers and seeing what was going on outside of the brick and mortar school walls in these kids’ homes and in their neighborhoods, then I fully became aware of the needs that they had outside of just academics. I’m really glad that it’s a priority now and that it has a seat at the table with regards to a focus that organizations have to take. 

Jason Johnson:
Awesome.

Bruce Bushnell:
Matter of fact, I just saw a survey of administrators, and it was a pretty big survey, and 85% of the administrators said it was going to be their top priority for this year, was SEL. 10% said it was going to be a major emphasis. So that’s 95% of administrators that took that survey, and that’s something that’s, it’s nice to see that kind of emphasis on it because we know what it can do, and it does really help support academics. The research shows when you embrace and do SEL with fidelity, that many, many times your test scores and students’ performance academically improve.

Cory Anderson:
Yeah. One last thing. As Bruce was talking, it came to my mind, and that is the other big difference with SEL is that especially in the last year or two, I think organizations, schools realize that it’s not just the students who need SEL, but they need to take the adults in the buildings, their own health, social and emotional health, into consideration as well.

Jason Johnson:
Thank you. I echo everything you said. That is very similar to my arc as a school psychologist. I think we were always dealing with social-emotional issues probably a little bit maybe earlier on, but it was so refreshing when that started to become much more the broad culture of schools, because it does, it impacts the grownups and the kids.

Jason Johnson:
I wondered if… we spoke before as we were getting ready to address this, and you both helped put together a list of specific things that you identified as educators that you looked for in SEL programs. I think it actually serves as a pretty nice list, a pretty nice pattern that’s worth sharing here with our group. I’m going to put this up. I’m going to share this screen. I’ll put the list up that you identified of things that are important for an SEL program, and then wondering if maybe we can just go down the list and have you talk a little bit about each one of these before we have you walk through what the WhyTry material looks like.

Jason Johnson:
The list that we have, it goes engagement, something that builds capacity, something that’s comprehensive, something that’s simple and practical and something that builds culture. Those were all things that you as decision-makers in the world of education were really looking for in an SEL program. Maybe if we could take just a minute and start with, I believe you, Bruce. Talk a little bit about what that engagement piece means to you.

Bruce Bushnell:
Okay. Thank you. I do think it’s one of the keys. I’ve taught to a lot of educators across the country during this pandemic time and all the other challenges and things that are going on. One of their concerns, they’ve been scrambling a lot of times, is trying to get help getting students to show up, to come to school or in many cases come online and stay online. 

Bruce Bushnell:
One of the keys, I think, to a good SEL curriculum is that it is engaging, that it’s relevant, that a student, it’s relevant to them in their lives and they are engaged. We say a lot of times in our training, to teach them you got to reach them. I don’t think that means engagement, but they have to be, again, engaged and invested and bought in. I really believe the relationship makes a big difference in engagement, and the more we need to focus more on establishing stronger connections with students. When they have that relationship with a key educator, they’re more likely to be engaged and stay with it. But again, that needs to be relevant.

Bruce Bushnell:
What do students, adolescents, youth like? Part of that engagement can be multimedia. It can be music. It can be activities, but whatever that engagement is, it has to bring them in and relate to what’s going on in their world. You’ve got to I think create a buy-in, that there’s something in it for me. That’s what engages a person, when they know there’s something there for them. 

Bruce Bushnell:
I had the opportunity in our county to teach social-emotional curriculum with… went in from our organization and taught with a counselor and a teacher a bunch of students that weren’t showing up. Their attendance was about 20%. We made a strong effort to get those students the very first two days. We made it a wow and we did some things that were very interactive and got them involved, and then we taught this SEL curriculum. We didn’t get 100%, but we got quite a few, but the word got out. They enjoyed it so much that we had more come the third, fourth days that we taught the class. Their attendance was about 20%, went as the term ended, it was up to close to 90%. The principal kept saying, “How did you do that?” We said, “Hey, they don’t want to miss. They’re engaged. They’ve bought in. They want to be here and they’re invested in what we’re doing.” So it’s something that you want to make sure that that curriculum helps create greater engagement.

Jason Johnson:
Cory, additional thoughts?

Cory Anderson:
Bruce did a great job there. I think there are a lot of things, a lot of distractions, competing for kids’ attention and stimulating the brain requires innovation and engagement. To add to that idea, everyone’s minds are stimulated in a different way by a different type of learning mode, so in SEL curriculum it has to be engaging, it has to answer the question, “How are we going to get these kids to buy in to what we’re saying?” The curriculum itself can go a long way to making that happen. Does this curriculum create opportunities for active engagement? That if somebody who comes into the classroom and sees the class, can they see that these kids are actively engaged and participating? 

Cory Anderson:
I think that an educator can take any curriculum and make it engaging depending on that educator’s own expertise and skillset as a teacher or facilitator, but I think a good curriculum, the materials will build engagement opportunities into the curriculum itself so that any educator can pick that up and do that and create that type of environment, regardless of how developed their skills are at creating that type of engagement. So yeah, I think engagement is huge and a key part.

Bruce Bushnell:
I like the way Cory said it provides opportunities. Curriculum will help in a sense to set you up to have the opportunities to create that engagement. My two daughters played volleyball, and both of them were setters and they would set up the outside hitters, but I think a good curriculum sets you up to have opportunities to bring students in and create that buy-in.

Jason Johnson:
Awesome. Builds capacity.

Cory Anderson:
Okay. 

Jason Johnson:
Who’s starting on that one?

Cory Anderson:
Want me to jump in, Jason?

Jason Johnson:
What’s that?

Cory Anderson:
Want me to jump in?

Jason Johnson:
Please.

Cory Anderson:
Building capacity, this is an interesting one. I have many thoughts about it, and I could refer to it under the hat of a teacher or as an administrator and my feelings might be slightly different, but let me speak to this as a leader, because I think more now than ever, organizations as a whole are looking at SEL or leadership teams or a group of people in an organization are looking at bringing it on, and so from a leader’s perspective, you really do want to bring in a curriculum that is not just going to contribute to the education and development of the students, but also to the people that are using the curriculum.

Cory Anderson:
When I entered education, granted I never really knew the road I would be traveling down, but when I entered education, I never thought that I would be in a situation where I was dealing with students that… a student standing on a desk with a piece of broken glass against their throat or students who are dealing with traumatic experiences at home, whether it be abuse or poverty or homelessness or suicidal thoughts. All of the situations that I worked through and the incredibly difficult conversations, if I would have known I would have been in that position before I ever entered education, I don’t know, I probably would have had major anxiety attacks, like, “I can’t do that. I’m not trained for that how do I do that?”

Cory Anderson:
Since we’re embracing this idea that SEL is something that everybody needs to put on that backpack and take a part of the responsibility of teaching kids this, we have to build that capacity to be able to do it. Teachers and social workers and psychologists, everybody who’s using this, from interventionists, whoever they are, they need some training as well. They need to know how to facilitate those types of discussions and dialogues and navigate these very tough issues. 

Cory Anderson:
This isn’t academics, this is real life, and it can be a little intimidating to take that on, and so I think a good program, one that I would look for, would have something built into it to build that capacity to know how to navigate all of that. That’s my thoughts on that.

Jason Johnson:
Thank you. Anything, Bruce?

Bruce Bushnell:
Cory did a good job. I think just to add to it, that we want to provide for, as staff, as many resources as possible, that training and staff development is critical. I do think what happened with me when I ended up teaching SEL and doing training all across this country, it actually helps me. I personalize it and it becomes something, it makes a huge difference in my life. So as we’re training the staff to prepare to share this and make a difference in young people’s lives, I think the byproduct of that, it also strengthens each one of us and helps us, and then that creates better buy-in. I think you want sustainability, you want this to go on, and so the more resources, help, training, materials, electronics, whatever it is, equipment, that we can provide for the staff, and then for them to truly understand if they’re teaching SEL, it could be for any subject, but the SEL, that they truly understand the content and how to become efficient or good at the competencies that go to become a good facilitator. But if you can do it as a whole building, as a staff, that makes a huge difference.

Jason Johnson:
Awesome. Thank you. Let’s go through the three next ones I think fairly quickly, because I want to get to the point where you can show specifically some of the pieces that connect to this. Who wants to address comprehensive?

Bruce Bushnell:
I’ll just do something real quick and then Cory could add to it real fast. I think one, comprehensive means it should be whatever you have should be for all students. Wherever they are as far as their learning, and your students that are gifted and students that have greater challenges. It should be comprehensive that way. It should be comprehensive in the content that whatever you’re providing is helping with… I would think it’s comprehensive, it’s helping with a lot of different things. It could be helping with academic achievement, dropout prevention, anxiety, suicide prevention, attendance, whatever that is, but it’s comprehensive. That’s very helpful.

Bruce Bushnell:
And then I think it’s comprehensive in the sense that you’re looking at the whole student, a holistic approach to the student, but you’re teaching the way they like to learn and all the learning styles, whether that’s auditory, kinesthetic, visual, but that’s in that curriculum so you’re not leaving someone out. Sometimes, I knew as a teacher I liked to teach the way I liked to learn, and it wasn’t always best for my students. I learned that I needed to provide that comprehensive approach so they all can learn.

Jason Johnson:
Nice, thank you. Anything you want to add, Cory?

Cory Anderson:
No, he nailed it.

Jason Johnson:
Cory, you want to group the last two together, simple and practical and builds culture?

Cory Anderson:
Simple and practical, I don’t have a lot to say. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. I think the way to frame it is simply this. The thing that educators don’t have enough of is time, so you need to have a curriculum that is easy to use, easy to access and easy to learn. If it’s that, then I think it checks that box, and if it’s difficult, it becomes too laborious to work through.

Jason Johnson:
Nice. Thank you. How about builds culture?

Cory Anderson:
Builds culture, I really like this one. I think this is something that is exclusive to very few programs. I think when you’re looking at social-emotional learning programs, you really have to ask yourself, “What are you trying to accomplish with this?” It’s not just about one student or one class, it’s really about changing a school environment. I think it’s perhaps one of the most daunting for a curriculum to take on, but I guess the question I would ask as I look at different curriculums would be, what is the vision of this curriculum? What effect is this curriculum hoping to have on a whole school community or organization? Will the implementation of this curriculum have an impact on more than just the one student or the one facilitator or an isolated pocket of where it’s being used.

Cory Anderson:
I think your curriculum needs to have its own unique vision that can easily be stated by those who are using it, and that will ultimately develop a culture, and when we’re talking about SEL, develop that positive culture that is supportive for everybody in it.

Jason Johnson:
Nice. Anything you want to add, Bruce?

Bruce Bushnell:
Yeah, just 30 seconds. I won’t take long on it, but read an article recently and they said building a positive culture or positive school climate needed to have four things. It was based on a bunch of mental health experts, but they said one, to build that culture, I’m thinking for the curriculums it should be doing the same thing. The four things are it should be safe, physically and emotionally. We have a lot of kids with anxiety and a variety of things, so that’s important that they feel safe emotionally. Students feel supported. But adding that to a culture, staff feel supported, parents feel supported the community feels supported. This third one was that they’re engaged. We already talked about that, but that helps build that culture when everybody’s engaged. And then everybody feels like they belong or are accepted. I think there are some curriculums out there that can help focus on those four things and other things that help build positive culture. 

Jason Johnson:
Awesome. Thank you. So now, we’re going to pivot just a little bit. Not a huge pivot, because we’re still talking about that list of five. Why don’t you tell us how, then, you feel like the WhyTry program checks those boxes, and maybe take this as an opportunity to show a little bit what that program looks like within the world of SEL. Maybe we can just start with you, Bruce, and we’ll kind of go down that list.

Bruce Bushnell:
Okay, I’m going to put on my share here real fast.

Jason Johnson:
Yep.

Bruce Bushnell:
Hold on a second. I don’t know if I did that right. I want a certain thing and I think… Okay, I’ve got it.

Jason Johnson:
Yep.

Bruce Bushnell:
The WhyTry curriculum, the SEL program, basically it answers the question, “Why try? Why put effort into life and the things that are important?” Your education to school to careers to becoming good at something. It teaches critical social-emotional life skills, which we call the skills of resilience, and the third thing, it helps students look at their challenges differently.

Bruce Bushnell:
Our whole program, our SEL curriculum, and our philosophy and theory is based upon what we call the new Three R’s. Again, we could spend a whole hour on each on of these, but these help bring students to the old Three R’s, academics, reading, writing and arithmetic. They’re still very important. The very first R is the relationship. We call that the X factor. A lot of times I’ll ask an [inaudible 00:25:52], what’s more important, our curriculum or the relationship? Everybody will say, “Well, the relationship.” I’m as excited as the foundation piece of our curriculum. We call that the X factor. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Relevancy. It’s the key to why. The things that we’re using, are they relevant to students and is the curriculum relevant? That’s the combination of those two and, again, relevancy is important because it reaches the students where they are and also the tools that we’re using should be relevant, and how we reach them in that curriculum. The combination of those two bring us to our end goal, resiliency. We think the greatest gift we could give to students would give them the gift of resilience. Life happens to you, and they have so many challenges, and sometimes it’s really hard to focus on the academics when they have them coming at them very rapidly.

Bruce Bushnell:
We focus on those three things. I think almost anything you could teach, if you kept that a consideration, the relationship, making it relevant and teaching resilience, would make a huge difference whether it was our curriculum or any other curriculum or any other subject we’re teaching. That’s what we call the new Three R’s, and it shapes everything we do in our SEL curriculum and program.

Jason Johnson:
Awesome. Thank you. Cory, why don’t you dig in a little bit into that first engagement piece and maybe build on what Bruce said and show us how the WhyTry material checks that engagement box?

Cory Anderson:
For sure. So, when it comes to engaging the students, the thing I love about WhyTry is that it really is built on this idea of, “How are we going to make this relevant?” Bruce brought up that word, that second R of our Three R’s, relevance, and relevance really means how are we getting students to take these things and apply it to their own lives, think that it matters to apply it to their own lives, and so the way we do that in WhyTry is we ask ourselves the question and we’re really honest about it, “Are we engaging students in a way that they like to learn?” And that’s kind of a scary question, because gosh, it’s school. How do we engage students in a way that we like to learn? But we really do have to take that into consideration, because when we’re talking about social and emotional learning, to get kids to buy in, we are going to have to be innovative and creative. If we simply put out a story and say, “Hey, let’s read through this together and talk about this situation,” you’re going to lose some of your students if that’s the only way that the curriculum sets it up.

Cory Anderson:
You really do have to take this in an approach and realize what academic teachers learned many years ago is that we know students learn in a variety of ways. You have students out there that are going to walk into a classroom, sit down in the classroom and be able to listen to a teacher talk and go back and forth in a discussion, and that’s going to work for them, but that’s not going to work for everybody. You’re going to have other students that are visual learners, you’re going to have other students that learn kinesthetically or learn through active participation or through music or through all these different learning modalities.

Cory Anderson:
In order to make the learning relevant for them, you have to provide experiences for them that meet the way they like to learn. The way we make that relevant is we take all of those academic instructional strategies and we try to tie them into SEL. I guess it’s my turn to share the screen. Let me show you what the WhyTry… says, “You cannot start screen share while the other participant is sharing.”

Bruce Bushnell:
Do I need to end?

Jason Johnson:
Yeah, if you want to hit stop share. There you go.

Cory Anderson:
There you go. Nice job, Bruce. Thank you. If I share my screen really quickly, what I’m showing you here is the toolkit that any WhyTry facilitator would have access to. This toolkit is divided up into our learning units as well as different lesson tools you use to teach those learning units, and I think we’ll show that in a little bit, but to help you understand what we use to engage our students, if I were to click on any one of these units, so if I go to, for example, defense mechanisms, which is teaching students how to control their emotional impulses and responses in pressure situations, you’re going to see that we have a variety of tools that we use to try to teach the unit. We have visual metaphors to try to reach those students who learn visually.

Cory Anderson:
I’m going to skip the teacher’s manual, because that goes hand-in-hand with these other tools, but we have learning activities, where we have a list, and throughout the program we have hundreds of activities, but specific to defense mechanism, you can see this long list of activities that, a lot of those activities are going to be hands-on, up and moving, different activities that engage students with each other and with the facilitator to create almost this experiential learning moment that ties back into the objectives that we’re really trying to hit with defense mechanisms.

Cory Anderson:
We have resilience boosters, which are basically journal prompts as well as game plan activities and art prompts and music prompts to once again try to help hit those students in different ways, whether it’s intrapersonal learning or interpersonal learning, that music learning, audio. We have video resources. We all know how the kids love their YouTube or TikTok or whatever it is. You put on the right video, every single kid is going to cue in to what’s going on on that video, and so we have a large library of video resources we use to teach our objectives and tap into then.

Cory Anderson:
Then we have our own WhyTry music as well as suggested playlists that we use to once again use music in a strong way. We even have book lists, where we take picture books, and these are picture books that their themes and their overall point ties in specifically to our objectives that we’re trying to teach through our SEL units. The thing I really like about WhyTry is it makes it relevant by engaging students in a whole bunch of different modalities of learning. Any thoughts on that, Bruce?

Bruce Bushnell:
No. I just did a lesson the other day to a middle school, and I took everything you’re showing and did it, it was on a blended approach. I had half the students were in the class, half were online, and we took all those things you were clicking on, had a great lesson plan, which we’re going to talk about in the flex lesson plan, and they were engaged. The teacher said, “I couldn’t believe how they all bought in and they were there.” It was a little more difficult because some were in the class and some were just watching on the Zoom as I presented to them. I wasn’t in the class, I presented electronically to them. But those tools are simple enough that I can use them, and that’s great.

Jason Johnson:
Yeah, awesome. Thanks. Bruce, why don’t you talk a little bit about how it builds capacity?

Bruce Bushnell:
Okay, I’m going to share again, and I hope I’ve… I think I lost my… Hold on just a second. I had a slide, but I think it’s gone now, so I won’t worry about that slide. Anyway, so building capacity…. Hold on just a second. I’m going to try one thing. Yeah, it’s gone. All right, we’re good. Just talking about training. I think we only [inaudible 00:33:44] staff development. There’s two components to that. Cory will talk about one, but it’s teaching the content of what SEL curriculum’s about. So whatever those social-emotional life skills are, you need to have a training that helps provide that for your teachers. In our training, we have what’s called a WhyTry level one training, and it helps you learn about the content, see the content demonstrated, the lessons demonstrated, you participate. And when you’re done with that, you could feel like you could start using it. 

Bruce Bushnell:
But then we have a level two, where you can focus on competencies and becoming stronger at how you deliver that and learning techniques and things that help in the delivery to your students. In our content, it’s based upon the 10 social-emotional life skills, which I’m going to review later on in another section. Also, we use visual metaphors, pictures. We use music, we have activities, we have journaling, we have art. All that is content and you learn about all those things of how to share that in a flexible lesson plan. But that’s what helps build capacity. When teachers feel confident, it’s I call it educator/teacher friendly, and I think that’s what I love about WhyTry. It’s very educator friendly. It’s something that I think almost all educators can use without a lot of… it’s not very difficult, and that’s why I can use it. So anyway, so I think the training, the staff development is one of the great ways of providing the curriculum for educators. It helps them to build that capacity and create sustainability.

Jason Johnson:
Awesome. Thanks, Bruce. What about you, Cory? Anything you want to add?

Cory Anderson:
Yeah. The only thing I thought of when Bruce was walking was I went through my WhyTry… my first exposure to WhyTry was in 2009. I was an administrator and I was hunting for an SEL program. I stumbled across WhyTry and I ended up going to the training. I remember two things from the training. I remember number one, thinking to myself, “I can’t believe how much this relates to my own life.” As I’m going through this, I’m thinking of my own personal stories and everything I’ve been through in my life and how all of these units reflect… I had so many connections with it. It was really cool and it felt empowering a little bit. I felt like I suddenly became an expert on it.

Cory Anderson:
Then the second thing was I remember just loving the training, coming out the other side of it and thinking, “I want to give this a go.” The training is probably on my top three all-time best trainings I’ve ever attended for education. The training definitely builds capacity. The other way that the WhyTry curriculum builds capacity is within the curriculum, we have what we call the WhyTry approach. We have content, and Bruce was explaining the content, I shared the content, but we know that WhyTry is going to be successful not just because of the content, but also the way that the person facilitating delivers the content and creates a classroom culture. So we have what we call competencies.

Cory Anderson:
This right side of the screen share that I’ve showed, where it says engagement strategies, these are all competencies that you get trained on within the curriculum. So even in the training and then within the curriculum itself, when you go through the tutorial lessons, you get trained on how to surrender the one-up, which is all about relationship. I think Bruce will probably talk about that in a little bit. Questions and processing, effective framing, activities, videos, state changes, storytelling. You can see them there. I’m reading a list, here. Some of them you may be totally familiar with, and some of you may be like, “I have no idea what that means.” The bottom line is is that the program is about building the capacity of the person delivering the content, because we know that’s just as important as the content itself.

Jason Johnson:
Awesome. Thank you. Bruce, tell us a little bit about how it checks that comprehensive box. What does that mean to you?

Bruce Bushnell:
Okay, I’m going to go to share. Hold on just a second. I’m going to go to share. All right, here we go. 

Jason Johnson:
This is a good opportunity to practice our technology, right?

Bruce Bushnell:
By the way, when they have a problem in WhyTry, they call me to help with technology, so you have to just know that if, like when I say if I can do it, anybody can do it, it’s true. All right, we use vision metaphors to teach. Research shows when you use a metaphor or a picture to teach your concept or principle, students can retain it for a long time and remember it for a long time. I’m going to share how this relates to being comprehensive. This is our 10 social-emotional life skills, and it relates to a lot of things. A lot of you were working with a lot of students. All students, whether they’re on your honor roll or struggling to stay in school, students have challenges and they’re standing here at this wall. 

Bruce Bushnell:
You could put whatever challenge you want on the wall that your students are dealing with. It could be a variety of things, it’s not just the things that are on that wall. A lot of times they have the limited view, and they really struggle to focus on the things we want them to focus on, academics, and so our goal, SEL is to each 10 social-emotional life skills that help them to get on top of that wall. We call this a walk up the wall, and it’s just really brief, but it’ll give you a sense of the 10 visual metaphors. 

Bruce Bushnell:
The very first one, I’ll give you the key concept, is called the reality ride, and it’s that your decisions and choices have consequences and your decisions and choices determine what track you’re on or the direction you’re going in your life. It’s about decision-making and being responsible for your decisions. That helps you in almost so many different areas in your life. Why it’s comprehensive, if you’re focusing on academics, improving academics, decision-making makes a big difference. If you’re focusing on attendance, so dropout prevention, it doesn’t matter the area that you’re trying to improve upon. I did a training and a lady said they had a grant that was kind of an unusual grant, and she said, “But it helped us in so many areas.” Grades were improved, attendance has improved, behavior improved. So it’s comprehensive as they learn these skills.

Bruce Bushnell:
The next one, just going brief. I love these so much I am tempted to teach them each time, but this is Cory’s [inaudible 00:40:25] references, but it’s tearing off your labels. Tearing off a label, we ask the question, “How is your label working for you? Is it providing you the opportunity you really want?” This visual is about self esteem, self confidence, self worth and letting people see the real you, what’s inside the can, so to speak. Your positive attributes and strengths. A lot of students are limited because of their labels.

Bruce Bushnell:
Cory referenced defense mechanisms. We use a [inaudible 00:40:52] of how we defend our emotions and feelings, sustain control. We have four steps of learning to control your emotions. Recognize the emotions of others and your own emotions. It’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to hurt yourself or hurt others. In psychology, they call this the crab effect. This about peer pressure, peer influence, positive or negative. This pot or pan with hot water represents negative peer influence. You could throw a bunch of crabs into a pot. They each have the ability to take their claw and flip themself out and escape if you don’t put a lid on your pan or pot, but if you went away for two hours and you didn’t have a lid on, you’d come back, your students will say if they’ve never seen this before, they’ll all be gone, they’ll all escape, but the reality is they’ll all be there because just as soon as someone gets their claw up on top of the rim of the pan, someone from down below grabs them and pull them back or keeps them back. So there’s two aspects to this. Don’t go near that pot of negative peer influence, but if you’re in that pot, how do you get out? And we provide the how. It’s really about being a true friend versus a false friend.

Bruce Bushnell:
This is a basic problem-solving model. We use a track analogy. That hurdle represents challenges, trials, obstacles, maybe a real hard goal, something that’s difficult for you to get over, but how do you jump your hurdle? How do you get over it? We have six steps for jumping hurdles. One step I really, really like is step five, it’s the power of belief. We help try to increase the students’ belief level that they truly can jump their hurdle. 

Bruce Bushnell:
Again, you can apply all of these to almost any area you’re working on, why it’s comprehensive. This one is a maze. We have the students do the maze, but it’s three things that help you to be… Anybody that’s listening today has been successful in your life. You’ve had the desire, you’ve put real time, real effort. There’s no shortcuts, and perseverance and hard work will take you a long way in life today, and it’s something we help students foster, learn to take control of, their time and their work and their desire, foster greater desire.

Bruce Bushnell:
Lift the weight is what makes you strong in today’s society, and as adults and students, we get an opportunity to choose. Are we going to choose to lift the actual weight? If you look at this weightlifter, he’s lifting a balloon and it’s bringing him down. What do those two weights represent? The balloon represents those things that get you in trouble, things that are easy, things you give up on, things you quit on. Anybody can lift the balloon of not doing homework. Anybody can be unkind, be a bully. Anybody can find drugs in their community. That makes you weak. Well, what makes you strong in today’s society is doing what’s expected of you. That weight represents what’s expected of you. It’s society’s rules and laws, home and the community, it’s school and self-discipline. If you choose to lift that weight… If you notice, he has strong muscles on that side. That’s what makes you strong. I love teaching that, because a lot of it’s kind of a paradigm shift for students. They’ve always let laws and rules take away freedom of self discipline, but it’s what provides you with freedom.

Bruce Bushnell:
This next one may be the very most important, it’s getting plugged into positive support systems. You can have all the electrical sockets in the world, but if you don’t plug in, the light doesn’t come on. Same with getting plugged into getting help and support. So we help students to learn how to, if they don’t have one… We have five basic support systems that we teach, and we help them to… we like all students to plug into all five, but at least three, but if they don’t have one, how do they acquire one? If they have a weak one, how do they strengthen it? A lot of students think getting help is a weakness.

Bruce Bushnell:
This next one is the motivation formula. It really helps students to look at their challenges differently. We’re going to show a little bit more of that in a minute, but it’s the keys to motivation. Our goal is to help get students on top of the wall where they can see the big view and they can see real opportunities, real freedom, self respect, go for their goals and dreams, take control of their life, and we think the key to getting them on top of that wall is the Three R’s that we shared. Relationship is the X factor, again, that’s the key. Foundation, relevance is the key to why. The combination of those two, our end goal, resilience. It’s very comprehensive. From almost anything you’re trying to deal with, you can use these 10 social-emotional life skills to deal with that challenge or problem or trauma, whatever they’re dealing with.

Jason Johnson:
Awesome. Thanks, Bruce. You want to add anything, Cory?

Cory Anderson:
Sorry, had to unmute myself from coughing. No. Nope, that’s great, Bruce.

Jason Johnson:
So Cory, why don’t you talk a little bit, show us how… Bruce just gave a very brief overview of the 10 skills of resilience that we teach. It probably feels to some people like this is a lot, I think, because there’s a lot of information we tried to provide. Cory, show us how it can be simple and practical, because I know that was a really important piece for you when you were examining SEL programs as an administrator.

Cory Anderson:
Yeah. So I want to show what tool our users use to deliver and create lessons. When somebody goes through the WhyTry training and then they start using the curriculum, they’re going to become proficient at using what we call the flexible lesson plan. Now, the flexible lesson plan is a really simple document, and I want to explain it a little bit because it really speaks to the simplicity of what we’re trying to do in providing SEL using the WhyTry approach.

Cory Anderson:
When you look at this flexible lesson plan, you’re going to see it’s pretty simple. I mean, there’s not a lot there. You see that there’s this space that says attention-getter, warmup, brief movie clip. It’s your opening act. Then there’s this thing that says visual walkthrough, then a music activity, learning activity, a journal activity, examples, stories or other resources. All of these are an element of what might make up the perfect WhyTry lesson, but the thing about it is, is that if you used all of those elements, chances are your lesson is going to be like 70, 75 minutes long depending on what they are.

Cory Anderson:
So the thing is, is that most people don’t have that long, and in fact, if you look at all the WhyTry users, something that’s very distinct with regards to WhyTry is that our users are composed of teachers, elementary and secondary, social workers, psychologists, counselors, administrators. We have probation officers using it, we have interventionists, we have social workers that push into homes. I trained last fall two guys that work with death row inmates, and I know other people have done that in WhyTry trainings. We are used in so many different settings, and we are used in so many different timeframes and with tier one, tier two, tier three settings, it’s like how do you create a lesson plan that fits all of those different settings?

Cory Anderson:
Well, that’s not going to happen, so what we want to do is we want to create very simple tools that, depending on your situation and the timeframe you have, you can create a lesson plan. So the idea here is… Do you know what? Last week, I introduced the reality ride, and I went through the whole visual walkthrough. It took me 30 minutes, because that’s how long I have with my students, and so this week, I want to do a followup to the reality ride and I only have 30 minutes. Do you know what? For my 30 minutes, I’m going to do an attention-getter movie clip. I’m going to show… in our library, we have Jimmy Fallon and Kevin Hart ride a roller coaster. Then I’m going to do a quick review of the reality ride walkthrough. That’s going to take me three minutes. Then I’m going to do one of our learning activities. I’m going to do keys to staying on track. That’s a longer activity, it takes 20 minutes, 20, 25 minutes. There’s my 30 minutes. I filled in those spaces on that flexible lesson plan. I have the materials in the online toolkit of WhyTry, and that’s how I create my lesson. It doesn’t take a long time to create, it’s just kind of a plug and play system. 

Cory Anderson:
The trick is becoming familiar with our materials. As you jump into this toolkit that I’m showing you, as you go through the program, you become very familiar with all of our materials to the point that you can plug and play things depending on your students’ needs. In fact, in our getting started section here, when you click getting started, you’ll notice the step two, the how, when you come to this view lessons here, we have 18 lessons that are created for you to deliver to your students. When you go through these lessons with your students, these lessons are not only going to be lessons for your students, but they actually train you as a WhyTry facilitator on how to use all of the materials, as well as it trains you on our competencies. You see there’s this embedded video on how to learn how to do activities. So the program really is created to help get you to a place where you are using that flexible lesson plan as this plug and play model, and it really is meant to be user-friendly.

Jason Johnson:
Awesome. Thanks, Cory. Cory, how would you describe what grade level those prebuilts are built for? That question just came up.

Cory Anderson:
Yeah, great question. Those prebuilt lessons are geared towards middle school. You would want to differentiate that a little bit based on your age of students. When I say middle school, it could actually be used for fifth grade and up as well. If you go lower than fifth grade, you’re going to change some of the vocabulary there. You may look at the booster and change the booster. I believe on the motivation formula activities, we actually give you several choices, depending on whether you are doing it secondary or elementary. But that’s what it’s geared at, the tutorial lessons.

Bruce Bushnell:
I don’t think we mentioned, we have a full elementary curriculum and a secondary curriculum just for those. So if it is younger, you have the elementary curriculum that you can help to adapt or adjust as you’re teaching those lessons, or just as you teach your elementary students.

Cory Anderson:
Yeah. As you go into it, you’ll see that there are elementary versions of different things. Like here’s the elementary version of the teacher’s manual. If you go into visual metaphors, there’s going to be elementary versions of that. We have taken that into account. You may have to swap some stuff off, depending on the students you’re working with.

Jason Johnson:
Thank you. Bruce, bring us home. Talk about how it builds culture. This is something I know you’re really passionate about.

Bruce Bushnell:
I am. The SEL curriculum, I call it, can become, I always say magic, induces pretty amazing things. Not maybe magic, but create many miracles. The key is, what I’m going to share right now, and it builds culture in your whole school and your staff. As we said, relationship is the X factor. We call it surrendering the one-up relationship. It comes from one of our visual metaphors. 

Bruce Bushnell:
I want to show this to you. This is the motivation form. I’m not going to teach you, but students have challenges and a lot of times there’s a lot of emotion that comes with challenges, like anger. A lot of times, hopefully you can take that energy and go in a positive direction, but sometimes we go in a negative direction and we have a lot of students, and sometimes as adults, who are in this flood zone. When we talk about what students look like, a lot of times they’re just treading water and they need help. If you look at that lifeline, that life preserver-

Jason Johnson:
Bruce, I don’t think you have it shared yet.

Bruce Bushnell:
Oh. Hold on a second.

Jason Johnson:
Yeah, you’re good.

Bruce Bushnell:
Let’s share, then. Sorry.

Jason Johnson:
There you go.

Bruce Bushnell:
There we go. Anyway, we teach that when students have challenges, they go in what we call the flood zone many times. Our way of helping come out of that flood zone, where they’ve shut down, quit or apathetic, they lack motivation, is to do what we have coined this phrase called surrendering the one-up relationship. We have over 50 strategies of how to surrender the one-up relationship, and it’s based upon three points. We don’t have a lot of time because we’re wrapping up today, but in the curriculum Cory was showing you, we have the sections where we list all those strategies and a section that helps you learn more about surrendering the one-up, but it’s based upon these three points. It’s sending a powerful message to your students that we as educators, as adults, that we care about you, that we believe in you. We’re there for you. We treat you with dignity and respect. It kind of creates equity in the relationship, it kind of levels the playing field. It’s kind of a win-win. 

Bruce Bushnell:
It gives students, hey, there’s a clear message. It’s based upon… I’ll just stop after these three points, but based upon you have value and worth because of who you are, not because of accomplishments or failures. It’s not tied to achievement or failure. That’s something I missed as an educator. I was always trying to get achievement from students, that if they didn’t achieve, they felt like maybe I didn’t like them. So when I learned this, it changed my life as an educator. They have value unconditionally because they’re a human being and we care about them. We send that clear message. We’re there for them.

Bruce Bushnell:
The second point there, the experts on themselves. They have their own stories, let them have a voice, share what they really think, what they are going to do, and tap into, again their opinion and their voice. And then the third point, continually we’re looking for positive attributes. WhyTry is strength-based times, and so we’re looking at what’s right with students. We feel we’ll solve a lot of things that are not so right. So this lifeline, when we teach the students, it says, “Recognize who your lifelines are.” All of you out here listening today are lifelines for students, and when we focus on those things, it creates a culture. Can you imagine a whole school where every teacher’s surrendering the one-up and it’s a clear message, “We want you to attend. We want you to be here. We care about you. We’re there for you. We’re going to support you.” That’s a pretty amazing thing that can help start creating that culture throughout the school.

Bruce Bushnell:
When you have that culture in a whole school, you walk in a school, you can feel it. We go out and train in schools all the time, and you can sense when that culture’s there and that climate, and you can build it. So that’s one of the things we focus on. In our curriculum, I’ll just stop, we have all those strategies. I was going to go to it, but we have all those strategies and a whole section on learning more about how to apply and surrender the one-up relationship.

Jason Johnson:
Awesome. Thank you, Bruce. Anything you want to add, Cory?

Cory Anderson:
I was muted, sorry. I don’t, but the only thing I guess I want to bring up with regards to building culture that’s a little bit a side to what Bruce was saying is that one thing that I think that WhyTry does in comparison to other social and emotional learning curriculums that I’ve even used, is that WhyTry is all about creating genuine and authentic experiences with the students you’re working with. I think that goes a long way to building trust in the culture. It does not feel like it is a script or a curriculum that the students… students are smart, they’re adept, and they can tell when people are following a script or something that’s written out for them. 

Cory Anderson:
One of the great things about WhyTry is it kind of trumps that a little bit. It pushes that aside and it creates genuine relationships and feelings and discussion with the students you’re working with that I personally really looked for and liked about it. It’s one of the things I liked most.

Jason Johnson:
Totally agree. That was one of the things that attracted me to it when my world as a school psych and the world of WhyTry kind of crossed paths, was that it really seemed to create space for authenticity that was something that was personally really valuable to me as a practitioner. I think we’re out of time, just about. Just wondering, do either of you have any final thoughts before I wrap this up and tell everybody how they can get ahold of us?

Bruce Bushnell:
I would just say one thing. I usually say it when I start, and I didn’t and I feel bad I didn’t, but just thank you for everybody that’s listening in for what you do. I just went on a drive last night and there was a sign in a front lawn and you see it in front of hospitals, “Heroes work here,” but it said, “a teacher lives here and is a hero.” There was a sign in the lawn. It wasn’t quite read that way, but you are heroes. You’re doing amazing things. Thank you for what you do, and I hope people recognize you for the good things that you are doing, and that people appreciate you. We hope that at least something we’ve done here today has been of value to you, but we would love to be a resource to you, support to you in any way we can. Anyway, thank you again for taking the time to be with us.

Jason Johnson:
Yeah, I echo that. Anything, Cory?

Cory Anderson:
No. Ben and Debbie had questions I just put in my email. They should reach out to me since we’re out of time. I’d be happy to answer them.

Jason Johnson:
Yeah. You can get ahold of us, it’s just our first name at whytry.org, jason@whytry.org, bruce@whytry.org, cory@whytry.org, or send a general question to info@whytry.org. What we’re going to do, we’re going to reach out to everybody that was on here just as a thank you. We’re going to tell you how you can get a free sample lesson plan, and then for anybody that is interested in scheduling a full walkthrough demo, we’re actually offering our book, a digital copy of our book, The Resilience Breakthrough, we’ll give you a free download of our digital book on resilience, our resilience model, for anybody that sets up a demo for one of our program directors to walk them through. 

Jason Johnson:
But I just want to add my thanks to what Bruce and Cory said. Thank you so much for all that you do. It is such a boost of I guess hope, for me. I’m really lucky. I get to work with educators and therapists throughout the country, and it really is the greatest humans in the world that get into this field, because it’s not easy and we all do this for the same reason, we want to help other humans. That’s a really, really benevolent thing to do, so thank you for what you’re doing. 2020 is a difficult year. Hopefully some of the stuff we’ve talked about will be either personally helpful or helpful with the kids that you’re working with. 

Jason Johnson:
Then look for us to reach out to you and tell you how to get a sample lesson plan and get access to our book, The Resilience Breakthrough, as well. But if you have any questions, reach out to us, info@whytry.org.

Bruce Bushnell:
Jason. Just one…

Jason Johnson:
Bruce, go ahead.

Bruce Bushnell:
Just one thing. We had one question. A lot of people said they got in a little late or they have others that’d like to see this. Can we send a recording of this out? We will send that out so they can [crosstalk 01:00:55]?

Jason Johnson:
Yeah, so we’ve recorded this, and what we’re going to do is we’ll send a link out that you can share. So if you want to share this with your administrator or somebody in your staff just to give them an overview of some of the SEL things we’ve talked about, feel free. If you want to continue a discussion, we’re happy to collaborate. If you want to talk about how to create buy-in, if you want to talk about how to present SEL material to your staff, this is something we’re all pretty well versed in doing. We’ve had to do this professionally and now we get to do this in kind of a consultative manner as well. We’re happy to help out in any capacity that we can. We’ll get you a link probably by the weekend or Monday with access to the recording, and then we’d love to get you a copy of our digital book, The Resilience Breakthrough, as well. Hey, thanks everybody. Thanks for joining us. Have a great weekend.

Cory Anderson:
Thanks, guys.