SEL learning stands for Social Emotional Learning, and it is becoming more and more popular in schools all across the country. PCM has been implementing these lessons every few weeks since last year, and plan to get rolling with them this year very soon. 

Samatha Pohl, the PCM High School Instructional Coach has recently taken on the role of SEL team advisor explains, “This year we will do the same thing every other week or so, rotating with the College and Career readiness. It will happen on Monday’s during advisory. It’s a bit different because we have added time to it, so it isn’t as short. It is really hard to do a cool and creative lesson in a short time, we will hopefully have more engaging lessons rather than just a ‘sit and get’. We are hoping to get a curriculum from a company I worked for this summer.”

Over the summer Pohl was chosen to be a part of a team who works in making SEL lessons for teachers and schools all over the country.

 “It is for Joe Beckman’s company, and I wrote a lot of lessons because there isn’t a curriculum for SEL. It’s just up to educators and that company realizes that there needs to be something for teachers to use because they are begging for that all over the country.”

Beckman is a motivational speaker who has held assemblies at PCM and worked with PCM staff in the past few years. Pohl explained that there were about 8 team members chosen who worked from K-12 and they were given themes to create their lessons over. She plans to continue writing for them long term. 

“One of the themes was ‘commitment and courage’ and my partner and I created a spreadsheet and we broke it down into two lessons per theme, and in the lesson there’s a powerpoint with three different activities where there is teacher choice. Based on those three activities the teacher can choose which one they think will be best for their specific class,” Pohl explains. 

 SEL is a concept growing in PCM and surrounding schools and PCM will keep it in its curriculum this year and for years to come.