Inside the Claymobile’s Nine Socioemotional Learning Competencies
For the last year and a half as an FAO Schwarz Fellow with The Clay Studio (TCS) in Philadelphia, I have been working on a strategic project to highlight and improve socioemotional learning (SEL) in the Claymobile curriculum. This project has been a true labor of love. I am very passionate about SEL in the arts, so it was an incredible opportunity to grow my skills and share my knowledge about the topic with the Claymobile team.ย
These nine SEL competencies have been instrumental to expanding Claymobileโs capacity for socioemotional growth.
In the past few months, several elements of my strategic project have been coming to fruition. I completed Claymobileโs SEL toolkit, which documents Claymobileโs nine SEL competencies, as well as guiding philosophies on each competency and best practices on how to promote them through our teaching. I also worked with Emily Wallace, TCSโs Communication Manager, to create an SEL workbook that provides exercises and journal prompts to deepen our understanding of each competency. Claymobile Teaching Artists have been completing the workbook as supplementary materials to our SEL Deep Dives, a series of learning sessions that I have been facilitating. Last week, I also led a presentation on SEL for the entire TCS staff.ย
In this blog post, I want to share the nine SEL competencies that I developed with my fellow Teaching Artists, as well as share how we are implementing each competency in our daily teaching practices. These competencies are:ย
- Critical thinking
- Community and belonging
- Joy
- Pride and self esteem
- Accepting imperfection
- Autonomy
- Self expression
- Responsible decision making
- Emotional regulation
1. Critical thinking
One practice that we’ve started employing to push students to practice their critical thinking skills is to bring teacher-made example projects that show the effects of certain techniques in clay making. A pedagogy centered on critical thinking requires students to understand the logic behind what theyโre doing, not simply to follow instructions. When we teach students how to scratch and attach, make coils, and hollow out pinch pots, we want to make sure weโre demonstrating why and how we use each technique. However, because ceramic projects take a long time due to processing and firing, it can be difficult for students to connect the cause and effect of using a certain technique on one day, and then receiving a project back on a different day weeks later.ย
Bringing examples with mistakes can demonstrate the effect of techniques in a more tangible way. For example, we might bring a mug that has its handle falling off because its creator did not scratch and attach properly. This gives students a better understanding of why we scratch and attach, instead of just copying the technique because we told them to.
2. Community and belonging
To promote community and belonging, we’ve recently started focusing on classroom rituals. A classroom ritual is something that we do consistently every time we have a class, whether that’s opening the class with a question of the day or ending the class with a share-out of our work. These small, consistent rituals are emotionally reassuring to students because it makes our classes predictable instead of uncertain. It also gives us a small moment for the whole class to connect to each other by, for example, hearing every studentโs favorite animal. Claymobile moves very quickly, so these rituals give us the chance to connect with every student in the limited amount of time we have during a residency.
3. Joy
Unlike other competencies, joy is not necessarily a skill that we as teachers need to help students build. Everyone is born with an inherent sense of joy, but that sense of joy is not always fed or valued by the world around us. In order to maintain what is considered โappropriateโ classroom behavior, students often have to subdue their expressions of joy. Students are expected not to laugh too loudly, talk out of turn, or move their bodies while learning, because it’s considered disruptive. However, Claymobile is a much different learning environment than a typical academic class. While it may be necessary to sit still and be quiet when taking a math test, making art can involve noise, silliness, movement, and energy. We promote joy by creating an environment where students can express their joy freely.
4. Pride and self esteem
One way we have been promoting pride and self esteem in our students is by emphasizing moments of affirmation in our classroom rituals. We are incorporating activities like gallery walks and share-outs into our lesson planning to give students an opportunity to show off their work and receive positive affirmation from their peers. This helps students practice celebrating their accomplishments and experience validation from their community.
5. Accepting imperfection
To embrace imperfection, we draw from psychologist Carol Dweckโs theory of the growth mindset. According to Dweck, a growth mindset involves believing that effort and perseverance can improve skills and that mistakes are an opportunity to be learned from. Conversely, a fixed mindset believes that talent and success are innate and can’t be changed, and that mistakes indicate failure. Students with a growth mindset are more likely to persevere, problem solve, and maintain positive self esteem in the face of difficulties, while students with a fixed mindset are more likely to avoid challenges and give up easily. When we interact with students, we can promote a growth mindset by using language that encourages practice and effort, frames mistakes as valuable lessons, and prompts students to problem solve around their mistakes.
6. Autonomy
One way that we are increasing autonomy in our classes is by carefully considering where we can expand our studentsโ creative freedoms. While ceramics does have some rules that must be followed, other rules can be handed over to students to honor their autonomy as artists. For example, we can never allow students to glaze the bottom of their artwork, because it will cause the project to be fused to the kiln shelf and damage the kiln and their project. But we can offer more choices when it comes to other types of risk-taking. For example, we often warn students that including thin and long elements in their projects is risky because those things often break off during firing. But if a student decides that the risk is worth it, we often let them include those pieces. Risky creative decisions like these allow students to safely practice autonomy and critical thinking in a developmentally appropriate way.
7. Self expression
To promote self expression, we are incorporating more student choice into our residency planning. While a typical residency is planned mostly by the teacher, each student has their own interests and hopes for what kind of art they want to create. To honor their need for self expression, we can create opportunities for students to have more control over what projects they work on during our residencies. Depending on the individual needs of each class, this might look like voting on the final project, creating a new project based on a studentโs idea, or having a free clay day.
8. Responsible decision making
As a socioemotional skill, responsible decision making goes beyond simply following the rules. Students also need to be able to evaluate situations, predict the cause and effect of certain actions, and make decisions based on their own judgement. To encourage responsible decision making, we have begun implementing co-created classroom norms in our residencies. Classes can decide on classroom norms together, rather than just having to follow rules decided by the teacher alone. This creates more buy-in from students, as they are more likely to value norms that they participated in writing. The process also challenges traditional hierarchies in classrooms by emphasizing that everyone in the room has a responsibility to everyone else in the room; students have to treat each other and the teachers appropriately, and teachers also have to treat students appropriately.ย
9. Emotional regulation
Emotional regulation refers to our ability to express our emotions appropriately and return our nervous systems to a calm state when we are emotionally activated. To address this, we are learning about various methods for engaging the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for returning our body to a calm, safe emotional and physical state. Some ways to engage the parasympathetic nervous system include taking deep breaths, stretching or moving your body, drinking water, or moving yourself to a calmer environment. When children behave in disruptive or unsafe ways, they are often acting out of emotional dysregulation. Instead of punishing children for being sad, angry, or afraid, we can help them learn to regulate their emotions with compassion and understanding.
These nine SEL competencies have been instrumental to expanding Claymobileโs capacity for socioemotional growth. Throughout the past year and a half, weโve focused on providing intentional feedback, structuring residencies to create an experience of growth, and intentionally creating moments of connection within our classes. Iโm incredibly proud of the work weโve done as a team, and I look forward to reporting back on our growth in the last six months of my fellowship experience!
Emily Lu
Emily (she/her) is the FAO Schwarz Fellow at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia.
SHARE THIS STORY