Knowledge Bank

The state of Ohio has recently released new social and emotional learning (SEL) standards for all subjects and grade levels, yet not all teachers are prepared for SEL. Whenever a change occurs in education, teachers need support to successfully negotiate and implement that change, often in the form of professional development (PD). There is currently a lack of systemic, district-level PD on implementing the new SEL standards. This has created a need for quality PD on SEL, especially for physical education (PE) teachers who often do not receive quality PD. One method that teachers have successfully used as PD is a community of practice (CoP). The purpose of this project was to engage in participatory action research (PAR) with elementary physical education teachers through a CoP focusing on implementing SEL standards in their classes. The study addressed the following research questions (1) How is SEL understood by teachers in the elementary PE curriculum over the course of the project? (2) What do teachers perceive to be the problems of implementing SEL into their lessons? (3) What strategies do teachers use to address SEL in their classes? and (4) What student behaviors do teachers expect students will demonstrate as evidence of growth in SEL? This project is based on a constructivist perspective that knowledge is constructed be each person based on their life experiences. As such, each person has knowledge to contribute to a project; knowledge is not solely held by researchers. PAR occurs as a lead researcher and those involved in the project work together to design, implement, and study the results in a repeated cycle of action. Teachers in this project agreed that new SEL standards was a problem they wanted to investigate. The teachers chose a course of action to address this in their respective teaching. The facilitator observed as action was taken. The teachers and facilitator kept journals of the results of the action, then met as a CoP group bi-weekly to discuss results and choose new courses of action. To gain a greater context for teachers' implementation of new standards, classroom teachers, school counselors, school principals, and district leaders were interviewed in addition to the physical education teachers themselves. The project will continue through January 2020. Anticipated findings include a change in teachers' understanding of SEL as a result of being a part of the CoP. It is anticipated that teachers will begin this project with limited understanding of what SEL is and will have negligible experience implementing SEL during their lessons. Their knowledge of and ability to include SEL will increase as teachers talk with the facilitator and other teachers, and as they attempt to meet the new standards. It is anticipated that each teacher will take unique approaches to including SEL into their practice, but that each will benefit from the sharing of struggles and success with other teachers. It is hoped teachers will expect specific behaviors from students that can be practiced and observed as evidence of teaching SEL. These student behaviors are expected to increase in frequency as teachers include more SEL during instruction. It is also hoped that this project will result in a greater understanding of how teachers want and use PD to improve their own practice, particularly when new standards come out. The implications of this project could have a broad impact in education. Districts can learn how to design PD that is of more benefit to teachers. A greater understanding of how PD is used by teachers to change their teaching practice can be drawn from this study. Building on that finding could be a greater understanding of how the changes teachers make based upon PD impacts student behaviors. This project could lead to a better understanding of how teachers learn, how better to design PD to serve teachers, and how PD for teachers could impact students and student learning.