Evolving Me, Evolving You: A Journey to Understanding Ourselves to Strengthen How We Support Students

Kelly McMillan • Cahn Fellow 2022

How does focusing on adults' well-being positively impact children's social-emotional needs? As educators, we naturally focus on the needs of students but often neglect ourselves in the process. We tend to think our own emotions and needs take a backseat to those of students when the reality is that our emotions drive our thoughts and actions. When our school began to experience a rise in challenging behaviors last year, the first question we asked was, "How do we address the increasing social-emotional needs of children?" Through developing a theory of action, we deeply examined how we support the needs of students. This process was often frustrating and anything but linear, but the winding journey eventually led us to understand that it starts with us as adults and caregivers. 

Our self-awareness is crucial in responding to students, allowing us to support their needs effectively. The shift in our focus on our staff's needs and learning styles rather than our students required us to take our journey down a new path. We could derive soft data points to direct our project and its evolving plan through faculty overviews of our self-awareness and social-emotional needs, whole and small group activities, and conversations. With this step, we began the process of more effectively meeting the needs of our students dealing with intense emotions, displaying escalating behaviors, and dealing with traumas we cannot always recognize or relate to while also becoming more self-aware and increasing our self-care.