The Adult SEL Podcast CharacterStrong

As we kick-off Season 2 of the podcast, Dr. Clayton Cook lays out the Outside-In and an Inside-Out approach when it comes to adult social-emotional learning. He highlights the importance of leaders cultivating healthy work environments while also supporting all staff in order to help promote well-being, resilience, and engagement in their work. Dr. Cook also shares ways that systems often miss the mark when it comes to Adult SEL.

In episode 2, we talk about how promoting collective efficacy among the educational workforce is one of the highest leverage things we can do to promote better student outcomes. Dr. Cook speaks to the consequences of low collective efficacy, and the pandemic’s impact on collective efficacy. He also gives tangible ways we can better support the educators we serve.

On this episode, Dr. Cook shares that when people collaborate they feel more connected and supported; which is a buffer against adversity and stress. He defines psychological safety and shares how psychological safety enables collaboration, and ultimately continuous improvement. Finally, he gives 3 ways that leaders can intentionally cultivate psychological safety within their schools.

We talk with Dr. Cook about the troubling data that shows that a majority of educators do not feel valued and appreciated. This is important to address as leaders because feeling valued and appreciated is a significant protective factor against stress, burnout, and turnover. Dr. Cook highlights the need to create systems to help us recognize people that we work with on a regular basis.

By the time you are 75-years-old, you will have spent about 25 years of your life sleeping. It’s not just something that we do, our quality of life depends on it. In this episode, Dr. Cook talks about how sleep impacts our health, our ability to learn, our relationships, our work, and our immune systems. He then outlines a formula that we can implement right now in order to help us all get good sleep.

We talk with Dr. Cook about the impact that our thoughts and perceptions of certain situations have on how we feel and ultimately behave. He defines cognitive reframing and shares how one of the best ways that we can cultivate a growth mindset in students is to model it ourselves.