To celebrate SEL Week, we invited you—students, parents, teachers, counselors, school and district administrators, and community leaders—to share your SEL story. Of the many excellent entries we received, Noemi, a physical education teacher in Brooklyn, New York, is one of our 10 finalists. You can view all 10 finalists here.
I started teaching in 2021, a moment when COVID affected everyone and their mental health, including me. I worked in a school where stories of children began to affect me, too, because of my empathetic nature. It just so happened that around that time I had just graduated and had completed my bachelor’s degree online while also having a torn ACL, which affected playing my senior year in college and my performance day-to-day.
Fortunately, I signed up to manage a turnkey implementation of the RULER program, which I was being trained on for my job. I learned how to take on my emotions and regulate them. From this point, social and emotional learning (SEL) started playing a crucial role in my life. I learned to identify what I am feeling so that I can separate them and not project these emotions on children. I learned to stop and think before reacting.
Eventually, the training got more intense, and there were conversations that led me to further think about myself. They say that “when things start to change inside you, they change around you”—that’s exactly how it happened to me. I started bringing awareness to myself, which led me to focus on emotional safety. This theme of emotional safety was something that I valued, and I wanted to teach how lessons in sports are connected directly to life lessons. I wanted to bring some light to the involvement of emotional safety in sports. I wanted students to reflect on the emotions that arise from performing in games and activities, and how the relationships between players, opponents, coaches, and parents affect the dynamic.
Once I knew what I wanted to emphasize in my teaching encounters, I had an idea of how to drive my physical education classes, my morning soccer league for student-athletes, and my coaching practices. In my P.E. classes, I created teams that were led by captains and co-captains. Their job was to create a positive culture, one that welcomed everyone despite their skill level and provided gentle reminders of what it means to be a good teammate and supporter.
In my soccer league, I had players that would not attend school as often or would arrive late. These students were invited to join a team where they would feel important and welcomed. Their teammates would encourage them to attend more regularly, asking “Where were you?” or saying, “We missed you at the game,” “Let’s get you to school on time,” or “Come on, we needed you.” The students began to hold each other accountable. Middle-schoolers are usually more prone to listening to their peers in that age group, so this was powerful.
When coaching, I began to do team-bonding exercises so each individual had the opportunity to work with new people and connect in new ways. Emotional safety became a starting point for conversations about bullying, how we can foster a positive environment on and off the field, the value in sport and healthy habits, healthy choices/decisions/responses, and how we show up for each other. In these moments of success, SEL has helped students who had conflicts prior to class or games show up in a different mindset, while captains learned to speak up for those who needed help and were anxious about performance.
My school community helps students become leaders of tomorrow by creating a safe space to be themselves and contribute to the positive environment they would like to see in the class, in the gym, and beyond the school walls. The growth in my students has left me astonished because not only are they changing their own habits and behaviors, but they are creating a place for everyone to feel a sense of belonging.
Middle school is a very tough age due to the changes they are going through. However, my middle-schoolers have helped each other grow for the better while leaving their mark for the next generation. Overall, SEL has helped me become a better educator, coach, and mentor. It has helped my students learn to be better students, friends, supporters, and community members.
The views in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of CASEL.
Noemi Vazquez is a physical educator with 10 years of coaching experience. She is an entrepreneur and a soccer player that loves to make an impact for a brighter future.