Teaching Social Emotional Learning Through Music with Elizabeth Peterson

Yay, thank you Scott. I'm really excited to be here with you and talk about something that I know is really near and dear to both of our hearts and all the listeners as well.

Well, I won't start from the very, very beginning where it was second grade starting off my piano lessons and all that. But when I became a senior and I did my massive senior recital in high school, I knew that I wanted to do something with music. I couldn't just let it go. I also knew I wanted to be a teacher. However, I didn't want to be a music teacher per se; I wanted to teach all the subjects. So when I decided to go to college and was figuring out my major, fortunately I had to have a second major as an elementary ed teacher, and so I made that music. I just wanted to learn everything that I could about music in college, and I was set on that path. A lot of my peers kind of looked at me odd — why are you just a music major? Why aren't you in performance? Why aren't you in music ed? And it was just plain and simple: I just loved music and I wanted to learn about it. So when it came time for the senior sum of graduating from college, while everyone was doing their liner notes or their big practicums, my professor allowed me to kind of explore a little bit. That's where the whole idea of integrating music into what I was doing in elementary just started budding. I started really exploring how listening to music could be embedded into what I was doing in my student teaching, and that's where it really started. I had awesome cooperating teachers for my student teaching who allowed me to just test things out with all their kids, with all my kids. It was great. So I developed a lot of lessons that had to do with listening to music, interpreting music, writing, integrating math — just doing all that good stuff. It actually became my first book called Inspired by Listening, and all the great ways that you can incorporate that. Then when I was looking for a grad program, I stumbled upon Arts and Learning, and that's where I started to really get to open up to all the different art forms, get comfortable in them — like visual art, which I'm no visual artist, right? Movement, poetry, media, just all these art forms. I just ate it all up, and that was going to be my passion. So that's how I got started with arts integration. Then I could see how my students responded to all of this integrative work that I was doing. When I actually started teaching music a couple years into my career, I moved locations and wanted to continue teaching. The music position kind of opened up, and then I started integrating the arts and language and all kinds of things into my music classroom. So I'm a big proponent of integration for arts teachers as well, because I think that integrating the arts isn't just confined to a classroom teacher or a special ed teacher, but it really is for all teachers because it does nothing but great stuff for the kids and for the teachers themselves too.

Yeah, so at the core, arts integration really is when you are taking the standards, the objectives that you have in your content, and coupling it in a natural way — coupling it with the content standards and objectives in another art form. What you really want to do is look for that, I've heard it referred to as the elegant fit, right? Really making sure that it's fitting and you're not forcing it. For example, if you have a group of students that are learning about weather and the clouds, and you know that you have music that is inspired by clouds and weather — I know there's music out there that is composed for that — to find movement standards, things like that that you can integrate and connect very naturally with it. My approach as a current teacher is to make sure that the arts integration is practical and meaningful. It's got to be doable for a teacher, because you can really spend a lot of time creating arts integrated lessons, but there's also some things that you can just do on the fly and just make those little moments meaningful for the kids. I have a lot of those kind of resources — one is called Arts Integration in Your Back Pocket, just pulling out little strategies that you can use at the drop of a hat in the moment, something really quick so that your kids are able to dig into your content but they're also doing something creative and artistic.

Oh yeah, multimodal is gonna happen. Like with that cloud thing, then you can start drawing in visual art pretty quickly. Something that I know a lot of teachers have a hard time with is, 'Well, I'm not an artist. I'm not a visual artist.' Oh, neither am I. But I can't let that fear or that limitation that I think I have limit what my students are capable of. I've had so many times where a student is showing interest in doing something or trying something, and it's something that I can't fathom doing — like creating a whole landscape of the sky, whatever it might be. But I'll just say, 'Okay, well let's give it a shot,' right? Because even though I can't imagine myself doing it, it doesn't mean that the kids can't. My classroom is supposed to be this safe learning environment where kids can take risks, make mistakes, try things out. I think that when you have that — I call it an arts integration frame of mind — where you're just open to allowing your kids to try a few things, amazing things will happen. It positions the teacher in a space that we don't need to always be the expert. Oftentimes we hold our students back when we think, 'Oh, I'm not a visual artist, so we can't do visual arts in our classroom.' The same is true for our music educators. Often times we see this as a roadblock in composition or improvisation — 'Oh, I'm not a jazz musician, so I can't help my students learn how to improvise.' It's our own roadblocks that prevent our students.

Well, that's loaded. You've got the definition of social emotional learning, right? And what it boils down to is how you deal with your own emotions, how you deal with your own self, how you work with others, how you make good decisions. Yes, that's based off of CASEL's competencies, and I think that they do an amazing job of just putting it into good basic terms for teachers. What does it mean to me? Well, first and foremost, it has to mean something to me because my kids need it so badly. It's not just in recent years of the pandemic, but it has been building for a decade, maybe a little more. We've seen it — if you've been in education for any amount of time, you've witnessed it before your eyes where the kids are just needing more and more. Some of it is in your face with classroom outbursts, and some of it is subtle and is just so internal inside your kids. So for me, social emotional learning is just a necessity. If we're gonna survive as teachers and as educators, we've got to figure out a way to kind of transform how we do things. That's why SEAL came to be. When the administration started talking to my district's staff about this SEL thing and how we're gonna start doing SEL, all I could think of as she was unrolling all this information about what social emotional learning is was: everything you just said we can do with the arts. Absolutely everything. There's so many applications. So let's talk about music. Music is the ultimate, I think personally, because you've got being able to listen to music, perform music, compose music. Music is so innately emotional, and it doesn't matter what part of that process you're part of — it just becomes part of who you are and what you're doing in your experiences. Let me just share this amazing quote by Louis Armstrong: 'What we play is life.' I think that just encapsulates it, because it can be what we're playing on our Spotify account, it can be what we're playing on our horn, it can be what we're playing with others in an ensemble, and it just represents everything that is the human existence. So it's got that self part, and of course music is so innately social and it builds relationships like crazy. I've always dabbled in my music classroom and also in my general ed classroom with drumming circles or percussion circles, and it's just this instant relationship builder, instant community builder. So I think there's so many applications that are at various levels of comfort for teachers to be able to bring music in and use it explicitly for social emotional skill building.

Yes, and that's a huge part of SEAL is the explicit teaching. That's one of the big mindset shifts for anyone who is studying how to be a quote-unquote 'SEL teacher.' That is to really understand that yes, you do this, and yes, you can develop it further, but part of developing that skill of encompassing social emotional learning inside your classroom is being explicit with the kids. We're kind of at the point where you have to be blunt with the kids — 'You are not acting appropriately' — but then taking a step further: 'How do you feel right now?' Or taking that time after whatever incident has maybe happened and reflecting on it, bringing in some of that social emotional language to help kids figure out what is going on inside them, around them, so that they can become more equipped to do better the next time. Kids want to do better. When we look at some of these behaviors that we're seeing so prevalently across the country right now, it's not that the students want to misbehave. Often, this is the best that they can do. They are trying their hardest, and they're craving a space to improve, to do better, to have the capacity to have that management skill. To have something like music and the arts that can have both trains running at the same time is so special.

So agree with that. I think that has to do with the outside world. What is music or music education to them? They want to see the performance, right? They want to see, 'Oh, well what outcome has come from this? Is our money well spent in this programming?' But the behind-the-scenes of what it takes to get to the performance, but also the social emotional part, the connecting, the responding, all that stuff part of that creative process — oh my gosh, that's it. The performance is just the cherry on top. I think that's part of what we need to do as advocates for music education is to really bring to light all the amazing things that kids of all ages are learning regardless of what type of music education they're getting.

Yes. Sometimes we just have to — and this is true across the board with every teacher that I've worked with. I've been working with teachers and giving workshops and courses and retreats for 16 years now, and they're always worried that if I do something with the arts or if I take the time to do this, the academics are going to start to fall by the wayside. But it takes the guts, it takes that first step to say, 'No, this is what my kids need, plain and simple.' And you know what? This is also what I need as the teacher. I actually wrote an article on my blog called 'How Studio Day Saved My School Year.' It's about how I created this thing called Studio Days where general ed teachers can take a chunk of their day — sometimes the entire day if they have that flexibility — and really get your kids to go through the entire creative process beginning to end. It was kind of like SEAL before SEAL had already been created. I decided before state testing, no less — the week before — I said, 'Forget this, we are taking a day. My kids look exhausted. We kind of need this. They're so disconnected from one another.' We took an entire day and went through the creative process. We did a visual art activity in this case, with of course some carefully selected music for the background and reflection and all that good stuff. From that, our class created a set of new classroom guidelines that would help us to be better learners as we continued the school year. I'm telling you, from that day on for the next span of time, we were just so much more together. We were so much better prepared to take on the state testing because we had had that time — it's kind of like taking a vacation. We had that time to really focus on what we needed in those moments: work together, work individually, reflect together, learn about how we learn, and then continue on with the rest of our lives. I think that's important for teachers to just do, even if it's in a smaller bit. You don't have to take a whole entire day, but just taking that time to stop — sometimes you have to close your door and do what you know is right for your kids and for yourself.