Social and Emotional Learning for Successful Schools, Barcelona, August 2021

  • The teachers from six countries (Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Lithuania and Bulgaria and Slovenia) participated in one-week course "Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) for Successful Schools" in Barcelona.

    Through practical and experiential activities, we deepen our own self-awareness, empathy, and social skills, which enriched our Social and Emotional Intelligence and at the end we developed our own course of action for promoting SEL in our school.

    During the course I raised awareness of the emotions, emotional reactions, and their social consequences. I learned about the theoretical foundations and concepts, as well as gained practical experiences how to incorporate new methods into everyday work at school. A valuable experience was the game of empathizing with different emotional states, which expressed on different parts of our bodies and consequently how different emotional states affect the functioning of the whole human body and its physical sensitivity.

    With plastic design, we became aware of our way of expressing intense emotions.

    Assertive behavior was presented to us through practical exercises as the most effective in developing a good social climate in the group. “I sentences” were offered to us as a good way to express our last emotions and communicate to the environment what our emotional state is, what our expectations of the environment are. I deepened my knowledge of mindfulness and realized how meaningful and effective it is to connect the concept of mindfulness with the concept of gratitude. I intend to introduce it in my pedagogical practice through encouragement to write a gratitude diary. As extremely useful I consider experiences I gained through role play, where we solved educational dilemmas and problems in groups, which we pointed out from our everyday pedagogical practice.

    Attending the course, refreshed and perfected also my knowledge of a foreign language, enabled me to get to know other cultures and expanded my knowledge of the city and its past through cultural activities.

    I really enjoyed exploring the city, its enumerated beauties and colors ...

    At the end of the courses we gained the certificates of attendance and organized a pleasant gathering where we exchanged traditional food and briefly introduced the countries we come from.