By Tina Cuellar-Augustus, Director - Project HEAL
St. Martin de Porres Primary School teachers and staff attend a SEL workshop. Counseling programs at St. Martin’s have been extended to staff.
Project Heal launched its Life Skills Program in September 2020 - the first ever to be conducted countrywide at the primary school level in response to the pandemic and urgency to support students. These sessions were conducted virtually as distance learning was being enacted. Since January 2022, the program has been executed face-to-face.
The Life Skill program aims to equip students with positive social and emotional skills that increase self-awareness, self-control, and interpersonal skills, both in and out of the classroom. Currently, the program reaches approximately 72 students ages 10 – 12 years old. It covers topics like: self-esteem and positive self-talk, self-acceptance, emotions, decision making, grief and loss, making friends, and conflict resolution.
Each session, students engage in hands-on activities – like arts & crafts, experiments, and role-play to memorize the concepts. The objective of the program is to decrease referrals for behavior-related issues and increase positive interaction between students, students and teachers, and - ultimately - to create a campus that is Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) friendly!
This 2021-2022 academic year is the fourth of the Social Emotional Learning program, and it has evolved due to the pandemic. The focus has been to provide individual counseling services to all members of the administration and staff as they navigate uncertainties in their personal lives, challenges due to hybrid learning, and the salary decrease imposed by the government.
The need for individual counseling was reinforced by the results of a survey sent to teachers by the principal at the start of the academic year.
Weekly contact is maintained with the teachers and administration via WhatsApp groups. Recently, the first in-person group workshop was held with the entire administration and teachers with full attendance and engagement.
An additional consideration this fourth year has been to create a Social Emotional Tool Kit Manual to assist teachers with the transition of the children back into the classrooms. The manual provides step-by-step ideas, procedures, and resources that teachers can use to create safe, trauma-informed, and emotionally intelligent classrooms to help themselves and the students co-regulate through these difficult times. The counseling team at Project HEAL has been an integral part of the creation of this manual and will be a part of the support system at the time of implementation.