What Makes Us Unique
If you walk into classrooms that have had CRTWC training, you will see a unique teaching approach. Using the social, emotional, and cultural lens, teachers ask different questions about their students, gather different kinds of data, respond to students more equitably, and therefore build resilience for the teacher and their students.
When the framework is adopted and implemented, educational leaders learn to foster their own SEC lens, create an inclusive mindset, and do the SEC work to better themselves and those they serve by asking questions like:
How am I fostering my own Self-Reflection?
How am I examining my biases and assumptions?
What stories am I willing to share and hear to better understand myself, those I work with, and those I serve?
The following questions motivate our work. Explore below to see how we address these pressing issues:
How do we create a safe, brave and supportive learning environment?
We provide professional development training and consultation that spotlights the importance of creating a brave learning environment for educators to examine their own assumptions, beliefs, and biases and how those can influence the student information they choose to look at, and how they interpret and respond to student behavior.
How do we promote resilience and optimism in students and teachers?
Developing a social, emotional, and cultural lens involves an examination of both how one thinks about their teaching practice (e.g., consideration of context, assumptions/beliefs of both adults and students) and what they do. By teaching teachers how to reflect, model, and practice using the Anchor Competencies, teachers develop their own social, emotional, and cultural competencies, which are foundational to their own flourishing, resilience, and optimism - better enabling them to foster these competencies in their students, setting them up to become more resilient and to develop an optimistic orientation toward their lives and the world.
How do we support equity in teaching and learning?
The CRTWC Anchor Competencies Framework and the professional development opportunities offered by CRTWC empower teachers and teacher educators to examine and challenge their own assumptions, biases, and beliefs - exploring the ways that they influence their behaviors and interactions with students, especially those students who may identify differently or share a different background.
How do we foster academic success?
The CRTWC Anchor Competencies Framework and the professional development and training offerings provided by CRTWC encourage teachers to work differently and to view students from a perspective that encourages and develops their social and emotional growth in support of academic success. Academics are not separate from social, emotional and cultural skill development - rather, social, emotional, and cultural competencies are foundational to students’ academic success and their ability to thrive and work to support the greater good.
How do we equip students and teachers to feel a sense of responsibility for the greater good?
The CRTWC Anchor Competencies Framework calls teachers to action. We develop teachers who are agents of change and equip them with a common language and roadmap to transform classroom and eventually school environments to be ones characterized by community, compassion, and intellectual growth. This roadmap centers around the importance of trusting relationships and the fundamental interconnection we have with one another, society, and the world as a whole. In so doing, the Anchor Competencies and corresponding teacher moves, encourage teachers and students to develop an orientation toward and a responsibility for the greater good.
In their own words…
"It has altered how I plan lessons and how I approach standards and curriculum. It has made me more receptive to my student's needs and honestly much more aware of my own needs."
"I can see that teacher candidates who receive SEC skills in their university are able to incorporate SEC strategies into their content lessons, so they learn to use their lens to teach not to address SEL as a special separate curriculum. I feel validated when I work with CRTWC as a professional."
"Working with CRTWC has taken me from, it’s a mindful practice to it’s an academic intervention. I see that when my students are calm and ready to learn, they are tuned into how they are feeling, they can learn a lot better and a lot more and we can really push our academic challenges and stay positive about it. The CRTWC has provided an abundant amount of professional development and I always feel energized and eager to try new things. I feel validated, affirmed, and challenged!"
“After presenting the SEC framework, one student said to me, ‘Before you talked about SEC, I just thought we were teaching brains and now I see it’s more complicated because we are teaching the whole child.’ I think students are crying out for this. And with the current political situation, all of this is a crisis, and that’s why I think this work is so important. It’s almost like getting our students sensitized to these things before they go out into the schools. There is so much going on, students are suffering out there, and they need an advocate, and that’s what we are preparing them to be in the future.”
