Time for Change: Understanding Teacher Social-Emotional Learning Supports for Anti-Racism and Student Well-Being During COVID-19, and Beyond

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the approximately 3.2 million teachers serving 50.8 million students in U.S. schools were positioned, along with school counselors, as de facto first responders for student well-being. Teachers across the country, already struggling to transition their teaching to online platforms, had to simultaneously implement recently adopted Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Standards. While prioritizing the social and emotional needs of children is of course a necessity, we wondered about the support needed for teachers who shouldered this work? Of particular interest were the supports for teachers operating in urban schools and with communities of color disproportionately impacted. And within this timeframe, global uprisings protesting police murders of Black bodies revealed the crucial importance of anti-racist educational practices. While we contend that teacher well-being is a key determinate of student well-being, we also explored the ways teachers innovated and created online communities (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) to support one another’s SEL and anti-racist pedagogy. The connection between these practices to research-supported online teacher support structures that influence teacher emotions (e.g., efficacy) was further explored. We conclude with implications from learnings from this crisis for practitioners, educator preparation programs, policy, and future research while adding to the limited literature concerning teacher SEL, anti-racism, and teacher-created communities.