*Conversations Unveiled – Pt. 2*
As a continuation of the previous blog (Creating a More Compassionate World: A Deep Dive into Social, Emotional and Ethical Learning with Neha Bhatia: Month 2), this blog focuses on the work being done in the education space and classrooms, from my conversation with Neha Bhatia from SEE Learning India.
I also got the opportunity to speak to Ms. Neha Soneji from Tech Mahindra Foundation (Host Organisation). Neha shares about the work undertaken by TMF over the last few years, as an effort to bring SEE Learning into the workplace. In this blog, I share more from our interaction and the learnings involved.
Ms. Neha Soneji is currently the Program Director – Child Development at Tech Mahindra Foundation, the CSR arm of Tech Mahindra Ltd, a Mahindra group company. Neha works on the strategy for the education programs and supports the location team and partner organizations to implement the education projects in full-school development and disability schools. She manages stakeholder engagements and collaborates with various organizations to bring innovations to the programs. Additionally, Neha leads initiatives in Mental Health and Social-Emotional Learning at the Foundation. She has been associated with Tech Mahindra Foundation for the last 7.5 years now and prior to the Foundation, Neha worked with Teach for India and has completed the Teach for India fellowship where she taught children in a low-income school in Mumbai. An instrumentation Engineer by educational qualification, Neha worked as a Software Engineer for 2.5 years before taking the leap into the development sector.
Is there a right age to start teaching students about it, and if so, what’s the first step in the process?
“Sharing a personal example, my daughter is two, and I have been practicing SEE Learning skills with her, and I started doing that almost six months ago. Even before that, but like six months ago, because she started speaking then, and we could communicate. I don’t think there is a right “age” because SEE Learning is a set of skills and practices. On the surface, if you pick up the curriculum, it may look like a set of activities and lessons but SEE Learning is not a curriculum that has a start and an end because while you are doing that activity in the classroom, there is a practice in the activity that you’re introducing that can be done every day.
So I’m not doing a SEE Learning lesson with my daughter, but what I’m doing with her is the practice. For example, she’s starting to recognize, express and articulate her emotions, so if she’s upset, sad, or angry, or if something’s not going her way, she’s able to express that.
Now, how do I help her learn regulation?
Number one, setting the goal that a two-year-old will be able to regulate herself or her emotions is not the right goal to have. So, the awareness that adults and the ability to regulate themselves in that situation are going to help the two-year-old regulate herself, which we call co-regulation because children as little as two cannot regulate themselves, but they can co-regulate if the adult around them is regulated. More often than not, what happens is when the child is dysregulated adults around also start to get dysregulated because of that we either start to hassle or we start to distract them. What we are not trying to do is to help them see how to regulate or co-regulate. That’s the first step.
Second, I’m also teaching her some skills that actively help her disengage with the intensity of that emotion at that moment. How I’m doing that by taking her attention to sensory objects because children at that age work with their bodies and therefore, the sensory connection is very important and so is it for adults. But the truth is that we’ve, as adults become so disconnected from our bodies, that we’re not using them enough in our regulation process. So body literacy is a very important aspect of SEE Learning, and therefore, to answer your question, there is no age.
There is no starting point, but yes, the activities need to be contextualized. It depends on the context, age, level of understanding, demographic language, and many other things. But the practices remain the same for a two-year-old and a 35-year-old, the only thing is the level of the practice and the depth of my knowledge or reflection from that practice changes.”
On Incorporation into our classrooms and classroom teaching
“So there are multiple ways in which schools are already doing it, some are doing it as part of their lesson, like an hour a week, and I know that for the majority of schools, that’s not possible because of the time constraints, etc. The ideal way to do this would be to integrate into other subjects and classrooms, but that’s ideal, and we don’t want to keep operating in the ideal world because until that happens, we can’t just wait to not do it and therefore doing it as a standalone is also as helpful and effective.
So whether a school chooses to do it as a standalone or does it as an integrated effort is completely their choice. The only thing is that when one does an integrated effort it becomes part of the school culture faster and on the flip side the teachers or the school has to make that extra effort to contextualize SEE learning for their context.
At SEE Learning India, we can provide them with all the support and training and help them with implementation but ultimately they know the context of their school best, so we can’t get into their schools and contextualize everything for them for which the school will have to take the first steps towards.”
On Dissemination and Incorporation in India as compared to the other countries
“So at SEE Learning India, we work both with private schools and not-for-profit organizations that work further with government schools or communities, and India is so diverse and with the pandemic, the implementation also changed. We’ve experienced and seen in the last three years of our existence that the stage is now set and we worked with a lot of educators who are already helping them go deeper into the content.
We also run a facilitator certification program, that provides them with an Emory certification which certifies them to train educators further in SEE Learning. So we are trying to build a very certified cascading model to train the trainers so we can have more educators getting trained and them taking SEE Learning into their classrooms, into the communities they work with. This is the work we have been doing.”
On Incorporation of SEE Learning into Workspaces
“So, I think in any place of work, there is stress, or there is a possibility of being burnt out. I think it’s how these practices come in handy, and yes, some of them require a lot of self-work but there is so much more that is a part of our everyday life. I can give you a work example. For example, if there is a colleague who I enter into a conversation with a lot of judgment already, then my openness and curiosity about their ideas and about that conversation are going to be limited.
However, if one is aware that they are entering this conversation with some bit of judgment, you take it with a pinch of salt. Are we even doing that kind of reflection? Am I even doing the activity of my mind enough to know where my mind is? There is research that happened in the West, that almost 50% of the time, we have no clue where our mind is, so imagine half of the time, we don’t even know what we are doing, and these behaviors happen at a fast pace, sometimes at an unconscious level, ignorantly. We don’t even have the bandwidth, the ability, or the time to pause and see what we are doing and what is this causing to our relationships. Ultimately, even in workspaces, we are all human beings and we work together as making things happen together.
So it cannot be a place where one is not aware of one’s workings of the mind. Also, just simply, let’s say if, if there’s a smart person who’s aware of the workings of their mind but is not aware of other people and their feelings, and the ability to tune into other people’s feelings, but they are going to brush people the wrong way all the time. We fail to recognize that we all have our limitations.
How can we start to work? And I know all of these things sound very goody-good but CBCT is a program that is now being also created for businesses and workplaces and we have seen the effectiveness of CBCT with individuals and groups as well.”
The following is from my conversation with Ms. Neha Soneji.
SEE Learning at Tech Mahindra Foundation
“Sharing about our work, I’ll start with the history of how the entire learning came in at TMF, so what happened was when Social, Emotional, Ethical Learning (SEE Learning) was launching in India, we were one of the organizations that were part of a small board group where there were discussions about how to take SEE Learning further. During one of these discussions, we also got in touch with the entire team at SEE Learning from the United States and we also happened to sign an MoU with Emory University which was the original contender of SEE Learning to support learning in India.
We then decided to take this into our workspace where we started with training of 20 associates who were given training in the basic SEE Learning curriculum. We then continued imparting SEE Learning to various stakeholders – students at one of our ARISE+ schools to Shikshataar teachers to external NGOs etc.
Then, Prachi and I enrolled ourselves in an advanced course as level-one facilitators. This was a nine-month program where the sessions were completely online and at the end of it, we were certified trainers who could go ahead and train other teachers and educators. At the same time, what we ended up doing was that we decided that we want to create technical foundations, learning frameworks on social-emotional learning. For this, we got an intern who researched for us social learning frameworks across the world. We looked at the CASEL framework and a few other global frameworks on Social-Emotional Learning.
Post that, we created our own set of training to be delivered through a span of 8 sessions. What we created now was relevant for adults, because we were training adults to work on their transformation as well as use it in their professional life. So we were trying to have that nice mix where it’s not only for students and the curriculum was designed in a way that is relevant for ourselves, trainer, teachers, and everybody, and whoever is going to use this, they’ll use it in their personal development. They may not necessarily be working.
Then in 2022, we trained around 25 teachers of Teach For India which has its online teacher training portal called the ‘Firki’ portal. So we told them you give us the teachers and we will train them on this curriculum and we ended our training with a kindness capstone project. So what that means is that those participants have to collate their work on kindness. Either they have been kind to someone, or someone has been kind to them like it’s an entire kindness project.
Prachi and I have been the two people who are taking the learning and we are expanding it as the flagbearers of SEE Learning at TMF. We see synergies with Mind@Ease as well because mental health and counseling is more like a reactive action to something whereas social, emotional learning is like a proactive action. So essentially that’s where we are and hopefully, we will train more organizations and internal staff at TMF. Till now we have only done training online but we hope to undertake this training offline as well. But, we have seen that even the online training has been very effective because when we see teachers sharing their projects at the end of the session, it shows that where they have value and applied it to their life.”
The Necessity of these Principles in our Workspaces particularly at TMF
“Given that the generation we are in and the kind of social media influence we are under and that is happening to all of us in general, children and all of us, there’s a lot of mental pressure that has been built up, that not everyone can handle. Maybe some of us are very self-aware and equipped enough to understand and know that they are getting anxious and so when to step back and stop but with a lot of us it’s a flow. Constantly with AI, changing jobs every year, and new career options, people are living very differently, intellectual ability has been always prioritized, but emotional intelligence is something that has not been given as much weightage as the other, but now the realization is coming that the entire emotional quotient and our ability to manage our emotions and use them very smartly is something that is coming up now. I think social-emotional learning or SEE learning is doing just that. Equipping adults is going to be way more difficult for SEE Learning than its for children. If we start at a young age, teaching children how to be kind, to identify anger and help with anxiety how to identify stress, then they would be in a much better position to grow up into individuals who can manage their emotions in a better manner and hence the mental distress and other issues as well. 
So that is one of the reasons I strongly believe that more than anything else, the world needs individuals and leaders who have a strong hold over their emotions.
Why it is happening at TMF because we work largely with young adults and youth which is exactly where Mind@Ease also works and there’s a need for a lot of emotional management and self-management skills. So that is the reason that we as an organization said across our employees, partners, teachers, students, with our school students, everywhere that we want to intervene and work around this topic and we want to integrate because none of us or nobody is such that they don’t need it irrespective of what they do and what their age is. At TMF, we did not bucket it as SEE Learning only for teachers or students. We said it’s for all. It’s also for our employees, it’s also for our partners, it’s also for our teachers, and we tweak the version and give everybody the chance.”
Incorporating it within Programs at TMF
What we have created at TMF has flexibility for our audience. If we are discussing with TMF employees, the case studies that we use, and the examples that we look at are very different than when we’re doing it for the students so someone needs to do the tweaking, someone needs to spend their time and say that this may not seem very relevant for teachers and so on. So that’s how our entire framework is.
That gives the flexibility that we may have to pick and choose some cases and the priority may be given to some topics. Also considering we work with so many different kinds of beneficiaries so we also include, facilitators, and trainers, who then directly and indirectly impact our beneficiaries. So there’s a huge audience that we can cater to and work with specifically with respect to how important this topic, in general, is becoming in today’s day and age.”
Personal Experiences in Working with Social-Emotional Learning
“So when I participate in these sessions, even when the curriculum came to TMF and also for the training of some of our senior management members, I have seen people on various spectrums in terms of their beliefs in something like SEL.
Some of us feel that mental health and social-emotional learning is really helpful and then some people say it doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t matter if you’re feeling angry, just hide your anger. So some of these people are on a different spectrum when it comes to social-emotional learning in general. I’ve seen and I think their belief in something like this comes only when they see that moment of change in themselves. Only when they see that today I’ve been so kind, or today I’ve been so grateful. When they start practicing that or when they just see that soft part that they do have within them, that is when they started.
Humans are meant to be compassionate because we’ve lived in groups and we have kind of been a social group so more skills come naturally to us, and as we grow up they may just be very dominant and that’s why with children it becomes very easy to instigate these skills because it’s already there and it’s kind of very natural for them. So I think that’s my other experience that with the entire social-emotional learning, it’s way easy to get see changes in children, to change those mindsets and beliefs.
This also shows that there’s no right age to teach kids about it and even adults and teachers who are rigid. For example: Some of the very rigid teachers, ended up agreeing that till now I was thinking a certain way and that after today’s discussion, it has changed.
And the last thing about SEL is that it’s not a curriculum that can be given and executed, it’s not like math. We need to apply the principles in our life, demonstrate how social-emotional learning will have to be in it, internalize it, and only then can we facilitate it. If I just say, I know, SEE Learning, I believe in it, I have to practice it first. It’s like anything that a teacher usually teaches, need to be sure of it first because that’s like how knowledge transfers. If I completely believe in something only then I can make the other person also understand it, if I can’t make them believe in it by myself, but like by at least doing our part, there’s this whole personal transformation thing in it as well.”
