How Braving BSEL Came to Be

     The story of how braving BSEL came to be is long, but it matters. It starts with a simple truth: education is not what I expected.

       If your teacher certification program was anything like mine, you probably talked a lot about pedagogy, standards, and lesson plans.  If you were lucky, (or just a special education major), you might have a classroom management or behavior management course thrown in too. Either way, I felt ready for what I thought teaching was mostly about: academic content.

When I got in my own classroom for the first time though, I felt deceived. 

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How was I supposed to present these pristine plans to my students with so many other needs? We couldn’t do math when they were throwing the base 10 blocks. I couldn’t do a read aloud while a student was hiding in the closet. I couldn’t assign group work to students who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. Their needs were overwhelming, and I felt ill-equipped.

At first, I was told to work around it. Swap the manipulatives, keep reading the book, and move around their seats. But this didn’t feel right to me. Instead of working around it, I dove into it.

I became passionate about understanding and teaching beyond academics. It occurred to me that maybe addressing these needs was actually the gateway to the academic Content I had been told to focus on. Feeling boxed in by my learning support role, I made a bold move and transitioned to teaching self-contained special education in a behavior classroom.

In my self-contained classroom, the behavioral, social, and emotional needs of my new students were just bigger, like they were put under a microscope. The students in my new classroom weren’t tossing math manipulatives; they were throwing chairs. They weren’t hiding in a closet; they were running down the hallway. They weren't poking the kid next to them; they were calling each other names that 9-year-olds shouldn’t even know. We couldn’t just work around it for these kids.

It challenged me, and I loved it. I began pursuing my masters in applied behavior analysis and surrounding myself with social emotional learning opportunities. My career changed forever.

I found out that behavioral, social, and emotional skills were just that: skills! Skills that could be defined, taught, assessed, and most of all learned. With this shift perspective, I gained my footing in my behavior classroom and started seeing success. I wasn’t perfect, but I was learning. 

As education changed, more students started coming to school with more needs. This put me in a position to became a resource to my colleagues too. I explained to anyone that would listen that behavioral, social, and emotional learning wasn’t the special stuff you sprinkled on top of academic learning; it was the very foundation.

Then, in January 2022, I sustained a traumatic brain injury.

My limitations made it pretty clear that I could no longer keep up with the day-to-day of being a classroom teacher. I won’t sugarcoat it: I struggled. Just as I felt like I was making a real difference, I lost it all. And even if I got better, who was I to help students with BSEL now? What educators would want to listen to or learn from someone with literal brain damage?

Over the course of my two years of recovery, I came to grips with a simple truth: one moment of injury did not erase the education, experience, and success I had whilst in the classroom. If anything, my injury only made coming back more meaningful. But to come back, I had to be brave

I had to be brave enough to tell my story. I had to be brave enough to return to graduate school and continue learning. I had to be brave enough to start the hard conversations, to question the status quo, to challenge education as we know it. I had to be brave enough to use my limited energy to share the BSEL concepts and strategies that I believe have the power to change students’ lives. And I had to invite other educators to be brave with me.

That’s what it means to be braving BSEL. We are a community of educators, exploring how behavior science and social emotional learning can intersect to address students’ needs in today’s classrooms. This is new hard, vulnerable, meaningful work, for me and for all of us. But none of us are braving this alone.

Together, we are braving BSEL!