The Daily SEL Leader: A Guided Journal

Everyone in your school community benefits when you invest in YOU.

Social-emotional learning is one of the hottest education topics today. Most of the focus, however, has been at the student level. The truth is that school leaders can’t implement social-emotional learning effectively if they don’t deeply understand it for themselves.

A deeper, renewed self-awareness and understanding of your own and others’ emotional needs is the key to promoting social-emotional learning across your school. Exploring and mastering core social and emotional competencies a little at a time with the help of this guide fits perfectly with the daily demands of being a school leader, team leader, or classroom leader. Using the core CASEL skills presented in six modules, this guided journal will help you:

• Become more self-aware of what each CASEL skill means for leadership
• Build stronger relationships throughout schools, classrooms, and communities
• Increase credibility and approachability
• Engage stakeholders confidently

Because human growth and leadership go hand in hand, meeting students, teachers, and colleagues where they are at emotionally will begin a ripple effect and leave a lasting impact on your learning community.  To do that, however, you must first focus on developing your own SEL skills.

James Bailey is an experienced K-12 leader, having served as an elementary and high school principal, an assistant superintendent, superintendent, and turn-around leader in both the public and charter school spaces in Colorado, Wyoming, and Texas. He has also worked as a school improvement consultant and leadership coach opening his firm called the Leading Learners Institute in 2016 (llinst.org). Bailey started LLI to help make research more meaningful and actionable for educators through a specific focus on 1) leadership coaching 2) capacity building through design-based research and improvement science principles 3) social-emotional development of adults and students, and 4) future-oriented strategic planning. Throughout his professional career, Bailey has focused on the intersection of research, equity, learning, and organizational design for both adults and students. He has one self-published book called The Productive Principal and numerous blog posts and a few peer-reviewed articles (see publications section on the attached resume). He has presented multiple times at such conferences as the INACOL Conference, the Education Elements Personalized Learning Summit, the Wyoming School Boards Association Conference, the National Staff Development Council (Learning Forward)Annual Conference, and the American Educational Research Association.