This is Season 3, Episode 4 of FocusED, and it features our guest, Lorea Martinez. It was originally recorded live for a studio audience in Delaware, provided as a professional development experience for Delaware teachers and leaders. Don’t miss Lorea describe her HEART model for teaching with SEL and so much more. 

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Lorea Martinez Brings Tons of Experience to FocusED Listeners

Dr. Lorea Martínez Pérez is the award-winning founder of HEART in Mind Consulting, a company dedicated to helping schools and organizations integrate Social Emotional Learning in their practices, products, and learning communities. She has worked with schools, districts, and organizations to guide SEL implementation efforts, including training teachers and leadership teams, and provided guidance to educational technology and media companies to help them integrate SEL in their products.

An educator who has worked with children and adults internationally, Dr. Martínez is a faculty member at Columbia University Teachers College, educating aspiring principals in Emotional Intelligence. She has conducted extensive research in the SEL field with a focus on SEL implementation, principals’ Emotional Intelligence, teacher preparation, and school climate. She frequently blogs about how to incorporate SEL in teaching practices, leadership, and parenting.

She received her Doctor of Philosophy, magna cum laude, in Quality and Innovation in Education from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In 2014, she was awarded the American Education Research Association Graduate Student Award for Excellence in SEL Research from the SEL Special Interest Group.

Dr. Martínez started her career as a special education teacher and administrator. A native of the Costa Brava in Spain, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters.

Buy her book, Teaching with the HEART in Mind: A Complete Educator’s Guide to Social Emotional Learning. 

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Show Notes from Our FocusED Episode with Lorea Martinez

Lorea talked about being a special education teacher and all that needs to be done to support students, including their coping skills. She wrote the book because she realized that we’re not spending enough time on social and emotional learning to support students. 

She talked about how SEL is often misunderstood in terms of implementation. 

Joe asked about the entry point for SEL work. Lorea said it must be entered in any way possible. 

Lorea explains the HEART acronym and its alignment to CASEL. 

She lays out three easy steps to infuse SEL into any lesson plan. Every teacher can use this information. 

Don’t miss what she says about brain breaks and movement for our learners. 

Always have an SEL goal for your lesson plan in addition to your academic goal. ~ Lorea Martinez

We need a common understanding in our education community in terms of exactly what we mean by SEL when we’re planning for ourselves and our students. 

Lorea talked about nurturing students’ strengths to help them discover their path forward in life. 

She discussed the false dichotomy about relationships and academics and that they aren’t two things but rather one together. 

Lorea mentioned The Learning Policy Institute as a place she goes for practical research. She also pointed to Facing History and Ourselves as a resource for teachers and leaders.

Lorea mentioned two books that she’s reading:

Once I Was You by Maria Hinojosa 

Fierce Self-Compassion by Kristen Neff

She wants to see a book written that compiles educators’ success stories with SEL. 

We cannot teach what we do not practice. ~ Lorea Martinez 

Maybe this is her next book: Educator Success Stories Using Social and Emotional Learning in the Classroom: 50 Tips, Tricks, Resources, and Anecdotes for Successful SEL Implementation 

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Thanks for listening to FocusED, an educational leadership podcast brought to you by TheSchoolHouse302 @ dereka206.sg-host.com where we publish free leadership content. Go to the site, subscribe, and you’ll get all of our content sent directly to your email. 

FocusED is your educational leadership podcast where our mission is to dissect a particular focus for teachers and school leaders so that you can learn to lead better and grow faster in your school or district with more knowledge, better understanding, and clear direction on what to do next.

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