Assistant Principal Dan Wolfe on ”Becoming the Change: Using the 5 SEL Competencies to Navigate Through Difficult Times”

“The best way to predict YOUR future is to CREATE it.” Abraham Lincoln And what better way to create our own life than to have our very own built in compass. BOOK RELEASE DATE: Memorial Day. Stay tuned.  Watch this interview on YouTube here https://youtu.be/tPFhP5mg-l4 On this episode you will learn: ✔︎ How Assistant Principal Dan Wolfe came up with a "moral compass" using the 5 SEL Competencies to help students and teachers navigate through difficult times. ✔︎ How to use the 5 SEL Competencies to stay on track. ✔︎ How to use Dan's Self-Assessment to see where our strengths and areas of improvement are. ✔︎ How to use a "Compass Check" to monitor our progress along the way. ✔︎ Insights and AHA Moments with using the 5 SEL Competencies as your "guide." For returning guests, welcome back, and for those who are new here, I’m Andrea Samadi, author, and educator, with a passion for learning, understanding difficult concepts, and breaking them down so that we can all use and apply the most current research to improve our productivity and results in our schools, sports environments, and workplace environments. Today, on EPISODE #216, we will be speaking with Dan Wolfe, an Assistant Principal from Pasco County, Florida, on his new book Becoming the Change[i]: Five Essential Elements That Guide Us Towards Becoming Our Best Selves-- that is coming out before Memorial Day Weekend. Dan reached out to me via Twitter to let me know he was about to release a new book that was inspired by a blog he started on Social and Emotional Learning called “Our Moral Compass” that led to him starting the Become the Change Podcast[ii] where Dan focuses on the five areas of social and emotional learning that we have been focused on with this podcast. I’m always looking for unique ways to share these important SEL skills, and I loved what Dan has created with his book that compares SEL skills to a moral compass that can used to keep us on track with our life. Before the title of the book changed, it was going to called Our Moral Compass, and evolved to Becoming the Change. What caught my attention with Dan, BEFORE I had even read this book, was the original title. I wondered how he was going to use the SEL competencies to help us navigate through difficult times in our life. We all need a moral compass, and without this, we can veer off track very quickly. How do you navigate through life when times are difficult? Do you have your own built in compass that keeps you on track? I look forward to speaking with Dan, learning how he is using the analogy of a moral compass to help his students learn, navigate their way through the complexities of life, by understanding and apply SEL in our schools today. Let’s meet Dan Wolfe! Welcome Dan Wolfe, thank you for reaching out to me and sharing your new book, Becoming the Change. INTRO Q: Dan, what caught my attention with what you have created is not just the fact I can see that you have been immersed in teaching SEL for many years, which is clear from your blog and podcast, that I know is a lot of work on top of being an Assistant Principal and all that goes along with this full-time position. When I first saw your compass analogy, with the SEL competencies that we have been covering on this podcast since we launched, (we did add mindset to ours) but you’ve got the 5 Casel[iii] Competencies covered, it made me think of this powerful leadership activity I did many years ago involving a compass. I was dropped off in the middle of the woods with a cooler of food, (that I remember being very heavy) and a tent, (that was awkward to carry) and we had to navigate to our camp site using a compass. There had to have been at least 5 of us. This was years before I think Casel even came up with their 5 competencies, (or at least they weren’t online) but they were all apparent on this trek from where we were dropped off in the woods, to where we needed to go (our campsite) where we met up with all of the other groups