The Advancing Education in Muslim Societies (AEMS) initiative of IIIT launched its new Teacher Training Enrichment Program (TTEP) in December 2018. The program was designed as a three-part course in winter, spring, and summer. The course took social and emotional learning (SEL) aspects to practical levels in ways that empower teachers working with Muslim learners to include SEL and socio-emotional education (SEE) in their classrooms.
Teachers and school personnel explored processes underlying SEL in k-12 school settings and designed multilevel and evidence-based instructional plans. Topics included teaching about empathy, community mindedness, resilience and forgiveness among others. IIIT provided teachers with the opportunity to learn all about how to transfer their intuitive empathetic teacher-nature into the most needed 21st Century instructional practices using social emotional learning (SEL) as the framework to promote students’ critical thinking, problem-solving, self-direction, collaboration & communication, and social responsibility. Participants then prepared and presented their own action research on their specific classrooms and/or schools. Topics presented on included creating a more welcoming classroom, changing teaching style from “demonstrator” to “facilitator”, use of meditation in the classroom and its impact on student behavior, as well as storytelling, gift-exchanging, and play-acting to learn more about socio-emotional skills.