Building your SEL Classroom for Youth Empowerment

Dr. Yorel Lashley will lead two days of professional learning and reflective conversations that support your classrooms as healthy learning environments where students practice and develop social emotional skills. His high-energy "drum power" demo lessons with students will provide a focus for the conversation.

From his research on cognitive developmental outcomes and student-derived data of the cycles of learning in his classrooms, Lashley conceived the STAY framework. STAY calls for teachers to initiate and guide conversations that center students’ experiences and learning goals to build classrooms where students and teachers journey together in a reflection-driven process to Select SEL competencies, Translate them into shared commitments and common language, and make them clear, lived behaviors and Actions that support Youth empowerment for more thoughtful critical students able to seize agency in their lives.

Dr. Lashley is Director of Student Empowerment at the Center for Arts Education and Social Emotional Learning, founder of Drum Power and Director of Programs at University of Wisconsin–Madison's Office of Professional Learning & Community Education. He is a developmental psychologist interested in self-efficacy and social-emotional learning in arts, academic and integrated environments. Drum Power uses learning West African Traditional, Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban percussion to help young people develop and practice social-emotional skills-discipline, community and leadership. The program has supported more than 4,000 young people from New York City, Denver and Madison, Wisconsin to date.