Presented by Michelle Luhtala, Library Department Chair, New Canaan High School, CT; and Jennifer McCarty Plucker, Director of Professional Learning, Mackin Educational Resources

Sponsored by Mackin Educational Resources

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How can we teach social and emotional learning without adding to our daunting instructional responsibilities? Try embedding them in inquiry! Using inquiry and/or design thinking models, we can integrate social and emotional learning into our existing instructional programs.

In this edWebinar, Jennifer McCarty Plucker, Director of Professional Learning at Mackin Educational Resources, along with Michelle Luhtala, Library Department Chair at New Canaan High School (CT), highlight instructional strategies that enrich students’ lives by empowering them to connect with their feelings and empathize with others while learning core content through inquiry. The two are joined by Braddock Hills Elementary School teachers Shaasia Jackson and Nikki McAllen, who share the results of a project they did with their kindergartners that led to social-emotional growth for students school-wide.

This recorded edWebinar will be of interest to K-12 librarians, teachers, and administrators.

This is part 1 of the 3-part series: Lenses for Inquiry: Social and Emotional Learning, Representative Collections, and Digital Collections

Part 2: Diversity in Context: Stretching the Idea of Building Diverse Collections
Part 3: Rethinking the Cost of Digital Collection Building: It May Not Be as Expensive as You Think!

About the Presenters

Michelle Luhtala is the Library Department Chair at New Canaan High School in Connecticut and was one of five school librarians named as a “Mover and Shaker” by Library Journal in 2015. She is the winner of the 2011 “I Love My Librarian” Award and the Library Association’s 2010 Outstanding Librarian Award. The New Canaan High School Library won AASL’s National School Library Program of the year in 2010. Follow her on Twitter @mluhtala.

Jen McCarty Plucker received her doctoral degree in educational leadership with research focused on adolescent engagement/motivation and accelerated literacy growth. Her research has been recognized in ASCD’s Educational Leadership, by the International Literacy Association, and the Southern Regional Education Board’s High Schools That Work. Jen has over 20 years of education experience as a teaching and learning coordinator, ESL coordinator, K-12 intervention specialist, lead grant writer, magnet and STEM collaborator, English/speech teacher, reading specialist, speech coach, past president of the Minnesota Reading Association, adjunct instructor for Hamline University in St. Paul, MN, and literacy consultant. Jen is currently the director of professional learning at Mackin Educational Resources.

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 Mackin is one of the top providers of library and classroom materials for grades PK-12. Working with over 18,000 publishers and a database of nearly 3 million printed titles, and more than 1.9 million digital titles, Mackin supplies print books, eBooks, online educational databases, audiobooks and video resources to schools around the globe.