The power of movie-based modeling to make SEL effective
Carol Isaacs, school counselor at Rock Hill School District in South-Eastern Ohio, had been pulling bits and pieces from a variety of programs and tools for many years to create her own approach to teaching student wellness before she was presented with moozoom. The Netflix style movie-based SEL platform that combines education and entertainment to show students how to resolve real-life challenges happened to be a game changer to get teachers buy-in to implement SEL in their classroom. “Student wellness is difficult to teach as a counselor because the ratio of amount of students per counselor is very large. With moozoom, now it’s not just me teaching these things to the students.”
Referring to other SEL programs that she has used in the past, Cary Kaiser, a fourth grade teacher at Rock Hill elementary says: “moozoom is real-life situations. It’s not something that kids are watching saying… that’s not real, it wouldn’t really happen”. The fact that students can really relate to the characters makes all the difference, explains Mrs Kaiser.
ROCK HILL SCHOOL DISTRICT OVERVIEW: GRADES K-6
Lawrence County, OH. Southernmost county in the state.
Fairly rural environment
47 educators
708 students
Has been using moozoom for 120 days
The observational learning theory 1
According to the renowned psychologist Albert Bandura, people learn not only through direct experiences but also by observing the actions, behaviors, and consequences experienced by others: this process is known as observational learning or modeling. The combination of education and entertainment, also called “edutainment”, reveals to be a highly effective way to take the complex concept of SEL and turn it into a simple, fun and engaging lesson that students can learn, by watching other kids that they can relate to.
Outcomes and results in a nutshell after 120 days using moozoom:
of teachers reported starting teaching student wellness more than once a week with comparison to 26% before. 20% reported starting to teach it once a day compared to 6% before.
Over 86% of teachers reported a decrease of their planning time for student wellness from 45 minutes with other programs to under 6 minutes with moozoom.
of teachers reported significant improvement in how their students managed their emotions and improvement of their general classroom climate.
of teachers reported a significant decrease in student conflicts.
Less work. More impact.
Rock Hill School District needed a hands-on 360 degrees solution to student wellness that allowed children to be autonomous while providing visibility over the emotional landscape of the district. moozoom was chosen specifically to make it easier for teachers to integrate student wellness into their weekly routine and for the only school counselor of the district, Carol Isaacs, to be able to reach all students while identifying those in immediate need. 87% of teachers from the district identified lack of time or potential increase in workload as the driving factor for not allocating time to student wellness in the context of their teaching, leaving Isaacs with the responsibility of delivering this content to the entire student pool by herself.
Within 4 months of using moozoom, the vast majority of teachers had incorporated the activities seamlessly on a weekly basis or even more frequently. Moreover, the platform allowed the children to autonomously navigate real-life movie lessons and get relatable pieces of advice from other kids their age to better manage their emotional responses to everyday challenges. “It is fantastic that if they can’t get in contact with counselors, they can log to the Zen-Zone and still have some emotional regulation going on. I also really like that moozoom allows the students to access it anytime of day anywhere, you don’t have to be at school.” says Cary Kaiser, fourth grade teacher.
This is reinforced by Abigail, a fourth grader who says: “Whenever you’re having a hard time with friends, moozoom can show you what you should do.”.
Overall, a majority of teachers thus reported improvement of their classroom climate and decrease in student conflicts while simultaneously not feeling any increase in their workload or preparation time.
The students like the fact that they can do it independently and I like the fact they can do it independently. It frees me up to do other things or for extra intervention with other students.
Amy Dickess, 2nd grade teacher
More data for adapted intervention
With increasing needs in emotional support after COVID, it was necessary for the staff at Rock Hill to have a visibility strategy allowing to single out individual students in need for more adapted intervention. However, with a single counselor available and the ever increasing workload of teachers, this seemed like a heavy task at hand. Fortunately, moozoom offered them, through the daily emotional check-ins students have to perform and data entries from the various activities performed on the platform, either at school or at home, the ability to have that bird eye view of the school’s climate and each student’s wellness.
“moozoom has it all!. We are able with the dashboard to pull so much data. It really just helps us to show that we are doing the things at the school to show our students how to behave and how to emotionally get through scenarios.” says Isaacs.
In that regard, moozoom not only offered daily snapshots over each student’s emotional state, it also provided a track record of progress that allows to better communicate with the parents, demonstrate that the program’s implementation was a success and integrate with the district’s PIBS . Thus 50% of the district’s teachers considered moozoom to be more than a simple student wellness program because of the interactions and technology aspects it provided their students.
Conclusion
moozoom’s integration at Rock Hill School District was a success with positive outcomes observed on students, teachers and counselors after 120 days. The program allowed teachers to implement an effective and highly engaging student wellness solution in their classroom while not increasing their workload. From the students’ standpoint, moozoom was perceived as fun and resourceful, allowing them to really relate to the situations presented for improved emotional regulations in their daily life. Adeline, a third grader, says: “I’m very competitive in sports. When we lose I get really angry at myself and moozoom taught me that in these situations I need to calm myself down and take a deep breath.”
Finally, moozoom allowed the district to address the counselor to student ratio issue through a data-driven approach that brought in better response time and tracking of student progress.
