Shannon Feeley

Classroom Teacher

Aspen Country Day School

Shannon Feeley is an elementary school educator currently living and working in western Colorado, USA. Shannon has 15 years of teaching experience in public, private, and international schools. She is currently teaching third grade and has formerly taught kindergarten, first, and second grade.
Social Emotional Learning has always been at the center of Shannon's teaching practice. For the first years of her career, she was always searching for a program or a resource to help build a classroom community and help children to name what they were feeling. While working in Lima, Peru, she was introduced to The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence's RULER. A philosophy that promised to provide adults and children with the tools to Recognize, Understand, Label, Express, and Regulate their emotions. "Too good to be true," she thought, walking into the building-wide Professional Development sessions.
While slow to believe that The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence's RULER framework would be effective in her classroom practice, she jumped into the learning and found it to be the most transformative professional development she has ever had the privilege to engage in. Today, RULER isn't just a tool in her classroom it is a daily practice in her life outside of school.
Reading "Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive" by Marc Brackett Ph.D. deepened her understanding of how important Social Emotional Learning is for everyone. Shannon has been using RULER for the last five years in her classroom. The most rewarding work she does is in helping children to build their emotional intelligence. It is simultaneously the hardest and most rewarding work of her career.

Class Charters: The Why and The How of Keeping them Alive

How do you want to feel in this class each and every day? How do your students want to feel? Have you ever asked? In this session, you will dive into how a Class Charter outweighs class rules. Based on suggestions and practices in the RULER framework, we will explore in depth the process of making a class charter with your students, how the class charter can assist you in managing behavior, and why this document is essential to developing the emotional vocabulary and literacy of your students. You will learn how to incorporate the language of the charter in your everyday interactions, academic lessons, and use it as a tool for redirection. Walking away from this session, you will find yourself prepared to change the way you develop "class rules," and you will have a plan of action on how to keep the document alive over the course of the year. The charter isn't just a piece of paper on the wall, it is the heart of the community you build, it is powerful and transforms the way you interact with students, the way students interact and navigate conflict, and the way students interact with you. With all that in mind, How do you want to feel each and every day in your classroom?