In this episode, we talk to Dr. Giesela Grumbach, a social worker and educator. Dr. Grumbach discusses the evolving role of school social workers, emphasizing their importance in providing counseling, home visits, and advocacy. She highlights the significance of social-emotional learning (SEL) standards and the multi-tiered system of support, which includes tier one (prevention), tier two (small group interventions), and tier three (intensive support). Dr. Grumbach stresses the need for teachers to be attuned to students' emotional states and to listen with a "third ear" to understand nuanced meanings. She also addresses disparities in education and the importance of closing the loop with students, especially during remote learning.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

unconditional positive regard, social emotional learning, school social workers, teacher collaboration, parent advocacy, listening with third ear, marginalized populations, equity and inclusion, remote learning impact, classroom management, culturally responsive teaching, student progress, termination process, social justice books, anti-racist education

SPEAKERS

Giesela Grumbach, Amy Vujaklija, Joi Patterson

You can at least have unconditional positive regard, and that means seeing the humanity in every student, in every student's life that we touch.

This episode was originally released under the podcast titled teaching and learning theory versus practice. This rebooted episode has been migrated to teaching and leading with Dr Amy and Dr Joi I am Dr Amy Vujaklija, Director of educator preparation, and I

am Dr Joi Patterson, Chief Diversity Officer. Our podcast addresses issues through the lens of diversity, equity and inclusion, along with solutions for us to grow as educators. So

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join us on our journey to become better teachers and leaders. So let's get into it. Well, good morning. Dr Joi,

good morning. Dr Amy, how are you this morning? I'm

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thinking about when I was a middle school teacher, uh huh, and I was thinking about the types of support that were available. And I see such a different direction, a positive direction for teachers and support personnel, and the type of interactions and groups that students are able to get involved in for social, emotional, academic support, and we are going to talk to one such professional today,

when I think about school as a student, I don't recall having services, and maybe they weren't as available back then. And I went to school. I went to a parochial school. So you know the teachers, they wore many hats, and I'm sure social working skills was one of the hats. As a principal, we support services I saw as being essential to student wellness and student learning. Like you, I am looking forward to this conversation that we're going to have with Dr Isla Grumbach today.

Yes, indeed. Grumbach received her master's degree in social work from Loyola University of Chicago and her PhD in Social Work from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr Grumbach also holds a two year post graduate certificate in marriage and family therapy from the Family Institute at Northwestern University. Her work experience shapes her interests in many ways. Prior to her career in academia, she worked in medical and mental health settings, schools and as a private practitioner, mitigation specialist. These varied experiences provide her with a breadth of knowledge that, in turn, informs her teaching now. Dr Grumbach coordinates the school social work specialization and teaches school social work practice and policy courses at GSU. But I do want to say that Dr Grumbach states that she loves the profession of social work and has a vested interest in helping to vet the next generation of social workers. I'm going to ask her to speak personally later in the podcast about what she likes about working at Governor State University. So welcome, Dr Giesela Grumbach,

thank you so much. I am happy to be here with you.

Good morning. I just love that name. Doctor Gisela Grumbach, do your friends call you Gigi, they do. So hopefully, by the end of this conversation, we can call you Gigi, but I just love that name Isla from my I'm going to jump right in with some questions. Amy and I were talking about services when we were in school, when we were educators and as administrators. Course, when we were in school, I don't remember any social services. If children receive social, any services. I was not aware. I went to a parochial school teachers. Then they wore so many different hats. But as an administrator, I relied on school support. And there's so many different support personnel titles, actually, I don't think the name is fitting. School support personnel. We have school counselors, school psychologists, speech pathologists, just to name a few. And then we have our school social worker. Can you explain the role of a school social worker?

Yes, and thank you for that. So first I'd like to say that school social workers, of course, enter the school setting as a secondary setting, right? They enter the school setting and they're there to support the educational needs of the child, right, and to support that school system as a whole. So with that, I would say that social workers provide. Provide, of course, counseling services, whether it be individual, small group work and even now in larger groups, in terms of tier one interventions to work toward, like prevention services. So school social workers also provide a vital connection between the home and the school environment right oftentimes conducting home visits, creating a relationship with that family, to help support the students and providing referrals and other needed services. They also should advocate on behalf of students and families within the community. There are times when school social workers, I think, probably have a role in policy making, working in a collaborative way with teachers, administrators and other pupil support personnel there within the school setting. I think the school social worker, of course, plays a really important role in helping to explain some of the mitigating circumstances that affect a student's life, and helping to bridge that gap understanding that student within their environment. So I think that is our role. I like

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how you were talking about a partnership with parents and having that communication. How do social workers collaborate with teachers and parents and other support personnel? Can you give us a short synopsis of what that looks like? So

when I was a school social worker, when I worked in the schools, one of the things that I found was that teachers had this good sense, keen sense, of what was happening with their students. And oftentimes, if I got a referral, there were certain teachers that were just always spot on. It may have been a child who wrote a certain thing in an essay. It could have been a child who, even at a younger age, displayed something that was very alarming to that teacher, even in a drawing or some sort of interaction that they had within that educational environment, and they knew that something wasn't quite right, or even teachers who would be in attunement with students emotional state, like they would know that something changed within that student, in the way that they behaved or reacted within a classroom. And so you work collaboratively with teachers to get referrals, discuss their concerns about students or the home life, and provide any kind of resources that may be needed. But in addition, school, social workers oftentimes push in, they go into the classroom and provide services, maybe to the entire class that could be something that is social and emotionally based in terms of those learning standards, or it could be conducting a social skills group, any of those things. Well,

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you mentioned journaling, so I coordinate the secondary English education program. My background is teaching middle school English, high school English, and you are so right? English teachers, maybe more than other teachers, are privy to journal entries and other interactions among students with the writing that can be alarming at times. So that is really a powerful statement, and something I need to take to my methods classes to reinforce it's not just about the poetry they're studying or the speeches they're studying. It's about what those students are writing. That brings me to ask about the history or the knowledge of the child. What do we need to be aware of in order to better serve our students?

Oftentimes, teachers may have an inkling about what's happening within the family, right? And so they can have an early conversation just saying, Listen, I'm really concerned about this, just expressing what those concerns are. Having that conversation with like a school social worker who who may also be able to weigh in on what may be happening within the family, and could actually also reach out to them. But oftentimes, the teachers really do know the history, right. Oftentimes, you guys know if that child has had a brother or sister who's also gone through the system, and you may have then become somewhat familiar with the family, depending on whether or not multiple children within that family system have had difficulties in the school setting. So oftentimes, you do know that it may be difficult to get to know more if you have not been able to get the parent to come up to the school, or if the parent hasn't been responsive, and that's when the social worker can step in and help with that. But oftentimes, I think teachers learn also from exchanging with one another about how students may be doing in other classes if they're at that stage where they're changing classrooms. So I think that that helps, but I think it's also important to talk a little bit about the context. So beyond history, we know that i. With low income and marginalized families, they bear the brunt of the negative consequences of the pandemic. And for quite a few reasons, there are things that you can do in terms of the way that you listen to what is being said and how that student is responding to that learning environment, right, and to the Educate to the lessons that they're getting in social work, in therapy, actually, in psychotherapy. In particular, in 1948 there's this guy named Theodore Reich who came up with this concept of listening with the third ear. And this, of course, is not a call to educators, to teachers, to be therapists. I understand that they are not but this is a concept that others can borrow and learn a little something from it. So it is really pertinent to the therapeutic environment. However, there are lessons to glean from it, and so when we listen with the third ear, it's this concept that gets to understanding the nuances that people communicate, understanding some nuanced meanings and hearing messages that maybe are not explicitly stated. It's listening for deeper levels of meaning and understanding even what is not being said at times. So oftentimes, for me as a therapist, if I'm in session with a client and or even a student client, right? And they they say something, and they're giving me the story, but then there's something that you feel they're holding back. That's that listening with the third year, understanding and kind of hearing what's not being stated and exploring it. But I think it's also important to listen to tone of voice. I think spontaneity of speech is important, and even as a school social worker, visually, I look for that spontaneity, especially with the younger children, in terms of how they interact with their parents. Is there's that spontaneity there? Or is that child hesitant? In some way, it might tell me a little bit about some of the interactions, perhaps they've had with that parent, listening to background noises or distractions. Also, you can try to discern emotional tones in that child's voice, whether or not they're understanding a lesson. Are they getting frustrated by it, listening to the way in which they convey their level of understanding, if they have to reply back, are they asking questions? Are they really quiet? It's okay to live with a little bit of silence to give people time to think about things, but if there is a lot of silence, what does that mean? Are they not really taking in the content and not able to digest it. And so what does that mean? And oftentimes, when I talk about tone of voice, I think all of us know this in our own communications with other people, that sometimes people can respond to you in a way, and you can hear it in the tone of voice, but they're not even aware of it. And so you may hear this from children as well, where they're not quite aware of it, but what's happening in that environment that may be causing an irritation to them, and you can sometimes hear it in that tone of voice. So I think that we have to stay attuned to the students that we serve and how they communicate with us. I think those are some things that really help in terms of listening with the third year. And I know it may be difficult because you're concerned about education, given a lesson, making sure the students get it, but those are some things that I think can be secondary and perhaps even easily discernible if you sort of train yourself to it.

We are talking to Dr Giesela Grumbach, Professor, social worker and author, about meeting the needs of students through the perspective of a social worker. Dr Grumbach, can you talk about the needs for social workers in school, in the communities? How have these services evolved? Because they're very much different than, say, 25 years ago. So how have they

evolved? So I think that they've evolved definitely to include, nowadays social emotional learning. And that's those social emotional learning standards which have really been produced by Castle, which is the collaborative I think I may have it in my notes somewhere, but that the castle is at UIC, and it's dedicated to brief, doing research and conducting research around social emotional learning and those learning standards, because we recognize how important that is to students learning, and if you can help deal with their social emotional learning standards. It helps them to become more socially aware. It helps students to develop more self awareness, right social awareness, which is really important to then know how others in your environment are reacting, of course, to you and and what norms are sort of set that you need. To adhere to in terms of, you know, students. It helps students in terms of civic engagement in the long run, and it helps them to learn how to control their impulses a little bit more, so that they are more attuned to the social environment in some ways. And so this is me giving, sort of really, really paraphrasing it, but I think that's how it's changed. And nowadays, school, social work services and all the services that we provide should be data driven. So we should look at the number of times that students have been disciplined for something we look at and we try to count, or at least be aware of how students are starting to make progress in the services that are provided. So oftentimes, then you want to know how many like out of how many times, how many trials out of X amount of times the student has been able to be successful with one of their social emotional learning goals, right? In addition to that, nowadays, we have the multi tiered system of support, which has that educational arm, but then also the other arm that looks at behavior. And so we have the multi tiered system. And in school social work nowadays, you can do tier one interventions, which are really more like prevention, because then you address the larger commute educational community, it could be students, teachers, parents, where you can conduct assemblies to talk about things like suicide prevention and awareness bullying and other topics that might be helpful to address school wide. Then you have the tier two intervention, so when students don't necessarily respond to tier one, there may be an indication that tier two services are needed. Where you start to see students, perhaps in small groups to provide some interventions. You can go into classrooms that may have a smaller class size and provide services there. Do check in, check out with certain students, those kinds of things. And then, of course, tier three, which is the more intensive level of intervention that you have with a student, because you know that that tier two has not worked for them, and so you move then to tier two to hopefully be able to help maintain them within that educational environment and remove some of those impediments that prevent them from learning.

That was a great overview of tier one, tier two and tier three. So what about how can the community, how can a parents access school social worker services,

parents, I think, you know, schools could probably use or benefit from a parent advocate. So when I worked in a school setting, and I was in a densely populated area in South Shore, and we had younger parents and parents who had great needs, and students and families with great needs, and that principal hired someone who was with really embedded within the community, was a key stakeholder within the community, very active, and hired her as a parent advocate. And so I would work with that parent advocate, because when you have people who have connections and ties to the community, you have to make sure you, if you don't live in that community, also figure out a way to connect and tie into that community. And so oftentimes you could do it in that way. You could do it with holding community forums. You could invite parents in from the community to let them know what services may be available. And school social workers, if they write, even for many grants, they could provide job training. And I know this sounds a little bit of a stretch, but sometimes you really have to figure out how to meet parents needs and how to meet them where they are. I think it's really important to provide parent workshops to talk about issues like parenting. There are a lot of topics, right? So you have Diana baumrind, who has done scholarship and research around parenting styles. Could help them understand a little bit about what the research says out there. There are other evidence based parenting programs you could use. You could provide information to them on emotion coaching, which is the work of Dr John Gottman. He did what Diana baumrind did in terms of parenting styles. He tied that to emotion coaching and what he considers to be emotional styles that parents use in terms of helping their children understand their emotions, even, and which is kind of powerful and it has really good implications to understand early on how a parent responds to their child's strong emotions, and to help them learn how to help them through it, through emotion coaching, I think, is a very powerful thing, and it helps parents to become a little bit more aware of how they respond to their children and some of the things that They say, you know how we tell little boys, little boys aren't supposed to cry, right, right, right? And so helping them to understand that. So I think school social workers can help bring current information to the community as well and help make those linkages to services and programs

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we know. That you are also a researcher and do more than teach in the classroom and work in the community. In your research, what are you finding? Are the disparities in education, specifically the disparities with the support services such as social work, as a

school social worker, and being over the school social work specialization, one thing that I do know is that there does seem to be, there continues to be, a disparity in the way that we discipline students of color versus mainstream students the liberties that some students have others don't. And so I and there's been some debate about it, and that there's been some some mixed results reported, I think, in the literature about the disparities that exist among students of color in the educational setting. But we know that there are those gaps that still exist, our education gap, our health gaps, our wealth gaps, all of those things. And so when you when you work with marginalized populations, it's important to understand that. And how do we work toward equity and inclusion? I think is something that is very important that we still have to be aware of within school setting, even. So I'm not sure if I got at your question. So

I do have an additional question since we're talking about disparities, because when we're talking about disparities, we also may be talking about families that don't have proper insurance and things like that, and they are so reliant on those services that schools can provide. So my question is, what's at stake when support services are not there, who bears the brunt of the work, who's impacted?

I think teachers are first and foremost. Of course, students too, but teachers, because then you're looking at and you're right, Joi. I mean, Joi, I like the way you said that parents or families without insurance, rely on the schools heavily for resources. The brunt of it probably would be with the teachers. I think that a system without enough pupil support personnel to help support that learning environment and to help support what teachers do in terms of education, it would cause teachers to have to do way too much. Teachers are already burdened with a number of things, right? So you have to worry about, here I am saying, Pay attention to your child's the student's emotions in the classroom. But again, I do know that. You know I'm not asking you to be, become a social worker, a psychologist, but just to be aware so that when those support services are there in the school, you'll be able to collaborate with someone to address that. But then you have to be the disciplinarian in your classroom. You have to maintain classroom management. You have to get your lesson across. You have to make sure your students are able to take a test and pass certain tests, a number of tests, all of those things, right? And so there is a lot that's put on the teacher, and if those critical services are not there, it would impact the teacher's job.

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In my experience, working with student teachers with remote learning, they came back to that first seminar and said we were told not to even teach content for the first week or so. The content was social emotional learning. It was implementing and getting to know and building that community. So in your opinion, you mentioned the SEL standards earlier, with the implementation of these standards and the general curriculum, are you seeing there to be a, actually a visible impact in improving the relationships with students, among students and with teachers. Well, hopefully

this gets at what you were asking. So last year, I went into the schools as a consultant, and mostly because I'm over the school social work concentration now, and I've been out of the field of school social work for for quite some time now, because I'm in higher education, so I went back into the schools as a consultant to do school social work so that I can become up to date in terms of some of the latest standards, how they're doing it, how they're even writing their IEP goals and all of that learning the software. It was very helpful in terms of that. But one of the things I noticed was that I went into a classroom, and it was a classroom that had a special education teacher in there and a regular ed teacher. I went in during the time that they would focus on functional behavioral goals for their students. And this teachers were well prepared to address issues of social, emotional learning. They did a beautiful job, and you can see where these systems are really working to help the students. It provided a supportive environment, learning environment for those students, the teacher understood the children's behavior and what the function of that behavior was. And because of that understanding, they knew how to address it. Staying current

is very important. So I'm glad you had that experience of going back into the classroom, because once we transition to administrative roles in higher education, we have to be very deliberate about staying current, which is why I know Amy likes visiting student teachers and staying connected with our school partners, so it's very helpful to me and for us to share with our listeners. When you say this is a great tip for teachers, when you talked about the one page overview, maybe give some best practices for parents, about remote instruction set up how to maybe create a maker space behind your child's camera, like you have, you have a very pretty simple maker space. So I think that that's important also. Something else that you said that stood out to me is listening with the third Ear and Hearing what's not being said, being able to share that with teachers. When we can't see faces, we need to use our other senses, right? Yes, so that we can see what's there, what's missing and what's missing. It tells us a lot. I was wondering if there's other tips that you could share, maybe there's some signature principles or elements about your program at Governor State University, that your candidates go through, that you could share with us. There

is another thing, and that is we do speak to the importance of being able to engage our clients or engage students. And a part of that, I think, is that we all, and I think we share this with teachers, that teachers have to be able to gain the trust of their students, and you do it by being credible. You do it by being trustworthy, by showing up. And the way that we show up, we show up with care and concern. And I think that it doesn't take a lot to convey care and concern, but it has to be authentic. Sometimes, there are children who have behaviors that we don't like, but how can we still convey a sense of respect for that student and unconditional positive regard? If you can't love them all, you can at least have unconditional positive regard, and that means seeing the humanity in every student, in every student's life that we touch. And so another way is building a rapport with students. And so when you build that rapport by being, I think, relational in your approach, and that speaks, again, to caring and having that sense of and being able to convey unconditional positive regard for students they are not their behavior. They may behave a certain way that is unfriendly, unlikable, unproductive, but we still have to convey that sense of unconditional positive regard if we want that student to learn in that environment and to gain a sense of self worth. Students gain that sense of self worth. First of all, they should get it from home, but what if they didn't? Then, how do we mirror to them something that is likable about them despite their behavior? Those are things that really can help us, I think, in terms of reaching them, in terms of learning, it's not always easy, and there are still ways we have to figure out ways to discipline children that does not assault who they are at their core, but that gets to the behavior and lets them know that this behavior is undesirable, and in this environment, you're not only affecting yourself, you're affecting your classmates as well in the overall learning environment. So that puts it it takes it away from them, and it puts it on. Here's what these actions cause, but it doesn't have to make them such a bad person. That's

good stuff, not just for students, but for adults, also for us

to remember that with one another, right? Absolutely none of us is perfect. So yeah, some of those things, I think, being able to be relational with students, making what we talk about within that classroom relevant to their experiences, I think, is something that gets at it. And then I think we have a responsibility to have good management skills within the classroom, because it helps to protect children. Amy,

maybe we should have the social worker department come in and teach classroom management. I'm looking forward to how all of the licensure programs will implement the culturally responsive teaching and learning standards to take us even a step further, because some of the things that you're saying, the elements that the teachers need to have, may have to come through those culturally responsive standards as well. You

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were talking about relationships, and we saw last spring how student. Went abruptly to e learning, all of a sudden, to not having those relationships in that face to face environment. I know that my daughter, who was a senior at the time, said, If I had known we would not have gone back to school, I would have said goodbye to some of my teachers. She didn't say all of them, but she did say some of them. There was a bit of everybody, yeah, and she does need some support services academically and socially. That was frustrating for her to not have any closure. We've spoken about the SEL standards and culturally responsiveness. But there's something about closing the loop that I'd like for you to speak to before we end today. Okay,

thank you for that. Let me just say that endings are really very important. And I think you bring up, I think the example that you gave is a beautiful illustration of the need for that. I think that, of course, it threw us all for a loop, having to shift so abruptly from face to face learning to figuring out what's happening with this pandemic and going to remote modes of learning. It meant having to bring a lot of people up to speed in terms of technology, having to make sure that people had the systems in place in order to do it, despite all that, we have to remember how important it is to get that closure and to say our goodbyes and to review student progress in light of what's happening and to help them understand, I think, along the way, what's happening. I think being able to say the goodbyes for now is an important thing. It's an important step not to miss, even in the clinical sense, we had to remind school social workers and school social work interns not to forget to do termination with their students. It means then termination, in terms of that clinical sense, is about reviewing progress with that student, helping them to understand some of the gains that they've made, trying to figure out a plan in the interim, in the meantime, how they will maintain those gains, the progress that they've, you know, achieved, how do they maintain that over time, and then setting the tone for the Next steps, whether it's transition planning or just maybe terminating with that student altogether, because they have achieved their goals and now they no longer need school, social work services. But even in terms of the educational setting, I think teachers typically have their routines that they do to say goodbye and to create celebrations for the end of the year. And so I think we all just have to be reminded that even though we changed the way we were doing things, that you still cannot forego the importance of creating that closure for students and saying those goodbyes. Yeah, it's really important.

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Thank you for that, and we appreciate having Dr Gisella Grumbach with us today for closing words, what are your students reading right now? I know that you have been busy collecting materials for your social work students. What are those

my students? I do in one of my classes. It's a class that I teach in the fall, I assign a book review for them, and they do it in groups, and it's a wonderful activity, because I'll give them a whole list of books that they can choose from, and most of them are social justice oriented. And so one of the latest books that my students reviewed was how to be an anti racist by Ibram X kendi, which is, I think, probably on the best seller list, and he's been doing lots and lots of speaking engagements and different venues around that. And there are a ton of other books that I assigned to them. It

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has been a pleasure having you with us today, and we have learned so much, and we hope to have a follow up conversation in the near future. Thank you. Thank you for listening to teaching and leading with Dr Amy and Dr Joi. Visit our website at G, O, v, s, t.edu/teaching, and leading podcast to see the show notes from this episode.

We appreciate Governor State University's work behind the scenes to make publishing possible. Stay tuned for more episodes with Dr Amy and Dr Joi.