Spreadsheets to Heartbeats is an on-demand professional development program presented to classroom teachers and teaching assistants by the school leadership. School administrators (principals, headmasters, and assistant principals), are trained and mentored by Heartbeats Educators in leading two Heartbeats components: The Emotionally Intelligent School (for teachers) and The Mindful Teaching Assistant (for teaching assistants and other para-professionals). The Emotionally Intelligent School has four training Modules: 1) Meeting the emotional needs of your students, 2) Fostering resilience, optimism and hope, 3) Building a caring classroom culture, and 4) Becoming a reflective practitioner. The Mindful Teaching Assistant has three training modules: 1) Empathy in practice 2) Becoming a high-level listener, and 3) Shaping behaviors through quality feedback. There is also a student component taught by either the classroom teacher or school mental health professional. The Student component, Courageous Conversations, has four social and emotional learning lessons for each grade combination: k-1, 2-3, 4-5, 6-8, 9-12 for a total of 20 lessons.

The idea for the Heartbeats Program was hatched by educator and author David A. Levine over the course of the 2009/2010 school year. Once a month during that year, from October through May, David co-lead a social and emotional learning professional development initiative with principal John Voerg at the Crosby Elementary School in Kingston, New York. The professional development program was taught to Crosby teachers and training sessions took the place of Crosby's monthly staff meetings. All information that was typically presented during staff meetings was disseminated instead via emails, and printed memos.

In between sessions, teachers were assigned to utilize a specific classroom practice to help them build a classroom community while teaching their students the social skills necessary to work collaboratively with their peers. Some teachers invited David into their classrooms to demonstrate a technique or process (the community meeting for example), or to observe and provide feedback. In addition to the after-school course, David taught a similar course for teaching assistants and lunchroom monitors before school. The teaching assistants who were often in classrooms in a teaching role, appreciated the opportunity to receive professional training and responded in kind.

As the year progressed, it was evident how The Heartbeats Process was becoming a cultural norm. Classrooms felt more caring, staff morale was higher than it had been previously and grade level teams worked more effectively. Students as well demonstrated an increased consciousness around caring and compassionate choices and the overall school climate was invitational and welcoming. Mr. Voerg, in his role as principal and instructional leader, supported staff while holding them accountable for implementing the ideas from the monthly training sessions. By the end of the school year, the Crosby Elementary School Staff was highly focused on meeting the emotional needs not only of the students but of each other, both professionally and personally.

As Race to the Top funding has required school leaders to focus upon more stringent teacher assessments, and as the Common Core Standards have brought with them test preparation as the predominant professional development offering, more often than not, social and emotional learning is left up to the individual classroom practitioner. There is little consistency, best practice knowledge, or training and mentoring in this area. Spreadsheets to Heartbeats provides a training tool kit for school leaders that is intended to replicate the dynamics of the leader-driven social culture building professional development process that organically unfolded at Crosby.

Spreadsheets to Heartbeats provides a cost-effective, relevant, authentic and immediately applicable training to schools who could otherwise not afford it. There is a need for accessible professional development that is provided by the leadership within a school. Principals as instructional leaders can inspire and motivate through high leverage, meaningful and reflective training. The Heartbeats Program provides school leaders with the opportunity to shape the school into an emotionally safe learning community and caring culture that promotes compassion and empathy through consistent modeling and reflective practice. The Heartbeats Program will engage principals and headmasters of elementary, middle and high schools (grades pre-k-12) throughout the country and the English speaking world. My vision is to infuse the formula for my successful staff development workshops into an on-demand professional development course that involves real world dialogue about what is happening with children today combined with relevant and accessible research, story telling, reflection and implementation practices that have proven to be effective. Most teachers see the need for emotionally safer schools, and believe that their students need more opportunities for social interactions that are positive and successful. Although this program seeks to empower school leaders with the tools to be instructional leaders as opposed to building managers, Spreadsheets to Heartbeats can also be taken by individual educators who are self-motivated to improve themselves professionally or who are interested in learning about social and emotional learning and improving their emotional intelligence.

David A. Levine will produce four video presentations of 15 minutes to be used as on-demand training components. Each video will provide a highly engaging overview to its associated learning module that is fast-paced and entertaining. Each on-demand training video will be presented in three segments: 1) A storyboard of David summarizing the module concept (similar to Jeremy Rifkin's RSA Animate The Empathic Civilization http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g). 2) A segment of a classroom lesson demonstrating the Heartbeats technique or process that will be assigned for that module. 3) A closing segment utilizing a visually engaging approach presenting that month's assignment. The video will be shown and process questions asked by the building principal. A handout (downloaded and printed for each participant ) will be provided that summarizes the module, presents the rationale, offers three self-reflection questions, and closes with the classroom application assignment. Participants will be excited to apply the ideas from the session into their daily practices and will be accountable to teach using a new process/technique. Principals will be trained to implement The Spreadsheets to Heartbeats Program in one of two ways: either through a two day institute at the Ashokan Center Training Facility in Olivebridge, New York (2 hours north of NY City), or by a webinar broadcast from the Ashokan Center. In addition, principals will take part in monthly "digital campfires" to share with a cadre of principals how the training experience is progressing. Teacher and teaching assistants participating in The Spreadsheets to Heartbeats Program will have an opportunity to take part in once a month "digital campfires" as well, to share how classroom infusion is progressing. Participants will be encouraged to ask questions of, or offer solutions to, their professional colleagues from all over the world. A Spreadsheets to Heartbeats Summer Institute will be offered at the Ashokan Center for any professionals who have taken part in the program. The institute will be open to all: school leaders, teachers, teaching assistants and anyone else who has taken the program as a self-study initiative.

Teachers and other staff members want real world, authentic, validating and accessible professional development initiatives. They do not want what Tony Wagner in his book The Global Achievement Gap refers to as "Reform Du Jour" where new initiatives come and go seemingly every couple of years without any sense of purpose or continuity. One thirty year veteran teacher once told me that she "longed for a return to the joy" that she felt when she first entered the profession, and I believe that many of her experienced brethren feel similarly. Additionally, there is a sense by many principals and teachers that today's pre-service teacher training programs do not prepare new teachers well enough to deal with the social and emotional challenges of the profession. Spreadsheets to Heartbeats is designed to be conversational and exploratory while being lead primarily by the building leader. The current trend in today's Professional Learning Communities is to encourage principals to hold and articulate a clear vision for what they want their schools to be and, as keeper of that vision, to lead and inspire the teaching staff. The person that works in this way is an authentic instructional leader. The days of seeing effective leadership through the lens of being a good building manager who lets the teachers do what they want are over. The Heartbeats Model prepares school leaders to encourage their teachers to be reflective practitioners who are enthusiastic and honored to implement new approaches for building a classroom community. Along the way, the principal will dialogue with teachers, provide feedback, hands on support and monitoring of how student and parent relationships are progressing. Within a short period of time, The Heartbeats Practices will become cultural norms and be a natural as the air we breathe. Teachers will understand for example, that any social skills teaching process can be used with any curricular content and that student academic performance will increase as a result. In fact,in a meta-analysis study published by The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) of 207 social and emotional learning programs, students enrolled in these types of programs had improved academic achievement. This is the ultimate goal of The Heartbeats Program: for the building principal to act as the social, emotional and instructional visionary, for the teachers to be re-inspired by their profession and daily challenges, for the teaching assistants to be more aware of of how they communicate with children, and for the students to feel safe, supported and connected so they will thrive academically, socially and emotionally.

There are many on-demand and webinar training experiences offered by such organizations as ASCD, Solution Tree,Education Week and Schoolsmovingup. Spreadsheets to Heartbeats is unique in that it trains principals to be the trainers, it can be accessed any time that is convenient for the participants, the sitting time with the video is minimal and it engages participants in meaningful and relevant dialogue. The two keys for success are that the principal will be the trainer and the material will be highly engaging.