We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Peyton Curley a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Peyton, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

I believe that we can prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career by explicitly and intentionally teaching and practicing emotional skills and relationship skills as a daily part of their school experience. As a former public school teacher, I felt a heavy sense of pressure surrounding test scores and academic achievement and much less regard for the student as a whole person. The focus of nearly every staff meeting was test score data, but the true issues teachers were seeing in their classrooms were more often related to social and emotional wellbeing. I have seen and personally experienced this lead to teacher burnout. Teachers are under so much pressure to meet certain expectations with academic testing, but are not given the resources to support their students overall wellbeing, which has a significant impact on their ability to perform academically as well as impacting classroom behavior. Adopting social emotional learning curriculums to teach skills such as regulating emotions, self-management, empathy, conflict resolution, and problem solving creates an environment for children to thrive, take academic risks, and often leads to higher academic achievement, including test scores. These skills become arguably more important and valuable when entering the workplace than academic test performance. As confidence, problem solving, self-motivation, teamwork, and emotional regulation are nurtured, students become better equipped to meet high expectations.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Peyton Curley, and I am the creator of The Social Emotional Teacher. My background as a teacher led me to start my business. I taught in the classroom for five years. I started my career teaching third grade at the largest and most diverse elementary school in Nashville, TN. I loved being immersed in so many cultures in my classroom. After three years there, I moved to Louisville, KY where I taught first grade at a non-profit school for boys. I loved the experience of working for a non-profit and working in an underserved community. After 5 years of teaching, I decided to leave the classroom to pursue my passion for creating social emotional learning resources full-time. I have now been a full-time business owner for 5 years and back in Nashville. My time in the classroom showed me both the need for social emotional learning as a daily part of education and the immense benefits it has on students. My mission is to nurture and empower our students through social emotional learning. I aim to do this by providing teachers with resources, such as full curriculums, games, lesson plans, and more that are affordable and easy to implement into their already busy daily schedule. By offering digital products, teachers are able to just download, print, and go – saving them time and planning. In addition to creating resources for teachers to use in their classrooms, I also offer training and online courses to support teachers in developing their knowledge of social emotional learning and best practices for the classroom. I am also the author of Growth Mindset Workbook for Kids. Having the opportunity to write a book for kids was such a gift! The most rewarding part of my work is hearing the success stories of teachers and being able to reach students across the globe with my resources.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When Covid first began in 2020, I knew my business was going to be impacted, as teachers and students were majorly impacted. During the first few weeks when so much was unknown and teachers were unsure whether they would be remaining in their classrooms or moving to virtual teaching, I saw a major decline in my sales and knew it was time to pivot if I wanted my business to survive. I immediately began to take my printable resources and turn them into resources that could be accessed by teachers and students online in multiple formats such as Google Slides, SeeSaw, and other online learning platforms that many schools were adopting. As I was working through this change, education was also taking some major pivots, including embracing the need for social and emotional instruction during the pandemic, as students were isolated and having to adapt to a completely new type of learning. The pivot in education combined with my pivot to digital learning resources let to major growth for my business.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

I started my business as a side hustle to supplement my teaching salary when I first started teaching in 2015. Nashville was becoming more and more expensive and I had little room for financial growth with my teaching income alone. Because my resources are digital, there was little financial investment involved in getting started, so there wasn’t much to lose in trying despite having no formal business education or training. When I first started out, I was selling resources on an online marketplace for teachers called TeachersPayTeachers. I wasn’t focusing specifically on social emotional learning resources at that point, but rather general academic resources for elementary grades. Growth was slow at first. The first month I made $46, but I was just happy to have some extra gas money. A major shift happened when I found my niche and began to educate myself in branding and marketing. As I gained more teaching experience, I started to develop a passion for teaching social and emotional skills. This passion developed from the need I saw in my own groups of students and the success I saw first hand of bringing these skills into the daily classroom routine. At this point, I rebranded my business to be centered around social emotional learning and became “The Social Emotional Teacher.” Shortly after this shift, I hit the earnings goal that I had set for myself to feel confident in taking the leap from full time teacher and business owner to pursuing my business full time. I formed an LLC and began selling my resources on my own website in addition to TeachersPayTeachers. My social media following was growing the time I had to focus exclusively on the business outside of the classroom gave me the ability to grow in ways I never could have imagined when I made that first $46 and the opportunity to reach teachers not only across the country, but across the globe. Another major shift happened during the pandemic when social emotional wellbeing became a major focus for schools, and teachers began to seek out more resources. Above all, I feel that the students I have had the opportunity to teach have given me the fuel behind my passion and commitment to getting my resources into the hands of as many educators as possible.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thesocialemotionalteacher.com
• Instagram: @thesocialemotionalteacher
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/thesocialemotionalteacher
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peyton-curley-8b0658135/

Image Credits
Mandy Liz Photography