Almut Zieher is an Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Zieher received their Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, their M.A. in Special Education, and their B.A. in Elementary Education from the University of New Mexico. Dr. Zieher’s experiences as a general and special education teacher lead her to study how teachers learn and engage in social and emotional behaviors to increase their well-being and pedagogical effectiveness. She uses social, emotional, and mindfulness theory and approaches to inform training and measure development. Previously they deployed a mindfulness training using the skills form Dialectical Behavioral Therapy with pre-service teachers. Currently her work is focused on teacher measures, including developing the Social and Emotional Learning Observational Checklist (SELOC, IES R305A210262) measuring elementary school teacher’s social and emotional teaching, a teacher self-report measure of emotion focused SEL implementation, and the Objective Awareness and Mindfulness Measure (OAMM) an objective teacher self-report measure funded by this Mind and Life PEACE grant. She is creating these measures to better understand and to improve social and emotional (including mindfulness) school programing, including which program components are beneficial for whom.
