Social Emotional Learning Fizzle?

This week’s article summary is As Social and Emotional Learning Expands, Educators Fear the ‘Fizzle’.

An article summary a few weeks ago focused on one importance aspect of social-emotional development: the ability to understand the perspective of others.

Over the past few years it’s become vogue for schools to put more emphasis on social-emotional learning and lessons in the classroom as research shows that what has been traditionally viewed as ‘soft’ skills are actually vital factors in success and happiness. Cognitive ability is important yet without solid inter and intrapersonal skills, it’s tough to be fulfilled professionally and personally.

But, as you’ll read in the article, there is a concern that schools’ current focus on social-emotional development will fizzle out like other new ideas and initiatives because it’s difficult to quantify and can be viewed and treated like an add-on rather than an essential part of the classroom.

The advantage for us at Trinity--and for most independent schools--is that character development has always been an important goal, often commensurate with academic development. One reason my parents sent me to a private school in seventh grade rather than to the local public school was due to its Quaker philosophy: the school’s mantra of simplicity, humility, and moderation was definitely instilled in me and has continued to be my personal core values as a adult.

Much like the use of technology in schools, what seems to work best is when social-emotional development is a pedagogical instrument in the classroom to support student cognitive learning. I like how the high school history teacher in the article reminds his high school students about how to practice self-management.

At Trinity development of character is one of our Program Pillars and demonstration of social-emotional skills and habits has always been included in our progress reports.

As such, I’m not worried about social-emotional fizzle at Trinity!

Joe

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Four minutes late to his first class of the day, an 11th-grade boy at Skyline High School swung into his seat and blurted an explanation: “I had a bad nosebleed last night.” His U.S. history teacher, Jimmy Barbuto, looked up. Being late to class can wreck the morning flow at school, provoking confrontations and derailing lesson plans.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Barbuto replied. The remark was a nod to their shared humanity as well as an academic strategy, a tiny moment of modeling social skills that is part of a blooming movement in education known as social and emotional learning. While the term is jargon, the concept is straightforward: Help students recognize and manage their emotions so they can get excited about academics and get along with others.

The class rolled on. “Anyone doing self-management?” Barbuto asked his 28 students, who sat in rows and paid a good deal of attention, considering they were teenagers in the early morning. “Having appropriate things on the desk?”

Oakland is one of hundreds of school districts in California that have adopted social skill-building in an effort to move from zero-tolerance discipline and drill-and-kill curriculum toward a more nuanced approach to the behavioral and academic needs of students. Oakland has boiled down the concept to three signature teacher practices, most of them familiar to accomplished teachers:

• A warm welcome at the start of the day, perhaps with a morning circle depending on the age of the students
• “Engaging” teaching, such as encouraging students to volunteer their opinions while learning how to listen to the opinions of others
• Closing out the school day on an optimistic note by asking students to take a moment to consider what they’ve learned or someone they’ve helped today.

“There has been an explosion of interest in this work,” Emily Doolittle, a researcher at the federal National Center for Education Research, said.  And with that explosion has come heightened concern among proponents about how to spare social and emotional learning from the fate of many ideas in education: the fizzle.

“In education, it seems like there’s a fad a month,” said Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. “What are the crucial steps that need to take place to make sure social and emotional learning continues to advance?”

That is the question being asked by educators nationally and in California, where the California Department of Education in 2016 joined a multistate collaborative to develop guidelines for social and emotional learning. No consensus has emerged on what skills to teach or how to measure results, but interest in social and emotional learning is driven by evidence of its effectiveness.

“I worry about the fizzle a great deal,” said Stephanie Jones, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As with any initiative, over-selling is a risk – spreading the belief that social and emotional learning will fix every educational ill, Jones said. She referenced a maxim from her graduate school mentor: “Watch out for the quick fix.”

Part of the mishmash is generated by a profusion of programs that use different approaches, including videos, discussions and role-playing, to develop different and sometimes overlapping skills. In Wally’s Feeling Wheel in The Incredible Years Series program, kindergartners learn about their feelings and those of others using pictures of faces grimacing, smiling or frowning that are labeled as scared, excited, angry and more.

In the Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies program, elementary school teachers promote empathy by leading a discussion about how a story character might feel, such as a girl whose family tells her they are moving to the U.S. and she will be given a new name.

And for high school students, many programs have not yet shown results, said David Yeager, an assistant professor of developmental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Yeager explained that teenagers need programs that don’t preach to them or imply there is something wrong with them. Instead, approaches that tap into a teenager’s desire to make a difference in the world can wake up a student’s interest, he said.

In Oakland, the district has invested in social and emotional learning in elementary schools for years and is rolling out the concept in a few high schools through teacher training. The idea is to integrate social skills building into academic instruction.

In U.S. history class, Barbuto turned to the question on the overhead projector screen: “Who was responsible for the Battle of Little Big Horn?” As the discussion progressed, Barbuto jotted highlights on the screen. He noted that Native American tribes spoke dozens of languages, and then he segued into a tip that at once promoted learning, self-awareness and planning. “For me, because I’m a visual learner, taking notes is important,” Barbuto casually remarked. “If I took notes, it meant I had to do way less studying in the future and it was easier to write the essay.”

Pens moved in notebooks. Message received.