Social-Emotional Learning at School

 This week's article summary is Researchers Studies Kindergarteners' Behavior and Followed Up 19 Years Later, and it’s a follow-up to last week’s summary about some parents today delaying their children’s ‘formal’ education until First Grade.

The article is a reminder of the importance of the early grades of school, specifically Early Learners, PreK, and Kindergarten at Trinity.

While these early grades expose children to content knowledge, perhaps more important is children’s social-emotional development within those early childhood classrooms.  

One of Trinity’s student outcomes is the development of a child’s sense of self (intrapersonal) and care and concern for others (interpersonal).

During the first years of schooling, critical character values and habits begin to form: sharing/taking turns, self-regulation/impulse control, cooperation/collaboration/conflict management. Ideally, these values and habits began to take shape at home when our current students are toddlers, yet it’s within a classroom with fellow classmates that kids have opportunities to apply these skills and habits needed to coexist with others. Humans are social, yet we need much practice and reinforcement learning how to work with others. 

The study referenced in the article below reminds us that a child’s EQ is a better predictor of future success, happiness, and fulfillment than IQ, as the summary a few weeks ago revealed. 

When I read articles that highlight the importance of helping our kids develop core skills, attitudes, and habits, I am always proud of the emphasis Trinity places on character development and being a contributing member of a community!

Joe

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Every parent wants to see their kid get good grades in school. But now we know social success is just as important.

From an early age, we're led to believe our grades and test scores are the key to everything — namely, going to college, getting a job, and finding that glittery path to lifelong happiness and prosperity.

But a recent study showed that when children learn to interact effectively with their peers and control their emotions, it can have an enormous impact on how their adult lives take shape. And according to the study, kids should be spending more time on these skills in school.

Kindergarten teachers evaluated the kids with a portion of something called the Social Competence Scale by rating statements like "The child is good at understanding other's feelings" on a "Not at all/A little/Moderately well/Well/Very well" scale.

The research team used these responses to give each kid a "social competency score," which they then stored in what I assume was a manila folder somewhere for 19 years, or until each kid was 25. At that point, they gathered some basic information about the now-grown-ups to see whether their early social skills held any predictive value.

Here's what they found.

Those good test scores we covet? They still matter, but maybe not for the reasons we thought. Traditional thinking says that if a kid gets good grades and test scores, he or she must be really smart, right? After all, there is a correlation between having a better GPA in high school and making more money later in life. But what that test score doesn't tell you is how many times a kid worked with a study partner to crack a tough problem, or went to the teacher for extra help, or resisted the urge to watch TV instead of preparing for a test. The researchers behind this project wrote, "Success in school involves both social-emotional and cognitive skills, because social interactions, attention, and self-control affect readiness for learning." That's a fancy way of saying that while some kids may just be flat-out brilliant, most of them need more than just smarts to succeed. Maybe it wouldn't hurt spending a little more time in school teaching kids about the social half of the equation.

Skills like sharing and cooperating pay off later in life. We know we need to look beyond GPA and state-mandated testing to figure out which kids are on the right path. That's why the researchers zeroed in so heavily on that social competency score. What they found probably isn't too surprising: Kids who related well to their peers, handled their emotions better, and were good at resolving problems went on to have more successful lives. What's surprising is just how strong the correlation was. An increase of a single point in social competency score showed a child would be 54% more likely to earn a high school diploma, twice as likely to graduate with a college degree, and 46% more likely to have a stable, full-time job at age 25. The kids who were always stealing toys, breaking things, and having meltdowns? More likely to have run-ins with the law and substance abuse problems.

Social behaviors can be learned and unlearned — meaning it's never too late to change. The researchers called some of these pro-social behaviors like sharing and cooperating "malleable," or changeable. Let's face it: Some kids are just never going to be rocket scientists. Turns out there are physical differences in our brains that make learning easier for some people than others. But settling disputes with peers? That's something kids (and adults) can always continue to improve on. For a lot of kids, these behaviors come from their parents. The more you're able to demonstrate positive social traits like warmth and empathy, the better off your kids will be.

This 19-year study paints a pretty clear picture: Pro-social behavior matters, even at a young age. And because it can be learned, it's a great "target for prevention or intervention efforts."

The bottom line? We need to do more than just teach kids information. We need to invest in teaching them how to relate to others and how to handle the things they're feeling inside.

Ignoring social skills in our curricula could have huge ramifications for our kids down the road.

 

Why Some Children Skip Traditional Kindergarten

This week's article summary is Many Kids Are Skipping Kindergarten.

While the Covid pandemic is in our rear view mirror, its effects linger. During the pandemic, Trinity, like most other private-independent schools, had the resources and flexibility to provide in-person schooling for the vast majority of our students the vast majority of the time. However, this was not the case for public schools, and many of them had to resort to online learning for a significant portion of the pandemic. And, as we all experienced, online learning is ineffectual pedagogy for most students, particularly those in elementary grades. (Late night host Stephen Colbert jokes that ‘remote learning means there’s a remote chance of learning!’)

As you’ll see in the article, due to dissatisfaction with online learning, an increasing number of public school parents have now begun to question whether the early years of education, even in person, are essential to their child’s education. Their thinking is their older kids didn’t benefit from virtual learning during the pandemic years yet now seem fine in second and third grade. Consequently, these parents have opted to delay starting their younger child’s formal schooling until First Grade.

While I recognize that online schooling for most kids, particularly young ones, didn’t maximize their learning needs, that’s not a valid reason for postponing their younger children’s schooling until First Grade. 

I worry for those children who are skipping preschool and kindergarten to remain at home or in day care.

As all of us know, a strong academic and character foundation (what parents, after all, want for their children) is shaped progressively, with each previous year supporting the next one. A foundation with a weak base is wobbly and easily crumbles. Sadly, a societal bias continues to believe that early education is not essential and that kids ‘will eventually catch up after a few years.’ 

Clearly, Trinity’s Early Learners, PreK, and Kindergarten grades provide our students with both a strong cognitive and, perhaps more importantly, social-emotional head start! 

Joe

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Aylah Levy had some catching up to do this fall when she started first grade. After spending her kindergarten year at an alternative program that met exclusively outdoors, Aylah, 6, had to adjust to being inside a classroom. She knew only a handful of numbers and was not printing her letters clearly.

Still, her mother, Hannah Levy, says it was the right decision to skip kindergarten. She wanted Aylah to enjoy being a kid. There is plenty of time, she reasoned, for her daughter to develop study skills.

The number of kindergartners in public school plunged during the Covid pandemic. Concerned about the virus or wanting to avoid online school, hundreds of thousands of families delayed the start of school for their young children. Most have returned to schooling of some kind, but even three years after the pandemic school closures, kindergarten enrollment has continued to lag.

Some parents like Levy don’t see much value in traditional kindergarten. For others, it’s a matter of keeping children in other child care arrangements that better fit their lifestyles. And for many, kindergarten simply is no longer the assumed first step in a child’s formal education, another sign of the way the pandemic and online learning  upended the U.S. school system.

Kindergarten is considered a crucial year for children to learn to follow directions, regulate behavior and get accustomed to learning. Missing that year of school can put kids at a disadvantage, especially those from low-income families and families whose first language is not English, said Deborah Stipek, a former dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Those children are sometimes behind in recognizing letters and counting to 10 even before starting school, she said.

But to some parents, that foundation seems less urgent post-pandemic. For many, kindergarten just doesn’t seem to work for their lives.

Students who disengaged during the pandemic school closures have been making their way back to schools. But kindergarten enrollment remained down 5.2% in the 2022-2023 school year compared with the 2019-2020 school year. Public school enrollment across all grades fell 2.2%.

Kindergarten means a seismic change in some families’ lifestyles. After years of all-day child care, they suddenly must manage afternoon pickups with limited and expensive options for after-school care. Some worry their child isn’t ready for the structure and behavioral expectations of a public school classroom. And many think whatever their child misses at school can be quickly learned in first grade.

Christina Engram was set to send her daughter Nevaeh to kindergarten this fall at her neighborhood school in Oakland, until she learned her daughter would not have a spot in the after-school program there. That meant she would need to be picked up at 2:30 most afternoons.

“If I put her in public school, I would have to cut my hours, and I basically wouldn’t have a good income for me and my kids,” said Engram, a preschool teacher and a mother of two.

Engram decided to keep Nevaeh in a child care center for another year. Engram receives a state child care subsidy that helps her pay for full-time child care or preschool until her child is 6 and must enroll in first grade.

Compared with kindergarten, she believed her daughter would be more likely to receive extra attention at the child care center, which has more adult staff per child.

“She knows her numbers. She knows her ABC’s. She knows how to spell her name,” Engram said. “But when she feels frustrated that she can’t do something, her frustration overtakes her. She needs extra attention and care. She has some shyness about her when she thinks she’s going to give the wrong answer.”

Many would-be kindergartners are among the tens of thousands of families that have turned to homeschooling.

Some parents say they came to homeschooling almost accidentally. Convinced their family wasn’t ready for “school,” they kept their 5-year-old home, then found they needed more structure. They purchased some activities or a curriculum — and homeschooling stuck.

Others chose homeschooling for kindergartners after watching older children in traditional school. Jenny Almazan is homeschooling Ezra, 6, after pulling his sister Emma, 9, from a school in Chino, California.

“She would rush home from school, eat dinner, do an hour or two of schoolwork, shower and go to bed. She wasn’t given time to be a kid,” Almazan said. Almazan also worried about school shootings and pressures her kids might face at school to act or dress a certain way.

To make it all work, Almazan quit her job as a preschool teacher. Most days, the children’s learning happens outside of the home, when they are playing at the park, visiting museums or even doing math while grocery shopping.

“My kids are not missing anything by not being in public school,” she said. “Every child has different needs. I’m not saying public school is bad. It’s not. But for us, this fits.”

Kindergarten is important for all children, but especially those who do not attend preschool or who haven’t had much exposure to math, reading and other subjects, said Steve Barnett, co-director for the National Institute for Early Education Research and a professor at Rutgers University.

“The question actually is: If you didn’t go to kindergarten, what did you do instead?” he said.

Hannah Levy chose the Berkeley Forest School to start her daughter’s education, in part because she valued how teachers infused subjects like science with lessons on nature. She pictured traditional kindergarten as a place where children sit inside at desks, do worksheets and have few play-based experiences.

“I learned about nature. We learned in a different way,” daughter Aylah said.

But the appeal of a suburban school system had brought the family from San Francisco, and when it came time for first grade, Aylah enrolled at Cornell Elementary in Albany.

Early this fall, Levy recalled Aylah coming home with a project where every first grader had a page in a book to write about who they were. Some pages had only scribbles and others had legible print. She said Aylah fell somewhere in the middle.

“It was interesting to me because it was the moment I thought, ‘What would it be like if she was in kindergarten?’” she said.

In a conference with Levy, Aylah’s teacher said she was working with the girl on her writing, but there were no other concerns. “She said anything Aylah was behind on, she has caught up to the point that she would never differentiate that Aylah didn’t go to Cornell for kindergarten as well,” Levy said.

Free-Range Parenting

This week's article summary is I Have to Push My Own Limits to Let My Kids Find Theirs.

Being a parent today is much more challenging than it was one or two generations ago. 

Back then, societal norms afforded kids ample opportunity to be kids and to play and explore without constant adult supervision. Parents weren’t shamed if their children weren’t overscheduled after school and in the summer, complained they were ‘bored’, or broke an arm falling out of a tree.

This article explores today’s parent conundrum of wishing for their children to grow up confident and self-assured while also wanting to keep them safe and protected. The paradox is that too much parent protection stifles a child’s growth, which can create a psychologically fragile, dependent young adult. 

Most parents today know that being a helicopter parent is too smothering, yet they bristle at the other extreme: free-range parenting.

The world today is considered by most to be more dangerous than 10, 20, 40 years ago, even though data shows that today’s kids are growing up in perhaps the safest time in human history. 

In today’s risk-averse society, we need more trailblazing parents to loosen up a bit and give their kids more unsupervised latitude to develop the executive functions skills like resilience and responsible decision-making highlighted in last week's summary..

Joe

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A few weeks ago, my older son’s elementary school took part in National Walk and Bike to School Day, which meant meeting the school’s teachers in a parking lot a mile from the school and walking there en masse — with a police escort. It is remarkable to me that we need a national holiday to encourage people to walk to school, and that the journey has to be so carefully orchestrated.

A few years ago a family in Maryland made headlines for letting their kids, ages 6 and 10, walk to a park a mile away from their home. Local police picked up the kids and delivered them to Child Protective Services.

My son’s childhood couldn’t be more different from my father’s. By the time he finished high school, he had fallen from a tree two stories high and broken both arms; run through a glass door, causing a gash so deep and so near his eye that doctors weren’t sure they could safely stitch it up; raced a homemade go-cart down an impossibly steep hill, nearly killing a cow; and stuck his foot in a vat of 375-degree oil, resulting in months in the hospital.

The drama of these stories overshadows a quieter truth about his childhood. Most days, especially in summer, he would grab a bag lunch at home and spend long hours outside exploring, playing, and getting into his fair share of less life-threatening mischief.

Since becoming a parent, I’ve been amazed by how our culture has so circumscribed children’s freedom of movement, and surprised by my own complicated feelings about kids and risk. Our risk-averse society is not just a benign outcome of our overly litigious age, but also has deep personal and political implications for the kids we are raising.

“Physical freedom models all kinds of freedom, for children learn with both body and mind. When they see themselves demonstrate physical courage, they also learn moral or political courage — and independent thought, which has profound political implications.”

The Maryland parents who made news by letting their kids wander the neighborhood unaccompanied ascribe to a movement called “free-range parenting,” which the Washington Post described as “a counterpoint to the hyper-vigilance of ‘helicopter’ parenting, with the idea that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to progressively test limits, make choices and venture out in the world.”

Our risk-averse society works against the child’s instinct to find a working relationship with chance and risk — otherwise their adventures cannot even begin.

I’m drawn to the values behind free-range parenting, but I’ve always had a hard time living up to those ideals. While my childhood wasn’t as wild as my dad’s, I had lots of good adventures exploring the fields and forests around my house. I walked over a mile to school from second grade on, and spent hours building elaborate contraptions in my dad’s wood shop without supervision.

Watching kids scramble around a playground or sword-fight with sticks, I have to actively fight my reflex to keep everyone entirely safe at all times. As if that were even possible.

Sometimes, as I see my oldest son about to leap from some high peak or scramble across the outer edge of the play structure, I hear my own words as if they’re coming from someone I don’t fully recognize: “Be careful!” “Safety first!” Or, when his 3-year-old brother follows after him, teetering out to reach the monkey bars, I race over to spot him, never letting him learn from falling.

Parenting is full of negotiations and contradictions. For me, no tension is greater than that between wanting to develop a spirit of wild adventure and self-reliance in my kids and the deep yearning to keep them safe, and I’ve recognized the same search for balance between risk and safety in “adventure playgrounds.”

In her research into “the overprotected child” for The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin interviewed Ellen Sandseter, a scholar of early childhood education who has studied “risky play.” Sandseter identifies specific kinds of risky play — like exploring heights, handling dangerous tools, and roughhousing — and explains that they are important to childhood development because they help kids develop their own sense of limits instead of imposing them from the outside. When kids define their own limits, rooted in emotions like fear, excitement, and unease, they learn to master those emotions and negotiate their surroundings.

“Growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions,” Rosin writes. But how do we, as parents, square this with the fierce instinct to do anything we can to protect our kids from harm? I watch my kids careening down a hill on their bikes, or wandering away to go exploring at the park, and I feel it in my gut. How do we decide when to shout out and when to shut up?

These worries persist even in the face of logic and statistics suggesting that overprotecting kids isn’t making them more safe. These fears are visceral and immediate, whereas the threat posed by removing risk and play from kids’ daily lives is one that’s much harder to see from where we’re standing.

When we take those experiences away, we’re making a trade-off: short term safety versus long-term experience. Our control versus their judgment. We think of these things in binaries. If we give up order, we will end up with disorder. If we give up control, we will end up with chaos.

I understand the benefits of risky play in my head, but so much of parenting comes from my heart. What I’m slowly learning is that by listening to my head — without ignoring my heart — I can give my kids space to make up their own minds. Sometimes we have to push our own limits to let our kids find theirs.

 

Building Resilience in Students

This week's article summary is Building Resilience in Students, and it's a continuation of the past two summaries about developing student character.

As this week’s article attests, developing executive functioning skills in students is less about the direct teaching of skills like self-control and more about creating a classroom climate/culture that is nurturing, challenging, and consistent.

Infant brains naturally develop within an environment of warmth, care, and safety. Just as we discussed during Preplanning, the need to belong and be cared for is innate. Within a safe, caring environment an infant’s brain begins to develop its parts that govern executive functioning skills like resilience. As we know, this is a low process, and the brain’s prefrontal cortex isn’t fully formed until  late teens (for girls) and early 20s (for boys).

Equally important, classrooms need the attributes adults crave in the workplace: a sense of purpose, opportunities to grow and learn, a collaborative community, and the latitude to be autonomous and independent. With these qualities, non-cognitive skills needed for success develop.

We talked in Preplanning about embracing a both/and mindset in the classroom. This article supports the interrelation between cognitive and non-cognitive skill development in kids—an enduring strength of Trinity!

Joe

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Academic achievement researchers have been studying a set of personal qualities—often referred to as non-cognitive skills, or character strengths—that include resilience, conscientiousness, optimism, self-control, and grit.

These capacities generally aren’t captured by standardized tests, but they seem to make a big difference in the academic success of children.

Yet nobody has found a reliable way to teach kids to be grittier or more resilient.

And those teachers who are best able to engender non-cognitive abilities in their students often do so without really “teaching” these capacities the way one might teach math or reading—indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom.

What is emerging is a new idea: that qualities like grit and resilience are not formed through the traditional mechanics of “teaching”; instead, they are shaped by several specific environmental forces, both in the classroom and in the home.

 For most children, the skill-development process leading up to kindergarten generally works the way it’s supposed to: Calm, consistent, responsive interactions in infancy with parents create neural connections that lay the foundation for a healthy array of attention and concentration skills.

Early warmth and responsiveness send the signals: You’re safe; life is going to be fine. Let down your guard; the people around you will protect you and provide for you. Be curious about the world; it’s full of fascinating surprises. These messages trigger adaptations in children’s brains that allow them to slow down and consider problems and decisions more carefully, to focus their attention for longer periods, and to more willingly trade immediate gratification for promises of long-term benefits.

The guiding theory behind much of the school discipline practiced in the United States today—and certainly behind the zero-tolerance, suspension-heavy approach that has dominated since the 1990s—is behaviorism, which is grounded in the idea that humans respond to incentives and reinforcement. If we get positive reinforcement for a certain behavior, we’re likely to do it more; if we get negative reinforcement, we’re likely to do it less. On some level, behaviorism works. People, including children, respond well to behavioral cues, at least in the short term.

But researchers are coming to understand that there are limits to the effectiveness of rewards and punishments in education.

If we want students to act in ways that will maximize their future opportunities—to persevere through challenges, to delay gratification, to control their impulses—we need to consider what might motivate them to take those difficult steps.

Students will be more likely to display these positive academic habits when they are in an environment where they feel a sense of belonging, independence, and growth.

These teachers are able to convey deep messages—perhaps implicitly or even subliminally—about belonging, connection, ability, and opportunity. And somehow those messages had a profound impact on students’ psychology, and thus on their behavior.

The environment those teachers create in the classroom, and the messages that environment convey, motivate students to start making better decisions—to show up to class, to persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student’s school day.

A teacher may never be able to get students to be gritty, in the sense of developing some essential character trait called grit. But you can make them act gritty—to behave in gritty ways in your classroom.

Messages that teachers convey—large and small, explicit and implicit—affect the way students feel in the classroom, and thus the way they behave there.