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.

Parenting Styles

This week’s article summary is Parenting Styles Explained.

If you’re a parent, you probably struggle with how to parent your child/children. While we all strive to be firm but fair, finding that sweet spot between the extremes of being lax and permissive on the one hand and being tough and strict on the other is a constantly moving target. Often added to the mix is a spouse whose parenting style and philosophy differ from you, and, if you have more than one child, the fact that each one often requires different parenting techniques, hence the expression fair does not mean equal.

Earlier this week, Erica and Carli facilitated a UED parenting meeting (with the EED meeting to follow next Monday). In their opening comments, they discussed the three Hurdles of Child Development: developing a sense of self, developing social competence, and developing academic motivation. Carli and Erica spoke about the importance of parents supporting, encouraging, guiding but not domineering their children in the hopes of helping them become self-empowered and assured in the three areas above. They and the UED parents then dialogues about the inevitable ups and downs children have in those three areas.

We all want our kids to be successful, happy, fulfilled, and to not make “big” mistakes, i.e., ones with lasting effects. The challenge for all parents is recognizing  a potential big mistake from an opportunity for a learning experience. As a parent of two kids now in their late 20s and early 30s, I see that what I thought were big mistakes leading to the ‘road to ruin’  were in fact natural testing of limits and important learning opportunities that did have consequences but the ones that helped my kids see that their choices had real world implications.

Seeing real world implications can be tough for elementary school kids especially within the intentional safety (physical and emotional) of Trinity where we appropriately provide lots of cushioned landings for stumbles and missteps. Always keep in mind as a parent and as a teacher that choices and decisions (the good, bad, and ugly) our children/students make are helping them ultimately become self-reliant and compassionate adults. As a parent, the natural instinct is to rush in to help when often we need to remain on the sidelines of our kids’ lives. It takes much patience and restraint to be a parent (and a teacher). As the book The Self-Driven Child espouses, it’s better for a parent to be a consultant to his/her child and not his/her boss.

I think the grands who spent this morning at Trinity had big smiles on their faces because they aren’t worried about life lessons for their grandkids; they just want to enjoy the moment with their grandkids, cherishing their childhood!

Joe

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Sure, every parent wants the best for their kid. But one look around the playground and it's impossible not notice that there are a ton of different parenting styles out there. For example, are you the parent who rushes your child to the doctor for a paper cut? Or are you the rub-some-dirt-on-it type?

From the constantly hovering helicopter parent to the totally hands off free-range approach, we broke down the five most common parenting styles being adopted by moms and dads today.

Free-Range Parenting: The official definition of “free-range” is livestock kept in natural conditions, with freedom of movement. Without referring to livestock, free-range parenting is similar in the way that these parents allow their children the independence and self-reliance of being less-supervised or unsupervised in public—like a park for example. For a long time, parents who practice this style were considered neglectful, endangering their children due to lack of supervision. But, more recently (and after much debate) states like Utah have passed laws in favor of the hands-off parenting style—it can instill amazing qualities like self-sufficiency and resilience.

Lighthouse Parenting: The lighthouse approach is acting like a lighthouses for our children. Stable beacons of light on the shoreline from which they can measure themselves against. Role models. We should look down at the rocks and make sure they do not crash against them. We should look into the water and prepare them to ride the waves, and we should trust in their capacity to learn to do so. This means finding the perfect balance when loving, protecting, communicating, and nurturing your child.

Lawnmower Parenting: Instead of preparing children for challenges, they mow obstacles down so kids won’t experience them in the first place. Lawnmower parents (also known as snowplow or bulldozer parents) are easily willing to drop everything to fulfill their child’s wants and demands no matter how small. These parents often have good intentions and are motivated by not wanting their children to experience struggle. But, these habits don’t provide a foundation for long-term happiness, they can actually strengthen a child’s anxiety of failure.

Helicopter Parenting: If you’re an overprotective parent who feels the need to control most aspects of your child’s life you likely fit the bill of a helicopter parent. Helicopter parents constantly intervene to prevent failures, overlook their kids’ weaknesses, and hovers closely. These consistent risk assessing tendencies are often driven by fear and anxiety that can hinder a child’s ability to learn integral life skills, confidence, and self-sufficiency.

Tiger Parenting: Often displaying rigid and harsh characteristics, tiger parents expect first-time obedience, excellence in every endeavor and a child who never talks back. While tiger parents can raise children to be more productive, motivated, and responsible, children can form anxiety, poor social skills, and face difficulty functioning in a day-to-day setting due to their parent’s high demands, name calling, and constant expectations for perfection

The Importance of Perspective Taking

This week’s article summary is Learning to Walk in Another's Shoes.

While many schools in the past few years have begun to formally teach social-emotional skills, schools like Trinity have always included character development as a vital part of their curriculum.

I like to break down social-emotional skills into two categories: intrapersonal (agency, sense of self) and interpersonal (communion, sense of others).

The article below believes that 'perspective taking…the capacity to make sense of others’ thoughts and feelings’ is perhaps the most important social-emotional skill to develop in our students. 

For those of you who have read To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch tries to impart this on his two children, Jem and Scout, in a depression-era, segregated Alabama town. By the end of the book, Jem and Scout learn to better understand those who the townspeople have written off due to race, socio-economics, or education level.

As the article says, if we can help kids become social detectives trying to assess why others act and behave rather than rushing to judgment from our limited perspective, the world could be a much better place.

Joe

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Implementing social-emotional learning in schools raises some important questions:

• Which “soft” skills matter most? Students being caring, morally upstanding, purpose-driven, or empathetic?
• Which proficiencies can teachers actually change? For example, is it realistic that schools can make students more caring?
• Aren’t some social-emotional skills really values that should be addressed by families?

The danger with social-emotional learning is that we get excited about it, implement a handful of versions, find ourselves daunted by the vast array of components that need to be taught and assessed, become frustrated, and then move on to the next big thing.

This won’t happen if we focus on a single, teachable capacity that anchors almost all of our social interactions: social perspective taking, or the capacity to make sense of others’ thoughts and feelings. The motivation and ability to ‘read’ other people, vividly imagining their unique psychological experience, provides the compass by which we navigate our social world. This capacity allows us to interpret the motivations and behaviors of our friends and neighbors, or to see situations from the point of view of strangers, or to understand and appreciate values and beliefs that diverge from our own. Without it, we cannot empathize, engage in moral reasoning, love, or even hold a normal conversation.  Research suggests that perspective-taking is linked to less stereotyping of others, responding less aggressively to provocation, and developing better relationships with those with different beliefs – in other words, there’s a ripple effect to a number of other social-emotional competencies.

Perspective-taking can be taught in schools if four key steps are followed:

• Mustering the motivation to take the perspective of people outside our immediate family and social circle – for example, a cashier, a driver who cuts us off in traffic, a former classmate encountered at a reunion.
• Choosing a particular strategy to use when “reading” the other person – for example, empathizing with someone who is terrified of giving a wedding toast (something you have no problem with) by thinking about waiting for a dentist’s opinion on a root canal.
• Coordinating the available data to make inferences about the other person – for example, reading body language and facial expressions together with verbal cues.
• After making inferences, evaluating if we’re on the right track, because it’s not easy to know what makes another person tick. “All we can do,” says Gehlbach, “is keep seeking feedback, keep trying to read people, and keep refining our impressions as we learn more.”

These skills are learnable and they have a domino effect with other social-emotional skills. Perspective-taking can be integrated into any class at any grade level. Below are three precepts to keep in mind:

            • Make it a classroom expectation for students to talk about others’ perspectives. Teachers can ask questions like, “What are some possible reasons the British may have wanted to appease Hitler?” rather than “Why did the British appease Hitler?” Students can also be asked to play devil’s advocate or restate a classmate’s opinion before responding to it. “When disagreements or interpersonal conflicts arise,” says Gehlbach, “it should be considered the norm for students to explain their side of the story and to listen while the other side explains theirs.”

            • Encourage students to be social detectives, not judges. It’s easy for students to jump to conclusions about a teacher giving low grades because she’s mean or a classmate starting a rumor because he’s spiteful, but they can be weaned away from shoot-from-the-hip characterizations by asking questions like, Why might she have done that? or What’s his version of what happened? The more students get in the habit of investigating others’ perspectives rather than rushing to judge them, the more skilled they’ll become at looking for clues that might illuminate others’ decisions and behaviors.

            • Provide low-stakes opportunities for practice. Perspective-taking is an unfamiliar process for many students, and it has to be okay to make mistakes as they learn.

Once in the habit of trying to gauge other people’s ways of looking at the world, they will inevitably become more empathetic, more understanding, and more caring; they will become more thoughtful about how to navigate relationships; and they will become more likely to reach out across cultural groups rather than withdrawing into their own clique.