Do Masks Stunt Social-Emotional Growth?

This week's article summary is Do Masks Stunt Students' Social-Emotional Growth? 

As we all know, ‘to mask or not to mask’ remains a controversial topic in schools.

As Nurse Debbie constantly reminds us, while there are many practices we all need to follow to help limit Covid’s spread, the most important are to get vaccinated and to wear masks when around others.

One reason offered from those who oppose mask requirements in schools is they detract from students’ social emotional growth. 

As you’ll see from the interview below from the Senior Director at CASEL, there is little to no research that’s been done on this question. Yet as you’ll also read, kids wearing masks have displayed remarkable adaptability over the past 18 months and have shown growth in both their academic and social-emotional development.

So for Trinity,  if masking ensures that kids can be at school learning collaboratively with their peers and developing the skills and habits of a responsible, respectful member of a community, then masks are a minor inconvenience that helps us achieve our greater school goals for our children.

Joe

----------

While many students wore face masks in school last year, the issue has become incredibly heated and polarized in some regions this year. One concern that has risen out of the debates over whether children and teachers should be wearing masks in schools is whether the practice inhibits the development of social and emotional skills. But with the surge of the Delta variant, the need to protect students and school staff from infection, illness, and death is paramount. After vaccines, universal masking is the most effective way to prevent the spread of COVID, public health and medical experts say.

At the same time, social-emotional learning is a top priority for educators right now, as many see it as vital to helping students cope with the anxiety and disruptions caused by the pandemic. So, does that strip of cloth covering the nose and mouth and muffling the voice get in the way of students learning about emotions? How do masks impact teachers’ ability to get a read on how their students are feeling?

Education Week put these questions and more to Justina Schlund, the senior director of content and field learning at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL. This conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

How could masks affect students’ social and emotional development: I’m not aware of any research that shows that masks have specific or meaningful social-emotional detriment to students’ development. I think, logically, part of social-emotional learning requires being able to understand other people’s emotions, and because masks cover part of the face, they probably in some ways obscure what we can see on someone else’s face in terms of their emotions, in terms of social cues that we might be responding to. But I think the question, whether this has a negative impact on their social-emotional development is a different question than, does it make it more difficult for me to see your emotion in the moment? The past year has shown us that there are lots of challenges with social-emotional connection and learning through virtual platforms. One of the things that masks allow a lot of schools and districts to do is resume in-person learning where they have more opportunities for in-person SEL or in-person relationship building that we know are also important for students.

Which is better? Is in-person and masks better than out-of-class and virtual: It is pretty agreed-upon by most of the experts in the field that in-person learning is going to be better for most students. And so the degree to which we’re able to continue that is beneficial for students, socially, emotionally, and academically. At the same time, there are lots of ways, regardless of if you’re in person or virtual, with masks or without masks, to promote students’ social-emotional learning. 

A masked teacher facing a room of masked students wants to continue imparting social-emotional skills. What are some of the workarounds? Is this an opportunity to teach new skills: It’s absolutely an opportunity to teach new skills, beginning with the most basic. We have traditionally relied on a lot of facial expressions to help talk to students about what emotions mean and look like and feel like. This is an opportunity to expand our language and awareness about emotions. Those emotions include facial expressions, and they also include body language, they also include tone of voice, and what people may be saying through their eyes or their eyebrows and helping students to tune into that type of social awareness. We’ve seen in a lot of classrooms the use of pictures and even emojis to do checks with students, to create that time to share how they’re feeling and what their perspectives are. What was critically important before the pandemic but especially now is building a really, really strong sense of community in every classroom. This means making time and space for students to learn about each other on a more personal level, to share their interests with one another, to ask each other questions, to collaborate on projects.

An important component of SEL is good decision making. How could this time offer a lesson in building that skill: We’ve seen this throughout the pandemic. This brought up a lot of conversations in classrooms and homes with students about what does it mean to be a good community member. And what does it mean to make decisions that are responsible and that benefit not just myself, but my family and other people? Whether or not schools are choosing to have masks on right now, it’s opened up a conversation for students to engage in around how can we keep each other safe and healthy. And what factors do I need to weigh to make those types of decisions? What are some of the pros and cons, exactly? And then, how can we all work together to make those healthy decisions that keep our community safe? We often talk about SEL within the school walls, but there’s so much SEL that’s going on at home and in the community as well. Even if students have moments where they’re masked at school, they have so many opportunities to practice facial recognition of emotions and things like that at home with their families, or outside on the playground. We need to think about SEL beyond the confines of school.