This week's article summary is Middle and High School Students Need Social-Emotional Learning Too But Are They Getting It?
I feel very lucky to have attended a small (80 kids in my senior class) independent-private school for middle and high school. Even though the school was located in the middle of Long Island’s Gold Coast where opulence and conspicuous consumption were the norms (hence the reason F. Scott Fitzgerald set The Great Gatsby there), the values the school imparted on me were humility, moderation, and simplicity. Academics were important yet teachers also equally cared about their students’ character development. Who I am today (my sense of self, how I treat others, etc.) was significantly shaped by my middle and high school years. As we all know, our teen years require support and guidance beyond academics.
Next Tuesday is our first Admission Open House. Brad talks about how Trinity cherishes the wonder and innocence of childhood and then I follow by talking about how we prepare our kids for future. I cover a strong academic foundation (literacy, numeracy, well-rounded experiences through specials classes) but I spend just as much time discussing how we develop our students’ character: their confident but not entitled sense of self and their sincere care and concern for others.
Focus on the whole child (cognition, character, confidence, curiosity) is a given in most elementary schools, yet too often is lacking in middle and high schools. And as the article points out, adolescents need social-emotional support and guidance today more than ever. The limits of in-person interaction due to Covid is certainly a factor as is the ubiquity of social media and the expectation that kids need to be perfect to get and stay ahead of their peers.
There’s some optimism in the article as middle and high schools begin to devote more time to the social-emotional needs of their students although it takes a long time to effect change middle and high school cultures that are so different from us in elementary school. We do our part in shaping a solid foundation in our students, yet our graduates are still works in progress and need advice, guidance, role modeling, and monitoring.
Joe
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In the secondary school years, students are grappling with some big questions: Who are they? How do they fit into the world? How do they form healthy relationships? These questions grow to a crescendo in high school where students face another daunting query: What will they do with themselves once they graduate?
Even in normal times, the journey through grades 6-12 can be fraught for students, but the pandemic has made it especially complicated as many are struggling with more anxiety, depression, grief, uncertainty, and loneliness.
That’s why experts in social-emotional learning and child development say the secondary school years are a crucial time to focus on teaching skills, such as responsible decision-making, emotional management, and nurturing relationships.
But the older students get, the less schools have traditionally emphasized social-emotional learning.
“Not that I don’t think that schools think it’s important, it’s just where are you going to find the time and who’s going to teach it when they’re focused on different academic subjects?” said Tia Kim, from the Committee for Children, a nonprofit that promotes social-emotional learning and student well-being. “In our experience, that’s what we’ve heard—where logistically are you going to fit it in?”
It’s harder to find time to include explicit social-emotional lessons in a secondary school schedule, she said, where students are changing classes and teachers every hour. When schools do carve out the space to teach social and emotional skills, it is often during a specific class period such as advisory or English.
There is also more emphasis—or pressure—in secondary schools to focus on academics, said Kim, leaving educators to feel like they don’t have the time to teach social and emotional skills.
Education Week has found that schools tended to emphasize social-emotional learning much more in the early grades and less so as students went on to middle school and high school.
Those attitudes may be beginning to shift.
New polling finds that 53% of district leaders say that a lot of focus is placed on social-emotional learning for students in grades 9-12, and 56% said the same for grades 6-8. Those figures are nearly on par with the 58% of district leaders who indicated a lot of focus was placed on SEL for grades 1-3.
In early 2020, when Education Week last put this question to district leaders, 38% said schools in their district placed a lot of emphasis on social and emotional learning in middle school and 31% said the same for high school.
COVID-19 has brought with it an overall rise in interest among educators in investing more in building students’ social and emotional skills to better equip them to handle the pandemic’s unique challenges.
From the student’s perspective, how are schools doing when it comes to teaching social and emotional skills? The EdWeek Research Center put several questions to a representative sample of middle and high school students at the beginning of this school year to get at whether students felt they were being taught important social and emotional skills, and whether their schools provided the support students needed to build relationships and sort out their identities.
The feedback was mixed. A little under a third of students said their school had not provided them with the help or support they feel they needed over the course of the pandemic to improve on a range of skills central to social and emotional learning, such as making responsible decisions, establishing positive relationships, and managing emotions. Many students indicated they could use more guidance in answering some of the big questions around identity. When asked if adults at their school were helping them figure out their identity—who they are, what they want to be, where they belong, and what they believe—a little less than a quarter of students said they completely agreed with the statement. Nearly half said they partly agreed.
There is no question that the pandemic has been hard on students’ social and emotional well-being. Forty-four percent of middle and high school students reported in the survey that their level of social anxiety and loneliness has gone up. Teachers reported in another survey that their students struggled more with procrastination and class participation than they did a year before and that many of their students were more often distracted by anxieties, worries, and fears during class.
But things were hard for adolescents and teens even before the pandemic, said R. Keeth Matheny, who developed a popular SEL program for his school. He said the demands on teens’ and tweens’ social and emotional skills have changed drastically from when he and many other educators were young—in large part because of social media.
“If you made a mistake, it was a mistake, and people didn’t know and define you for the next 20 years based on that,” Matheny said. “Being a teenager today has lots of big challenges with it—not just the emotional part of being a teenager and impulsivity of being a teenager. When you are a teen, you do make mistakes and say and do things that you then later think back on and go ‘I can’t believe I did that.’ But all of the sudden now, those things are recorded for posterity.”
The adolescent years are a time when students are pushing boundaries and trying to work out who they are, he said, and they need more guidance on how to make responsible decisions and grow into their identity. Matheny now runs SEL Launch Pad, a consultancy that helps schools institute SEL programs. Because of his experience with high school students, many of his clients include secondary schools.
“While I do believe that work at younger grades can be very impactful, … I also think the teenage years are very tumultuous with big emotions and novel situations and extreme social pressure,” he said. “We’re seeing our teenagers and tweenagers have significant mental health challenges. And this work can be such a powerful support in the teenage years, whether we’re talking about emotional management or self-advocacy or self-awareness or relationship skills.”
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