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Advice for ParentsTeaching behavior resolution an easy SEL
By Leanna
Landsmann
Q: I'm on our middle
school's Parent-Teacher Council. We want to reduce bullying, fights and other
behavioral problems, but we don't want to add more police officers. One member
argues for a curriculum to increase students' "social and emotional learning."
We don't need another curriculum. Teachers are too swamped with academic goals!
What is "social and emotional learning," and how is it taught?
A:
Social and emotional learning -- referred to as SEL -- isn't really a curriculum.
It's a process of teaching students skills they need to calm themselves when angry,
manage their emotions, resolve conflicts, work in teams, set and achieve positive
goals, and make ethical and safe choices. SEL has a growing group of supporters
-- from corporate leaders who look for character as well as "brain power"
in new hires, to filmmaker George Lucas, Special Olympics chair Tim Shriver, and
Daniel Goleman, author of "Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human
Relationships" (Bantam, 2007). SEL is about educating both hearts and
minds, says Sally Reed, a Chicago-based education writer who tracks the movement.
"SEL is drawing attention because in many schools, the social contract is
broken. Teachers say students simply haven't learned to get along in life. While
NCLB sets high academic standards, students can't succeed when they're fighting,
disrespectful to teachers or simply have poor attitudes. As your writer notes,
one more police officer in the halls isn't the answer. People are saying: enough!
Without a focus on the emotional as well as the academic aspects of learning,
students can't reach their potential." Reed notes that Illinois recently
became the first state to add social and emotional learning standards to its curriculum
goals. She suggests looking at the results of a recent study on the link between
emotional learning and academic performance lead by Roger Weissberg, professor
of psychology and education, University of Illinois at Chicago. His team studied
student performance in schools that explicitly teach and reinforce social and
emotional skills and compared it with student performance in schools that do not.
The results are impressive, says Reed. Students who participated in SEL
programs significantly improved attitudes toward school, themselves and others;
they improved social and classroom behavior, reduced poor conduct and aggression,
showed less stress and depression, and improved their grades and tests scores.
That relationship to improved learning is a key reason districts are implementing
SEL. "It isn't a magic bullet, but social and emotional learning can produce
higher test scores, fewer behavioral problems and less violent schools.,"
says Weissberg. How is SEL taught? In most of the programs Weissberg reviewed,
SEL skills are embedded in the educational process. For example, a middle-school
teacher might assign a problem-solving project and divide the students into teams.
The students are told: you'll be graded both individually and on your success
as a group. The grades will not only reflect the intellectual quality of your
work, you'll also be graded on your ability to form productive relationships with
each other, on how you work as a team. Goleman, a psychologist who advises
companies on employee productivity, says SEL skills are the ones that make people
successful over the long haul. "You can graduate with top grades from MIT,
but if you can't collaborate with co-workers, you've got a problem. These are
human skills -- how to get along, how to cooperate, be self-aware, manage emotions,
handle impulse, how to empathize, work out conflicts. But they're not taught in
the standard academic curriculum." For more information, go to The
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning website, www.casel.org. Copyright
2008, United Feature Syndicate, Inc. A-PLUS ADVICE FOR PARENTS 10-20-08 Submission
inquiries? Contact Stacey Pusey at 856-241-7772. | |
