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SEL Can Aid in Academic Recovery

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A recent editorial by SEL expert Sara Rimm-Kauffman, originally published in the Los Angeles Times, highlights SEL’s role in helping schools and students recover from the impacts of the pandemic.

Also, at a time like this, we can’t just think about academics, but also must consider a child’s social and emotional skills and well-being. It’s a good time to ask about our long-term goals for children and youth. In the 21st century, kids face an increasingly uncertain future. It’s not just about learning, but also about using new knowledge to work with others to address real-world problems in their communities and beyond.

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SEL Supports Academic Recovery After Pandemic

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Maurice Elias of the EQuip Our Kids! speaker bureau was recently quoted regarding SEL’s support for academic recovery following the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Elias directs the Social-Emotional and Character Development Lab at Rutgers University.

We need to prioritize schools and classrooms that are safe, caring, supportive, and inclusive if we are to optimize students’ academic progress. This is true under any conditions, but especially so as a consequence of a pandemic. We need urgency leavened with loving patience.”

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How ‘Social and Emotional Learning’ Became the Newest Battleground

by with No Comment EducatorsIn The MediaParents & CaregiversPolicymakers

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a longstanding educational concept aimed at teaching children skills like managing stress, treating others with respect and empathy, working cooperatively, and recognizing emotions.

 

But even as some educators have turned to social-emotional learning as a tool to help students navigate the loss and disruption brought about by the pandemic, conservative groups and lawmakers who have sought to restrict how race and gender are discussed in school have also turned their attention to SEL, arguing that it too can be a vector for discussions about identity and equity.

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Take This EQ Self-Assessment

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1-Self-Awareness

  • What are my thoughts and feelings?
  • What causes those thoughts and feelings?
  • How can I express my thoughts and feelings respectfully?

2-Self-Management

  • What different responses can I have to an event?
  • How can I respond to an event as constructively as possible?

3-Social Awareness

  • How can I better understand other people’s thoughts and feelings?
  • How can I better understand why people feel and think the way they do?

4-Relationship Skills

  • How can I adjust my actions so that my interactions with different people turn out well?
  • How can I communicate my expectations to other people?
  • How can I communicate with other people to understand and manage their expectations of me?

5-Responsible Decision Making

  • What consequences will my actions have on me and others?
  • How do my choices align with my values?
  • How can I solve problems creatively?
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The Power of SEL

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Social-Emotional Learning  empowers children to manage their own behavior in positive and productive ways, shifting control to the child.

This counters the “compliance model” widely used in U.S. schools, where adults hold all the power in classrooms and children are passive participants, not drivers of their own development and learning.

Being active in their own development is fundamental to children’s Emotional Intelligence learning, along with acquiring the ability to manage one’s emotions. Managing one’s emotions is hardly a given for a large segment of the population that, without this learning, is beset with remarkably high numbers of people suffering from anxiety or depression, anger issues, or high degrees of interpersonal conflict, violence and suicide.

In fact, most of us experience more emotional upsets and their consequences than we would prefer – in relationships, work, friendships, and in the everyday course of life.

This may be good for the bottom lines of pharmaceutical companies and therapists but is hugely costly in infinite ways to the common good and to the pocketbook of the society as a whole.

Neuroscience readily supports the positive effects of Social-Emotional Learning. Emotional reactions have been found to reside in the primordially-earlier lower brain around the amygdala while more sophisticated learning, thinking, and creativity occur in the later-in-evolution frontal lobes or “higher brain.” Brain scans show that when the lower brain is activated by emotional upset it lights up while the higher brain literally goes dark in activity.

The implications for students can’t be overstated – all learning stops while students are emotionally agitated, with their minds either distracted or full of negative thoughts about themselves, others or the situations they are in. (Read more about Neuroscience.)

Conversely, academic learning takes place on a rapid scale once students are taught to manage their emotions and responses. Surveys of student and teacher satisfaction often soar into the 90 percentile after a school prioritizes Social-Emotional Learning.

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An important note: Social-Emotional Learning should not be confused with what educators call “Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS),” a widely implemented system based on “carrot-like” tangible rewards.

Moreover, in uninformed reports, some EQ goals and subset practices are mistakenly taken for the entire complex of EQ learnings students experience. Examples are “violence prevention,” “anti-bullying,” “grit,” “resilience,” “mindfulness” and “growth mindset” practices – the latter a training to be able to take on challenges and failures as normal and educational in themselves rather than as obstacles and defeats.

One other note: Education is littered with competing terms for Social-Emotional Learning, among them “emotional literacy,” “non-cognitive education,” “character education,” and “ethical and moral development.” By whatever name, schools adopting such learning should include the core competencies explained here and their goal should be the other term popular with educators: “Whole Child Development.”

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A Short History of Emotional Intelligence

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The concept of EQ sprang from the landmark work of Harvard Education Professor Dr. Howard Gardner’s 1983-published theory about the “multiple intelligences” that humans possess. Specifically, EQ falls into a category he defined as ”inter- and intrapersonal” intelligence.

Building on this, two researchers – then Yale psychology professor Peter Salovey (now president of Yale) and University of New Hampshire psychology professor John D. Mayer – published an influential paper in 1990 introducing the term “Emotional Intelligence,” which Goleman cites in his work.

The term EQ over time often became coupled with the term “social intelligence,” meaning the ability to understand, empathize with, and influence the emotions of others.

From Goleman: “In practical terms, this means being aware that emotions can drive our behavior and impact people (positively and negatively), and learning how to manage those  emotions – both our own and others – especially when we are under pressure.”

Marc Brackett, Director of Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, and Susan Rivers, protégés of Salovey, put it this way: “The process of integrating thinking, feeling, and behaving in order to become aware of the self and of others, make responsible decisions, and manage one’s own behaviors and those of others.”

Psychology Today dives in with this definition: “The ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problems solving….[and] the ability to cheer up or calm down another person.”

Youth-focused approaches that combine EQ development with other life skills have now come to be defined by the term Social-Emotional Learning by educators and in child development and psychology realms, as well as in certain business quarters that apply such learning to adults.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, the nation’s leading SEL practice, policy, and research organization, defines SEL as “the process through which children (and adults) acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.”

CASEL pointedly notes that for SEL to be highly effective it needs to “nest” and be practiced in all school environments by all staff, including integrated in academic classes and non-class activities, in community service by students, and with parents integrated at the school level.

CASEL believes that SEL, correctly implemented, is the platform and process for a potential revolutionary leap forward in educating the “whole child.”

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12 Crucial Facts About Emotional Intelligence

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  1. Schools that implement comprehensive SEL as basic curriculum see all the good markers go up. These include improvements in engagement in learning, higher test scores (by an average of 11 points or 20%), responsible behaviors, healthy emotional states and quality relationships with others.  Also in: clarity of thinking, good decision making, creativity,  communications skills, empathy, student self-confidence, and teacher and students satisfaction.  Learn more.
  2. These same schools see all negative markers decline, often dramatically. These include violence, bullying, racial and class bias, drug usage, suicides, acting-out behaviors, teacher abuse, screen addiction, low attendance and low graduation and college rates. Learn more.
  3. EQ skills dissolve, in children and adults, their alienation, inability to process anger, emotional suffering, violence and abusiveness – and blocks to learning. 
  4. Nothing in the human toolbox has been proven to uplift children, schools and youth mental health better. When children develop emotional intelligence (EQ) they problem solve and help each other. They reinforce each other’s learning and relate to other people with understanding and empathy. They resolve conflicts and establish and maintain positive relationships and high academic results. And they are much happier.
  5. The earlier children learn EQ skills and mindset the better. Children can start to be taught EQ at home from birth. A study of 4-year old preschool children found that 25 years later their lives in almost every dimension were in considerably better shape than those of a similar control group that lacked EQ training in pre-school. Learn more.
  6. Neuroscience research helps explain and validates a child’s improvements in behavior, performance, brain function and emotional life.  Learn more.
  7. Research reveals EQ is more relevant than IQ to personal success, quality lives, health and happiness – and to positive outcomes for communities and workplaces. See the Harvard Business Review case study (subscription required).
  8. Well into adulthood, EQ-trained students experience significantly lower rates of mental and physical health issues, crime, conflict, hard drug usage, racial biases,  and welfare and poverty than populations that do not experience the training, lowering the cost of government and employer remedial programs. Learn more. 
  9. Most violence, crime, rape, child sexual and other abuse and human conflict and racism  stems for low EQ. Learn more.
  10. Only 10-15% of pre-K-12  U.S. schools (public, private and charter) implement full-on social-emotional learning curriculum. The reason is that 90% of parents and the public don’t even know SEL exists – hence little to no calls on schools and legislators to prioritize and fund it.
  11. Long-term studies show on net balance that SEL saves $11 to $15 per pupil in remedial costs over the costs of implementing it.  Learn more.
  12. Many employers are already providing adult social and emotional skills training for employees. Lots more employers – it’s becoming a wave now – are putting high EQ at the top of their hiring qualities because higher EQ throughout the workplace demonstrably produces better productivity, more profits and happier workplace with higher retention rates. Learn more.

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