Tuesday, December 12, 2017

How To Teach Social and Emotional Skills

Social and Emotional Learning is once again (or still, depending on who's talking) a thing. Character education, values education, teaching students how to be Good People. It erupts every so often in the education system, just as the business world is sporadically hit with seminars and training sessions about How To Talk To Customers or How To Interact Productively with Other Carbon Based Life Forms (you can spot people who have had these trainings because when they talk to you, it will always be in the format "Why, [insert name here], I hear what you're saying. [Insert rough paraphrase of what you think/hope the person said].")

I pin the return of SEL on the rise of test-centered learning, on a rising tide of people looking around and saying, "Oh, yeah-- I suppose there is more to learning to be a grown-up human than just bubbling answers on a Big Standardized Test." That realization has dovetailed with the push from Data Overlords and Corporate Reformers to collect data on the pertinent personality traits of these future meat widgets. After all, when I send HR to plug into cradle to career pipeline, I don't just want to order up math and reading skills-- I want to know about soft skills like showing up on time, not upsetting customers, and obediently following orders (those are the soft skills, right?)

That uneasy marriage of SEL fans underlines one of the problems of social and emotional education -- we may all agree that we want children to grow up to be good people, but whose idea of a good person? Historically, we've seen plenty of parents get prickly over the notion that a school will decide what kind of person their child should grow up to be.

Even if we can get past that, we have to figure out how to teach SEL Stuff to students, and the approaches available are bizarre, as if aliens are setting up "How To Act Like a Human Being" classes. A large number of companies offer all manner of modules, including some with scripted lessons-- because nothing says "Learn To Be a Naturally Better Human" than listening to a teacher read from a script.

Maybe these program designers and the people who adopt them aren't overthinking this. Maybe I'm not thinking enough. But I would swear that the best way ton teach students to be decent human beings is to be a decent human being in your classroom, all day, every day.

I mean, here's a Summit school-- Zuckerberg's infamous education in a box program-- running a weekly class entitled "Habits, Community, and Culture (HCC) class, where students learn Habits of Success and develop social and emotional learning (SEL) skills." It seems like a swell idea and the folks in the photo are smiling, but all I can think is "What do they do the rest of the week?"

How do you take SEL "content" and separate it from everything else, when your character is first and foremost the "How" of conducting all the other business in your life? How can you possibly split your life up so that "be ethical" is over here and "conduct daily business" is over there? Trying to develop character separate from conducting all the business is like trying to develop a Southern accent separate from speaking. It's like trying to practice swimming far from any water.

You don't get rid of bullying by running bullying programs one hour a week. You get rid of bullying by running a school that never tolerates-- or models-- bullying ever. If for one hour a week you talk about how bullying is bad, but the rest of the week you run a classroom where it's understood that some people deserve to be punished or hurt or made to feel small, your bullying program is a huge waste of time.

If you spend an hour a week talking about how to be a decent person, and the rest of the week behaving like a lousy person, you're wasting that hour. And if you spend the week being decent people, what do you need that hour of class for?

I agree that there is one sign that SEL seems called for-- we are in a society moment right now where the idea of character is so debased and displaced that teaching seems like a thing we might need. But character is not a discrete element of your life, like math skills or playing the tuba or color coordinating your clothes. Character is how you do everything else. If your life is a wave, character is the water it moves through.

And yes, sadly, I admit that with so many adults lost, we increasingly need to help littles understand their own hearts and map their own emotions and connections to others.

If you want to teach your students to live with thoughtful character, then do so yourself, in front of them, out loud. If you want them to learn respect, live in your classroom with respect. If you want them to learn honesty, live honesty in front of them. If you want them to learn thoughtful, reflecting growth, then live that every day. Grab the moments when they come.

None of this comes in a program in a box with a script. When I worked summers in private industry, we used to make fun of courses like "How to pretend you care . about your employees" or "How to fake authenticity" (I may be paraphrasing course titles). Much of what's offered for SEL reminds me of those. You cannot fake it.

And for God's sake, don't implement these programs because they might improve test scores or make students more employable. You learn to be a better person, a person of character, because it makes your life better. Without character, decency, all those better qualities, a person could become rich and powerful, even rise to the highest position in a country, and still be miserable and unhappy, a blot on the surface  of the planet.

What we call SEL is learning to be your best self, to become, to journey, to try to grasp what it means to be fully human in the world, to rise and advance in spirit. You should be doing that, too, and helping your students, showing your students. Profiteers and narrow policy makers have hollowed out so much of education. Don't let them take this, too.


14 comments:

  1. I would add that THE best place to be starting is Early Childhood. Kids come WIRED for social interaction, and that window is really best used to exploration and interaction, and naturally (and dare I say "organically" even though the term comes off as "crunchier" than it actually is in this case) wired to learn and internalize social & emotional skills: rules, social norms (please, thank you, waiting for/taking turns, things like that), creativity, persistence, impulse control, handling emotions, and so on. And under the direction of skilled ECE professionals, kids can learn all these AND other useful skills like Gravity Works, Sometimes It Rains And When It Does We Have Mud, and Playing Tag Can Be Lots Of Fun and other important early childhood lessons more important than the alphabet in safe appropriate environments. This is especially important for families with working parents AND for families whose children might otherwise not have the opportunity to learn and internalize these attributes (I hesitate to call them "skills") before Kindergarten, where they will serve to help children achieve socially AND academically and lay groundwork for more solid academic learning throughout school. Think about the things that impede learning: behavior problems, lack of persistence lack of creativity, and yes, other barriers like hunger, ESOL, and learning disabilities - but lack of SEL is so often at the forefront of Things That Make It Hard For Teachers To Teach, and it's something that's easier to fix than we think, if only we'd Ask The Teachers and Spend The Money.

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  2. Synchronicity-- Last night I began a series of posts on this topic — then came here to see your excellent treatment. Here's mine:
    https://bloghaunter.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/social-emotional-learning-preamble/

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  3. Having this problem in 8th grade Algebra right now. Growth mindset classwork AND homework. I have put my foot down and devolved into being "one of those" parents that teachers hate and admin wants to keep quiet. I have basically told the school that my child will NOT do the assignments and they will NOT give him a "0" on the assignments. I have threatened to go to a Board of Ed meeting and display this nonsense in front of an audience of parents so that everyone can see what is going on in math class (not math!). There are now lots of "excused" assignments in Algebra class. This all started because PARCC test scores have dropped..... again.

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  4. There is no way to teach SEL, it has to be lived. Real progressive schools that talk about social-emotional learning don't try to teach it, they live it. It's not a test you bubble in or a class for an hour a week. It's a daily pattern of respect and intention. It's allowing students to interact with each other and creating the space to deal with the misunderstandings and conflicts that naturally arise. Teacher Tom writes about it nearly every single day. Nearly every single day he has something new to say about it, yet he has hardly begun to scratch the surface.

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    1. Yes. It has to be lived. This happens when it is woven through the life of a school and the classroom. Otherwise, it is compartmentalized and is not seen as an integral part of how one moves through life.

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  5. Rafe Esquith taught his students Kohlberg's six stages of moral development. I think it's worth having an ongoing conversation about what it means to be a decent person and of course, in literature and history, talk about the morally exemplary people you see. What did they do and why did they do it?

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    1. Rafe Esquith and moral development in the same sentence? Are we talking about the Rafe Esquith who sent skanky emails to his female students from his school account on his school computer?

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    2. He settled on that case in his favor. The LA Unified School District was known for its witch hunts of veteran teachers. I can't say 100% he was innocent, but if the evidence was so good, I'd be surprised that that school district backed down.

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    3. "In his favor" is a bit of a stretch. He got what he would have gotten benefits-wise if he hadn't quit. LAUSD admitted no wrong-doing on their part - they settled to avoid continuing legal fees.

      In any case, the emails are there for all the world to see. Esquith has never tried claim that they were fake/forged/planted or anything of that nature. His only defense is that they were taken "out of context". I'd like to know what "context" makes it okay for a teacher to call teen girls "hottie" or "sexy" or talk about spanking them or any of the other flagrant violations in those emails. Not to mention the pictures of scantily clad, topless and fully naked women found on his computer. And all of that is neglecting the allegations of physical and sexual abuse against him dating back to the 70s. LAUSD may have been on a "witch hunt", but what they found was a child predator.

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    4. Regardless of his personal innocence or guilt (let's agree to disagree) I think he was correct that it's important to teach students how to develop a guiding light of morality, independent of who is watching them.

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    5. But that's the whole point of this post. You can't teach morality outside of and separate from your personal conduct.

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    6. Ok, I understand. It's true that grave personal failings ruin peoples witness. However, many "great" people in history did have problems, so there does have to be some grace somewhere. Maybe Rafe isn't the best example, since we can't agree on his personal conduct.

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    7. This article http://www.businessinsider.com/1-billion-lawsuit-against-the-la-school-system-2015-12 has a link to the Statement of Charges against Esquith. Some of it is allegations dating back to the 70s. But a lot of it is what LAUSD found on his school computer (from his personal account it turns out - my bad saying it was his school account). Esquith does not deny any of these emails. He only said that the district had no right to obtain them (which is patently false, as it was the school's computer) and that they were "taken out of context". Read all the way through that Statement and then tell me we can "agree to disagree" about his guilt or innocence. Remember, even if every single other allegation against him is false (which would be statistically near impossible), he admits to the emails.

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  6. We are always looking at SEL separate from everything that goes on in a classroom and school. To develop children's SEL, practices supporting this development need to be woven throughout the culture of the school and in the classroom with it modeled by the teacher and the way the teacher interacts with children.

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