Until I became involved in schools, I didn’t understand that children need to form emotional bonds with their teachers and see healthy social relationships among the adults in their lives to function well in school. Our first year in two New Haven, Connecticut, schools was so chaotic that I began to reflect on my own childhood experiences to try to figure out what kind of environment had to be created so that the students would be able to learn and develop well.
When I was in school, I often received better treatment than other students of the same racial and socioeconomic background. There was something about coming from a solid family, something about my father’s reliability, and something about all those times my mother would go to the school that resulted in the teachers treating me differently. My interest in the emotional aspects of learning perhaps stems from my realization even then that this treatment was helpful to me.
Copyright ©2003 by Corwin Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted from EQ + IQ = Best Leadership Practices for Caring and Successful Schools, edited by Maurice J. Elias, Harriett Arnold, and Cynthia Steiger Hussey. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. www.corwinpress.com.
I didn’t really understand the how and the why of it until many years later when I became involved in schools in 1968 when the Yale Child Study Center and the New Haven Public Schools formed a partnership. As the head of the team from the Yale Child Study Center, I observed that the students were not the only ones who had trouble interacting with school personnel. There were also difficulties in the relationships between teachers and administrators and among custodians, staff, and parents.
My childhood experiences and my training in child development had taught me that all those people needed to work together to support the healthy development of children. At the time, however, school reform experts, schools of education, school people, and policymakers were all talking about cognitive factors, linguistic factors, intellectual factors, cognitive–linguistic factors, linguistic–intellectual factors, and so forth. No one was talking about social–emotional factors. Nobody was talking about relationships.
Even the literature on child development didn’t offer much insight because at the time it focused almost entirely on parents. I realized that one of the reasons why children were not functioning well in school was because of difficult relationships between parents and school staff. The students were taking advantage of tensions between the teachers and the parents. They were playing one against the other. Although the research literature on child development wasn’t too helpful, my training in child development showed me that children need to see their parents respected by the school staff. They need to see all the adults in their lives working together. For children to learn how to regulate their own emotions appropriately, they need to see adults doing so in their interactions.
Today the School Development Program (SDP) helps schools throughout the country implement a process that helps schools recreate community and thereby promote the learning and development of students.
As I describe the process, it might sound as if we knew from the beginning what we needed to do, but in fact a lot of what we did was just to survive. The beginning was so chaotic that we were almost thrown out of the schools at the end of the first year! The chaos stemmed, in part, from a focus on everything but what the kids actually needed. People had a lot of plans. They wanted to be creative with the curriculum and they had good ideas about instruction and classroom organization. However, I asked them to start instead by asking the questions that no one else was asking at that time.
• What do children need to function well in school?
• How can adults work together to support child development?
• What kind of school environment must we create to support child development?
The key point I needed to convey was the following: When children are developing well, and when they feel emotionally connected to their school, then children can learn.
Just lecturing teachers and staff about child development wasn’t enough. We had to begin by creating structures that allowed parents, teachers, staff, and district administrators to work together. We didn’t mandate change (actually, the people in charge had tried to mandate it, but it didn’t work). Instead, what we did was create a new conceptual framework and operational structure designed to bring about change gradually. We created a school governance and management mechanism, consisting of three teams, that was representative of all the stakeholders in the building. I turned especially to parents who had been complaining about the school program and who now were invited to join us in our efforts.
Our School Planning and Management Team (SPMT) was the team charged with answering the question: “What kind of school do we want?” We knew that we had to be guided by the expectations of the school district central office, but we also knew that we were the experts on the children in our building and the problems they faced. So we pioneered what is known today as site-based management.
We had to start with basic issues of trust, authority, and communication. Students were acting up and acting out because the school environment didn’t support their developmental needs. Parents didn’t trust the school because they were used to broken promises and endless parades of new teachers. Teachers cared about their students but didn’t know how to set limits with them or how to exercise authority in developmentally appropriate ways. And the teachers came from a culture in which they were supposed to have learned everything already and to know how to do everything. For this reason, they were unable to articulate their own needs for help in managing classroom behavior or in teaching content in areas in which they had not been trained.
The SPMT took on the role of developing the Comprehensive School Plan, with input from the two other teams (the Parent Team and the Student and Staff Support Team). The Comprehensive School Plan even today is the mechanism by which all the activities in the school are coordinated. Student needs are identified. Staff development is aligned with these identified needs. A way is designed to monitor whether the staff development was effective and whether the identified needs were addressed. All the activities within the school are aligned to promote students’ development, including social and emotional development.
In addition to the School Planning and Management Team, we introduced a Parent Team. The parents selected their representatives for the School Planning and Management Team to decide school governance issues. More important, the parents also sponsored school programs to support social–emotional growth—their own and the students’. Parent involvement in SDP schools is about parents supporting the development of all the children in the school, and not just their own children.
We started out calling the Student and Staff Support Team the Mental Health Team because it included all of the helping professionals who often worked separately in schools: the psychologist, social worker, special education teacher, nurse, and so forth. Along the way, we changed the name to the Student and Staff Support Team (SSST), not just to escape the stigma that often accompanies mental health issues, but also in recognition of the team’s authentic efforts to change the school’s climate and culture.
The SSST supports child development by focusing on prevention—instead of intervention when a problem has already escalated into a major crisis—on the global level and the level of the individual student. We had found that most services provided to children tend to be fragmented and inefficient. For example, we observed seven professionals helping one child, with each one doing his or her piece, and none of them talking to one another. The SSST focuses on global preventive measures because we have found that if the adults create a supportive overall environment in the school, most children do not need mental health services.
For the teams to function well, we teach three relationship guidelines: consensus, collaboration, and no fault. Consensus decision making isn’t about who’s right. It’s about what works well for the children. Collaboration means that we work together in teams: The principal must not ignore the teams, and the teams must not paralyze the principal. And no-fault means that we avoid defensive behaviors and focus instead on solving problems rather than wasting energy on assigning blame for problems.
What we’re really doing is re-creating community in schools in ways that allow the children to make healthy emotional attachments. We want the children to create emotional bonds with their teachers and school staff that build on the emotional attachments that they have with their own parents. By keeping the parents actively involved with the work of the schools, the children learn how to imitate, identify with, and internalize the attitudes, values, ways of working, and ways of managing the world that they see modeled all around them. Children in SDP schools learn to talk about consensus, collaboration, and no fault just the way the adults do. They learn the same approach to living together in the school and in the community.
The SDP is often described as one of the school reform models. I think we’re much more than that. Of course, we want to improve student performance. Yet the SDP is interested in far more than just cognitive development. To understand this point, it is worthwhile to pause for a moment and talk about human functioning.
There are six pathways that are critical for academic learning and effective functioning: cognitive, physical, language, social, psychological, and ethical. The idea of the developmental pathways helps me to organize the many aspects of development in a framework. For example, people talk about self-awareness, self-regulation of emotions, anger management, and so forth. In the way that I conceptualize development, all of these aspects would come under the psychological developmental pathway (originally, this pathway was called psychological–emotional to emphasize the emotional aspects of psychological functioning). Social skills, empathy, and perspective taking involve the social pathway and the cognitive pathway. So the developmental pathways help me to frame all the aspects of development that are involved in emotional intelligence.
SDP schools tend not to use the terms “EQ” and “IQ”—and I worry that those terms may lead us to slip into thinking numbers about social skills and psychoemotional development. I’m not certain that I could name the seven components of “emotional intelligence” or the eight “multiple intelligences” with precision, but I will use the terms EQ and IQ in our schools if I must to convey the point that EQ is just as important as IQ. In fact, I think EQ is more important. We have to begin to look at the elements of EQ—the social, psychological, and ethical pathways—and show that this can also predict school success, perhaps even more so than IQ.
I reported recently on the Samuel Gompers Elementary School in Detroit (Comer, 2001). The school population is 98% poor and Black. Yet in 2000 they had the highest test scores in the fourth grade in the state of Michigan. How did that happen? I believe it happened because the school created a community that supported the students’ development along all the pathways. The school community created the conditions that allowed the children to forge emotional attachments to the adults and to the value of schooling.
Activities at the school’s daily morning assembly all focus on transmitting to the children a core set of attitudes, values, and beliefs that reinforce confidence and competence.
• The students pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag and sing patriotic songs, but they also salute their own school flag and sing their own school songs.
• The students recognize birthdays every morning, and the school custodians lead that event, thus always modeling and reinforcing the community belief that everybody counts.
• The students plan schoolwide projects that help children in countries that are even poorer than inner-city Detroit.
• The students celebrate winning citywide basketball championships, but they also discuss how to manage their disappointment when they lose the championship: They learn how to mourn their losses and then try again.
• They focus on academic achievement every morning by allowing the class with the best test scores for each month to parade the school mascot at the start-of-day assembly.
When the school is organized to promote students’ development, children from the lowest socioeconomic population can achieve the best test scores.
Schools of education aren’t paying enough attention to child development either. They focus on cognitive–intellectual, linguistic growth, but they forget about social–interactive development, psychoemotional development, ethical development, and physical development. Schools of education must learn to understand social–emotional intelligence before they can teach it meaningfully, and they must learn to assess levels of development because we know that what we measure in our schools and school districts strongly influences how we teach there.
Schools of education also have to prepare new teachers for the stressful environments they will encounter in real classrooms in real schools, and this means improving teacher training, field experiences, observation, and supervision. It doesn’t do a principal much good to hire a new teacher who earned all A’s in college and who looks like a winner during a job interview but who turns out to be an absolute disaster in the classroom. We need to see more professors of education leaving campus to observe their trainees during their fieldwork before we will see the improvements in teacher education that our communities need.
Higher test scores are not the only goal of schools, although many political leaders seem to have forgotten that fact these days. Schools face new and continuing challenges in many domains.
In addition to the wave of anxiety created when New York’s World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001, the extreme social stresses of family and community poverty continue to affect student performance. A student cannot perform competitively on a standardized test if that student has no light or heat at home because of unpaid utility bills or if that student’s parent has just gone to jail. Some of our schools are in neighborhoods where students have to go up to the roof to identify where gangs are hanging out so that the students can figure out how to walk home safely without encountering those gangs.
Struggling school districts often work hard to make slow but significant progress, only to be stopped by pay inequities. Hardworking teachers who gain teaching skills and teaching credentials cannot be expected to resist leaving inner-city schools for more comfortable suburban teaching posts that can offer salaries that are $20,000 or $25,000 more per year. The struggling schools lose the skilled teachers just when they attain the high level of competence essential to school improvement, leaving the schools who need skilled teachers the most to plug along with the least experienced teachers or with teachers working out of their fields of competence. Those are consequences of a system under severe economic and social stress.
School budgets often talk about cutting out “frills,” but look at what we’re losing along the way:
• Creativity. Students may not always begin with academic success, but students who are allowed to use their creativity can inspire teachers to perceive them differently, and we know that can lead to improved academic performance. Music teachers and art teachers greatly enrich the lives of students, offering a greater intensity of interaction than the regular classroom teacher who is teaching to a state-mandated test.
• Project-based learning. Projects that involve teachers, parents, and students interacting with their community teach all kinds of academic, social–interactive, and ethical lessons. A project about the life and times of Jackie Robinson that includes a museum visit, for example, will teach students about segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, asking questions of museum tour guides and listening respectfully to the answers, the practical skills necessary for a bus trip, and the social skills for a stop at a restaurant on the way home.
• Athletic coaches and arts teachers in the school and in the community. Not only are athletic coaches trained to teach essential psychomotor skills, they also can model ways to handle feelings and express emotions in intense interactions. The same is true of art and music teachers. All of these activities help children learn a range of skills involved in performance competencies. Participating in activities such as marching band combines many important pathways to learning. Such people are found not only in the schools. Coaches in leagues such as Pop Warner and Babe Ruth are a tremendously underutilized community resource.
The political and business communities want the schools to “teach character,” to help the students acquire social skills and improve their psychoemotional development. In fact, schools cannot teach character because it’s not an isolated cognitive process. Schools have to create an environment that models and promotes character development, and then they have to allow the children to “catch” character from the behavior of the adults and students around them.
One of our schools had an incident in which a teacher accused a student of having “street smarts.” The student reported the insult to his parents, and the father came in to school to confront the teacher: “What right do you have to tell my son that he has street smarts?” The father was especially upset because the family was White and the teacher was African American. It’s possible that other parents might have sent this teacher a note of thanks for complimenting their child, but the net result in this case was a series of nonproductive interactions that were not helpful to the teacher, the child, the parent, or the school.
We know that respect for authority is part of character development, but this child had in fact pitted one authority figure in his life against another, and he did that in his own self-defense. The student was never asked about his own responsibility to prevent the problem that led to the original insult, but the student did learn more about manipulating people and beating the system. Nor was the teacher asked about her responsibility for preventing the problem. But because the teacher is a human being, she probably won’t be able to go back into the classroom and respond to that child in a more constructive fashion. Thus the school has gained nothing useful from these interactions because the school failed to create an environment in which people can talk together, trust each other, respect each other, and solve problems without blame. The school has failed to model or to promote good character development.
School climate creates the learning environment for character, particularly in the area of school safety and teaching about nonviolence. Here is another school incident to consider: A 9-year-old student had transferred schools four times in one semester and finally was transferred into an SDP school. Someone stepped on his foot, and his dukes went up. He was ready to fight because that was the model he had encountered everywhere else he had been that year and in prior years. But another student saw the fighting stance and said, “Hey, man, we don’t do that in this school.” And the new student looked around, and sure enough, the facial expression of the nearby teacher and all the other students all echoed the simple statement, “We don’t fight in this school.”
That environment taught consensus, collaboration, and no-fault problem solving. When the school itself teaches and models consensus, collaboration, and no-fault problem solving, children then become the proud carriers of their school’s culture. Now that’s a good way to create nonviolent schools. That is a school where emotionally intelligent students can thrive. Those students have social skills, and one of them had the courage and the leadership skill to speak up to stop violence before it began.
Educators are the ones who must keep reminding our political leaders that being successful in life means more than high test scores. Our political leaders have a fascination with high-stakes tests that can be used for gatekeeping functions. And because those tests work so well for privileged populations, our leaders will continue to support them and push them on us. But educational leaders must continue to weaken political arguments about the value of tests.
We cannot document a direct connection between IQ and life success. We must begin to look at the elements of EQ, emotions and feelings, the social–interactive, the psychoemotional, and the ethical pathways, and we must begin to show the connection between those factors and life success.
People with the highest IQs are not the most successful people in our society. Our society must be reminded to value the arts and athletics as well as opportunities for self-expression. That is how we can build smart, safe, emotionally intelligent schools and communities.
Comer, James P. (2001, April 23). Schools that develop children. The American Prospect, 12, 7.