While psychologist Abraham Maslow was developing his hierarchy of human needs, he spent some time with the Blackfoot Indians to gain insight into their child-rearing practices. He once recounted being in a room of elders and becoming aware of a little boy pushing on the heavy door to gain entrance into the room where they were all seated. At first, Maslow wondered why none of the elders simply opened the door for the child. After several minutes passed in which the child repeatedly pushed on the door to no avail, Maslow recalled thinking that these Blackfoot were indeed a cruel and callous lot.
Finally, after trying for perhaps 10 minutes, the child reared back, threw his whole body into the door and came tumbling inside the room as the door gave way. The elders stood and cheered for the boy and his success. It was at that moment that Maslow understood how truly caring these people were to have had the patience to allow that child to learn such an important lesson and to experience success, accomplishment, and self-control.
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.
Characteristics such as self-awareness, problem-solving abilities, good communication skills, and a positive sense of self were once systematically developed in young people by many indigenous groups, including the Blackfoot Indians. But whose job is it to develop such vital skills in our children today? Although many would say, “It’s the parents’ job,” the realities, for many reasons, often contradict this assumption.
“This class sucks!” “Leave me the —- alone!” “I don’t want to do this and you can’t make me!”
These and even more antisocial statements and behaviors are common in today’s classrooms. Teachers must deal with these kinds of comments and aggressive behaviors when they arise, but it is rarely part of their training. Even less common are systematic, schoolwide approaches or sets of tools to develop social and emotional skills in students. Many educators, especially at the high school level, would argue that this is not even their job.
In fact, as James Comer and Tim Shriver have indicated, teaching social and emotional skills always has been a part of the schooling experience (HOPE Foundation, 1999). The challenges now are the following:
1. How do we teach social and emotional skills to a classroom of children whose home experiences range from having had a great deal of preparation in this area to having had none at all?
2. How exactly do we teach these skills? What tools are available for this?
3. How can we take time for even one more thing in our already crowded curriculum?
Drawing on the Lessons for Life program, this article provides both a framework and specific strategies to help answer these questions. The benefits of using a comprehensive social–emotional learning (SEL) approach such as Lessons for Life are seen in students’ academic and career success (Gardner, 1983; Goleman, 1995) and in changes in the school community. Staff and students alike come to have a stake in the school climate and are motivated to make it better (Dasho, Lewis, Watson, & Schaps, in press).
There is currently a daunting number of SEL programs available to educators—more than 300 as of this writing. Educators can hardly deal knowledgeably with this kind of diversity. To arrive at a set of core principles, my colleagues and I at the National Center for Innovation and Education called on leaders in the SEL field to help reach a consensus. We involved individuals from many top programs, leaders from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), and educators from some of the most effective “SEL-friendly” schools in North America. We analyzed the principles that embodied what was working most consistently for school staff and students. These principles were then translated into the REGS (Relationships, Emotions, Goal Setting) model:
1. Caring relationships form the foundation for learning.
2. Emotions affect how and what we learn—including academic learning.
3. Goal setting and problem solving provide direction and energy for learning.
Let’s consider how Principles 1 and 2 can play out in reality.
Increasingly, students are coming to school in an emotional state that is not conducive to learning. When students come to school upset, those feelings often need to be dealt with before any academic progress can be made. Take the following scenario, for example:
James’s mother and father had a big fight in the morning before he went to school. His father hit his mother, and James ran out of the house to escape the scene. Realizing the school bus was going to come shortly, James went directly to the bus stop without getting his books from home. His initial fear and anger was compounded by the fact that he was going to arrive at school unprepared. James entered school feeling very angry, and ready to “go off.” He wore his hat into class as a means of expressing his anger and engaging his teacher.
| Teacher: | James, take that hat off! You know we don’t allow hats in class. |
| James: | What hat? |
| Teacher: | James, don’t play games with me. Take it off, or you’ll have to leave. |
| James: | To hell with this stupid class—I’m out of here! |
This kind of exchange is common in schools across the country, and teachers are challenged to recognize, quickly analyze, and effectively respond to the emotional issues students bring with them to school. There is no substitute for having a good, caring relationship with students (Principle 1 in Lessons for Life), and had one been in place, this situation may not have played out in the same manner. For example, Lessons for Life demonstrates that greeting students at the classroom door provides both a warm welcome for them and a chance to detect and quickly defuse any issues they may be bringing with them from outside. This one strategy alone may have enabled the teacher to pull James aside to address the situation quickly and privately before he entered the classroom.
Having a positive relationship with James may have also provided this teacher with alternatives to a head-on confrontation. The teacher may instead have used humor (“Well that hat does look good on you, but I will not be able to take my eyes off of it for the whole class and I won’t be able to teach! How about if you show it to me after the bell rings, OK?”) or a private moment with the student next to his desk while class was in progress (“James, I’m concerned about you because you’re a smart guy and know that wearing your hat is against the rules. Could we talk a minute after class about how you’re doing? In the meantime, would you take your hat off for me?”).
The relationship provides a gateway for learning; it opens up opportunities to reach James. Ultimately, however, he will need to learn to understand and manage his emotions.
First, let’s examine how negative emotions can impede learning. Imagine that you have a serious argument with your spouse before leaving for work. If you are like many people, your ability to concentrate on work may be “crowded out” to some extent, because thoughts and feelings about the incident and what will happen as a result enter into what is known as your “working memory.” As a result, receiving any kind of professional development immediately following the incident would be less effective than at another time, when emotions of anger, fear, or worry were not present. Similarly, James was in no condition to learn. Had he not provoked the confrontation, he still would likely not have absorbed much during that class period.
In Lessons for Life, we provide the following four-step process for helping young people understand and manage their emotions:
• Identify and acknowledge your feelings. What are the physical signs—sweaty palms, clenched jaw, lower back pain, stomachache—that indicate you are feeling upset? What are the emotional signs? The object is to help young people quickly identify and then be able to articulate how they are feeling. Acknowledging there is a problem is the first step to resolving it.
• Determine your emotional triggers. For some students, mentioning something about their mother will set off a reaction of rage. For others, it may be calling them “stupid.” Whatever the case, “forewarned is forearmed,” and our role is to help students prepare for and channel their emotional reactions.
• Stay calm. Techniques for helping students stay calm and have self-control include using peaceful imagery and deep breathing.
• Reflect. Role-playing situations and discussing them afterward, debriefing after an emotional outburst, and teaching children self-talk are among the techniques that will enable them to learn from each situation so that they can improve their capacity to manage their emotions.
Emotions can also be tapped to enhance learning. In Piscataway, New Jersey, for example, schools integrate emotions into the curriculum by asking students in social studies class to imagine themselves as part of the culture they are studying. The students are then asked to deduce the reasons for various behaviors of that culture based on how they would feel and respond in that time and setting.
The Responsive Classroom, as used in a Washington, DC, elementary school, involves beginning each day with warm-up exercises that ensure each student feels connected to the others and to the teacher. In so doing, they create a climate in which learning is associated with positive feelings, thus increasing motivation to learn while actually enhancing students’ memory.
By consciously providing students with social and emotional learning opportunities using the REGS model in ways like those described here, teachers can actually gain instructional time that would otherwise be spent “putting out fires.” Moreover, including an SEL component in the curriculum will not only enhance students’ behavior, but their academic success as well (see Chapters 2 and 3 of this volume).
Lessons for Life, based in large part on the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’s Promoting Social and Emotional Learning: Guidelines for Educators (Elias et al., 1997), includes three videos with specific examples and a detailed Leader’s Guide to provide the tools needed for inservice and preservice SEL education for teachers. It represents a way to respond to the crises and challenges in our schools by providing ways for both new and veteran teachers to bring SEL into their classroom, into their interactions with students, and into the school as a whole. James Comer anchors each video, which feature members of CASEL and CASEL-affiliated educators and consultation schools. In sum, Lessons for Life is a statement that violence, fear, neglect, and other strong negative emotions are the greatest enemies to genuine, lasting learning and that educators do not have to throw up their hands in frustration because they were not adequately trained to deal with these issues. Not only can we reclaim our at-risk youth, we can also strengthen all students. This clearly seems worth the continued efforts that are required.
Dasho, S., Lewis, C., Watson, M., & Schaps, E. (In press). Fostering emotional intelligence in the classroom and school: Strategies from the Child Development Project. In J. Cohen (Ed.), Social emotional learning and the young child: The foundation for academic and character development. New York: Teachers College Press.
Elias, M., Zins, J., Weissberg, R., Frey, K., Greeberg, M., Haynes, N., Kessler, R., Schwab-Stone, M., Shriver, T. (1997). Promoting social and emotional learning: Guidelines for educators. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New York: Bantam.
HOPE Foundation. (1999). Lessons for life: How smart schools boost academic, social, and emotional intelligence. Bloomington, IN: Author.