Recent incidents of school violence, along with a growing understanding of the implications of allowing bullying and other forms of peer harassment to go unchecked, have prompted school officials around the country to look for solutions to these problems. They want to know what can be done to get children to become more caring, responsible, and respectful of themselves and others. In short, they want to know how to make their children more socially and emotionally literate.
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.
Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence (1995) has helped to promote worldwide awareness of the importance of social and emotional learning (SEL) and an interest on the part of school personnel to implement SEL programming. Guidelines for such programming were established in 1997 with the publishing of Promoting Social and Emotional Learning: Guidelines for Educators (Elias et al., 1997). This monograph provides teachers and administrators with a framework for organizing methods for teaching SEL skills. Educators are well aware that implementing a program in a school is no guarantee that it will become a lasting part of the school culture. Many program implementers are beginning to look ahead and ask, “How do we keep SEL programs from joining the ranks of the dusty curricula sitting unused on the top shelf and move toward making SEL programming a part of the everyday routine in our schools?” This is the daunting question that we discuss in this chapter.
The process of bringing an innovation or new practice into a school can be thought of as occurring in three stages: (1) the decision to adopt a program, (2) training for program implementation, and (3) institutionalization of programming (Commins & Elias, 1991). Institutionalization refers to permanent organizational change. When educational practices are institutionalized, observable and significant changes occur in “the way we do things around here,” and these changes are sustained after training and initial implementation occurs. SEL programs that have been introduced in school districts to date often have not achieved systematic and coordinated institutionalization (Gottfredson, Wilson, & Najaka, 2001). An appreciation of the difficulties in reaching this end can help us understand why this is the case. Simply gaining consensus within a building or district regarding the best model and methods is a process that can take months or years. Once that is achieved, gaining the resources and materials needed for staff training is also a complex endeavor. And all of this must happen before any teacher training takes place. Once training occurs, the adult learners must implement the program with fidelity if positive outcomes are to occur, but initiating and maintaining the effort it takes to integrate new skills if often difficult.
Our basic premise for working toward institutionalization is that this outcome must be kept in clear focus throughout the program planning, training, and consultation processes. Certain supports can be put in place that can help make institutionalization more likely (Heller & Firestone, 1996; Hord, Rutherford, Huling-Austin, & Hall, 1987; Kress, Cimring, & Elias, 1997; Norris, 1998; Sarason, 1996). Although there is no magic recipe for this, in the course of our work with the Social Decision Making/Problem Solving model (for more information about this program, see Elias & Bruene Butler, 1999; Elias & Clabby, 1992; Elias & Tobias, 1996), we have learned, along with our school-based collaborators, many innovative ideas for setting up supports for institutionalization. Our goal is to share some of these ideas. We frame these recommendations with case examples from pioneering districts.
Guidelines for educators to promote SEL published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (Elias et al., 1997) state that students benefit most from a combination of curriculum-based instruction and ongoing, infused opportunities to practice skills from preschool to high school. If SEL is seen as an “add-on” or something that is up to the individual teacher to provide when there is “time,” effective implementation is unlikely to occur. Teachers report feeling that the demands of their current curriculum are already overwhelming. In successful SEL sites, administrators take an active role in the detailed problem solving and planning to design a realistic strategy for when and how SEL instruction and practice will occur. A variety of approaches have been used in some of our most successful schools to ensure a strong and permanent foothold within the core operations of the school. Some examples include the following:
Infusing SEL Skills Into the Board-Approved Curriculum
Curricula are the building blocks that schools use to set forth an organizational plan for teaching objectives across the grade levels, and because of this, they can be used as the vehicle for integrating social and affective development and learning into formal and regulated school operations. When an SEL curriculum and instructional plan becomes part of the curriculum approved by the school board, the importance of, and accountability for, teaching such skills is highlighted. The development of a plan with administrative and school board support has been a key strategy for establishing stable and effective programming. The specifics of the plan, however, have varied within each setting. For example, in Clifton, Cape May Special Services School District, Highland Park, and in many other New Jersey school districts, a scope and sequence of skills for the elementary grades, developed with teacher input, has become an approved part of the curriculum taught by the classroom teachers. In St. Charles, Illinois, a districtwide plan for SEL programming was adopted as a foundation for substance abuse prevention, conflict resolution, and character education. St. Thomas Moore Cathedral School in Arlington, Virginia, has developed a scope and sequence of skills that are taught and practiced within their religious education curriculum. Teachers then develop specific plans for extending the practice and application of these same skills within the academic curriculum and within school policies for addressing real-life problems and decisions. In North Caldwell, New Jersey, educators were trained in skills of curriculum mapping using the Social Decision Making/Problem Solving curriculum as the model for teaching and practicing the process. The finished products also helped other teachers to see how the SEL program was an integral component of other academic curriculum.
Linking With National and State Standards, Standardized Testing, and Grades
In our most successful SEL school sites, consistent efforts to align SEL teaching and objectives with state and national standards and testing are essential in helping teachers implement SEL instruction with fidelity. Despite the fact that many individual teachers recognize the value of SEL, many educators today feel primarily accountable for standardized test scores. In fact, for many teachers and principals, they are criteria for reappointment. Test scores are usually published in local newspapers and are often seen by parents and communities as a benchmark of educational attainment—and thus of their educators’ professional competence. Norris and Kress (2000) described a process and outcomes of activities that map the overlap between social and emotional learning skills and the New Jersey Core Curriculum Standards. These illustrations of the strong overlap of SEL with the state standards has been used to help teachers realize that by focusing on SEL they are doing exactly what they should be doing.
In Highland Park, North Caldwell, and Westwood (NJ), benchmarks for grade levels linked with core curriculum standards have been adopted. In Highland Park and South Plainfield (NJ), SEL skills have been included on the report card. Linking SEL with testing and grades is one of the most effective ways to ensure that institutionalization will occur.
Linking SEL to Existing Mandates for Annual Goal Setting or Themes
SEL objectives have also been targeted as a school or district goal for which there is accountability for achieving measurable outcomes. Piscataway (NJ) selected goals in the area of social competence to be a part of their pupil performance objectives, which is part of their state’s annual quality assurance report. Developing a series of strategic objectives over a multiyear period has been particularly helpful for building stable and comprehensive SEL programming in numerous school districts. Targeting SEL training and implementation goals within a teacher’s Professional Improvement Plan (PIP) and in a student’s Individual Educational Plan (IEP) also serve to position SEL in line with priority and mandated operations. Less formally, some schools and districts adopt annual SEL-related themes, such as Respect or Honesty (Pasi, 2001), and these promote obvious inroads for SEL instruction and content.
One common difficulty faced in the process of developing integrated and comprehensive SEL programming in schools is that existing job roles are already full and demanding. Therefore, it is often difficult for anyone to add on leadership and management tasks regarding logistics, planning, and ongoing monitoring of SEL program activities. The development of SEL Committees, or Leadership and Management Teams, has been helpful in providing the ongoing support that is needed for establishing and integrating SEL programming and the continuous quality improvement efforts needed to keep this programming viable and effective.
SEL committees work to develop program objectives, action plans, and budgets each year. SEL objectives generally include issues of training and technical support for teachers who are new or teaching different grade levels from past years; conducting activities for parent awareness, involvement, and training; evaluating program effectiveness; and planning for adaptations, expansion, and improvements needed to respond to new demands or student and community needs.
The composition of the SEL committee will vary, but most often representatives include administration; child study team members; school counselors; teacher representatives from different grades, special education, “specials;” and, whenever possible, playground or cafeteria aides and parents. In several districts such as Cape May Special Services and Berkeley Heights school districts in New Jersey, the entire team of educators involved in the initial pilot program met every month to assess progress and to problem solve implementation issues. As the program grew and expanded, the committee structure changed to include representatives from different buildings who attend district committee meetings. The team, consisting of a representative within each building, serves as a support and resource, responsible for monitoring the program, providing support to new teachers, discussing program progress and problems at staff and grade level meetings, and coordinating activities for parents and students with special needs.
In addition to the committee, establishing an SEL coordinator, or chairperson, with specified responsibilities can help ensure that tasks such as arranging meetings, distributing and collecting documents and evaluation measures, liaising with building representatives and program consultants, and other middle-management functions are not left to chance. This often results in a formal job role modification in which, depending on the scope of the task within an individual site, a specified amount of time, such as a half a day per week, 3 days per week, or full time have been allocated within or as the individual job description.
The field of SEL is at a unique point in its history. The majority of teachers today have neither received training in SEL programming in their preservice training nor were they formally taught these skills when they were in elementary and middle school. However, many have been addressing SEL within their educational practices for many years as part of their individual approach to teaching. Traditional instructional methodology—thinking in terms of a scope and sequence of skills, using a systematic approach across grade levels—is a “new idea” in SEL.
As such, the learning curve of program implementers is quite varied. Some educators have already been doing effective, “SEL-friendly” activities but are now being asked to make their teaching more systematic and coordinated with instruction at adjacent grade levels. On the other hand, some teachers may be using techniques that are contradictory to SEL ideas (for example, providing negative feedback to students, using sarcasm, or not modeling effective self-calming) and now must face the prospect of their own major behavioral change. We must also bear in mind that any new instructional methodology must be worked into the context of an already full curriculum, across classrooms with compositions that may be quite varied in terms of behavioral needs and assets.
Because educators, as adult learners, have such diverse needs, many of our most successful schools have developed ways to provide ongoing follow-up, support, and technical assistance as teachers learn to implement SEL in an organized and systematic way. Initial staff development training is seen in these districts only as a launching point to program implementation that must be followed by continued opportunities for teachers to develop their own social and emotional abilities and their SEL teaching skills. This follow-up can take many forms, such as follow-up visits by an outside professional trainer or consultant or a within-district master teacher or certified trainer; discussions held as a regular part of staff or grade level meetings; opportunities to work with experienced teachers within or outside the district; and networking via Internet or distance learning technologies (Bruene Butler, Elias, Papke, Schweitzer, & Brown, in press).
In Highland Park (NJ), experienced teachers are provided with release time to mentor new teachers. In Jersey City (NJ), the budget for training was designed to provide teachers with technical assistance on site, after Saturday training sessions had occurred. Teacher feedback and consultant’s anecdotal recordings of what occurred during onsite visits from program consultants documented that follow-up support was often critical and served as an initiating prompt for implementation to occur. For example, a young male teacher provided excellent ratings for the staff development workshop and stated, “I have never been as excited to try the new ideas covered in this workshop when I get back to my class.” Despite this enthusiasm and perceived motivation, records from follow-up consultation visits indicated that 4 weeks of scheduled follow-up visits occurred; however, no lesson implementation took place. Instead, a fight involving a desk being thrown across the room, a mandated school assembly related to whole-school reform, and testing demands became the priority. Teacher surveys, distributed after the first year of implementation, indicated that the newly trained teachers found the onsite follow-up to be one of the most helpful aspects of the program, and for many, these were the prompts and support needed to persist in their efforts to implement a new program and find ways to overcome the obstacles within their classrooms (Wattenmaker, Elias, & Bruene Butler, 2001).
We have found that structured curricula and lesson plans can be helpful to a teacher in the beginning stages of learning to provide direct instruction of SEL abilities. Once teachers learn to teach the skill, however, the next step is to combine this instruction with ongoing opportunities to practice skills both within academic content and in real life. In our experience, the ability to weave SEL concepts into critical points in a story, a current events lesson, a historical discussion, or a real-life complex emotional problem or conflict is a skill that requires repeated guided practice and support. Ongoing structured opportunities for supportive practice helps teachers as learners to internalize new methods and processes and allows them to become increasingly skillful at recognizing and developing SEL applications.
St. Charles, Illinois, was one of our first districts to identify a team of teachers who were particularly skilled at creating application activities and identifying ways to infuse skill practice within their other academic curricula. The district paid these teachers for summer curriculum development so that they could document the lesson plans they had used, as well as create additional application activities. These “field-tested” products were then distributed to other teachers as useable examples of curriculum application.
In Piscataway, an SEL Exchange newsletter was compiled five times a year. This document included a district-level progress report; detailed lesson ideas developed by teachers at the primary, intermediate, and middle school levels for infusing the practice of SEL skills into content areas; and a question-and-answer and input section for teachers to engage in collaborative problem solving, discussion of current issues, and sharing of tips. Recently, the Exchange has evolved into a within-district e-mail-based bulletin board. One of the features on our training office Web site (www.umdnj.edu/spsweb) is the Roving Reporter. Innovative lesson plans, student accommodations, ideas for involving parents, staff development activities, and other aspects of program implementation are compiled to share with other school sites.
Classroom-based instruction and practice of SEL is an important first step in addressing SEL skills; however, some of our most exciting work has happened when children and teachers have extended their skill-building efforts to different settings within the school, as well as beyond the school walls. This process not only reinforces SEL skills for students but also helps embed SEL efforts more deeply within the contexts of the school and community, thereby strengthening efforts at institutionalization.
SEL skills learned in the classroom can be practiced throughout the school. The lunchroom, playground, and special subject areas (gym, art, and music) are all venues for SEL skill use. Educators in Highland Park have integrated SEL skills within the context of class- and buildingwide discipline and behavior management procedures. A Social Decision Making/Social Problem Solving Computer Lab (Poedubicky, Brown, Hoover, & Elias, 2001) has been designed to provide students with structured opportunities to think through a problem they are facing or that has occurred as a result of breaking a school rule. The Cape May Special Services School District, in Cape May Courthouse (NJ), has adapted their Outdoor Experiential Education Curriculum to provide infused opportunities to practice the specific SEL skills targeted by the classroom teachers at various grade levels.
Community service projects provide another powerful mode of SEL practice and extension. In 1999, sixth-grade students in both public and private schools in Piscataway came together to address the goal of reducing vandalism in the community. Using the SEL skills learned in their classes (such as problem solving, goal setting, setting criteria, and effective communication), students use e-mail, the Internet, and faxes to share ideas, ask questions, and get feedback on this issue from their peers, as well as the mayor, the police chief, and the director of recreation. Representatives from each class met at a convocation held in the spring to share their school’s suggested solution to the problem. Using a technology laboratory in each building, the students not in attendance were able to provide input to the event via video conferencing. The representatives, after coming to consensus among all the schools, then presented what they believed to be the most effective plan and evaluation strategy to city officials for review by the town council (Dencker, 1999). This meaningful practice of SEL skills and technology also provided students with an experiential opportunity to learn about the operations of the municipality, thus addressing an area of the core curriculum and the school district’s mission to build civic awareness and concern among its youth. The town council approved the creation of three billboards within the town to display antivandalism messages developed by the students. The students worked as discussion group leaders to make elementary-aged students aware of the economic and emotional cost of vandalism to their community. Screensavers were created for the high school computer labs so that the messages would be an ever-present part of the students’ environment. As seventh- and eighth-graders, those original students have continued to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of their plans.
In Berkeley Heights (NJ), fifth- and sixth-graders participate in projects to improve the environment. Through the years, their efforts have resulted in presentations to the New Jersey State Assembly, petitions to local government that resulted in plastics recycling in the community, starting and monitoring a recycling program in the school cafeteria, and conducting a fundraising project to plant trees in the community to avoid soil erosion, to name a few of the projects they have undertaken.
Involving parents is an important facet of entrenching SEL efforts, but one that requires creative and innovative strategies to achieve. In several school districts, such as Berkeley Heights, Old Bridge, Clifton, and Piscataway (NJ), to name a few, local cable television stations have been used to air programs that inform parents about SEL activities at school, and to provide concrete ideas for parents to promote these skills at home. These programs can be shown at a variety of times identified through a parent survey as most convenient for viewing. In addition, videotape copies can be borrowed from the school or viewed at the school for those families without means to view at home. Teachers in St. Charles, Illinois, and in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, have designed homework assignments and parent involvement activities. In Highland Park, NJ, parent awareness information is provided on the school Web site.
When other adults in students’ lives learn the SEL methods and language used by school staff, it helps strengthen the connections of SEL programming to real-life applications. Staff from New Brunswick (NJ) Youth Services system are trained in the SEL methods used in the classroom and in how to promote the use of these skills in after-school and summer programs. In Somerville (NJ), community sports coaches are trained to use SEL prompts, such as “Keep Calm” and “Listening Position” within the context of sports events and goal setting.
Once educators have been trained in effective SEL methods, they can become the true experts and masters of making this work effective and meaningful to their students. Providing educators using SEL methods, whether within a school or from a variety of sites in the district, with opportunities to share effective practices with each other through local conferences or visits are powerful professional development experiences. Currently, we are in the process of establishing a Network of Schools for SEL using distance learning technology. The use of video conferencing allows for co-teaching or observing an experienced educator; administrators receiving assistance from out-of-district leadership teams; students working with peers from other schools on SEL activities; and increased contact with SEL consultants. Online training modules can be a powerful fortification and extension of live training sessions by providing educators with a variety of sample lessons and activities that they can adopt and opportunities to observe a variety of master teachers in action. Such a support network can serve to keep SEL efforts up to date and provide teachers with SEL role models and boosters.
We are at an exciting time in terms of SEL programming. More and more, educators are realizing that students’ acquisition of these skills is too important to leave to chance. We have worked in many pioneering districts where SEL efforts are making the same point about teachers’ SEL programming efforts. Institutionalization of SEL requires effort and planning. Good intentions are a wonderful start, but they are not enough. Systems can and must be put in place to ensure the longevity of SEL programming. We hope that the examples we have presented from an array of districts in which we have worked will energize others. We encourage the reader to use these examples as springboards for creative planning, and to adapt and expand these examples as we all learn to become more effective in this critical area of student learning.
Bruene Butler, L., Elias, M., Papke, M., Schweitzer, H., & Brown, R. (In press). Developing a network of schools for social and emotional learning. In R. Stern & T. Repa (Eds.), Social emotional learning and new digital means. Social and Emotional Learning Series. New York: Teachers College Press.
Commins, W. W., & Elias, M. J. (1991). Institutionalization of mental health programs in organizational contexts: The case of elementary schools. Journal of Community Psychology, 19, 207–220.
Dencker, M. (1999, May 27). Vandalism as learning tool. Star Ledger (Newark, NJ), p. 18.
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Sarason, S. B. (1996). Revisiting “The culture of the school and the problem of change.” New York: Teachers College Press.
Wattenmaker, W., Elias, M. J., & Bruene Butler, L. (2001). Jersey City Public Schools, Evaluation Report, and Social Decision Making/Problem Solving Program: Preliminary Report. In-house document, New Jersey City Public Schools.