Case Study 11C

“The Missing Piece in Schooling”: Social and Emotional Learning

Tom Roderick and Laura McClure

Ms. Meijer is reading The Recess Queen to her second graders who are seated on the rug in her classroom in Brooklyn’s PS 307. The children are entranced as she reads the story of Mean Jean, who would “push and smoosh and lollapaloosh” any kids who’d cross her—that is, until a new kid, Katy Sue, came to school. Katy Sue stands up to Jean, invites her to play, and ends up transforming the playground into “one great place.” The students break into applause when the story ends—both for Katy Sue and for Ms. Meijer, whose dramatic reading is surely worthy of an Oscar.

The Recess Queen opens the unit on “assertiveness” in the curriculum Martina Meijer has been teaching at least once a week all year: the 4Rs (Reading, Writing, Respect, and Resolution). The 4Rs Program, created by the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, a nonprofit organization based in New York City, develops students’ social, emotional, and academic skills and provides tools for building a caring classroom community.

In the lessons following Meijer’s Recess Queen performance, the children explore the issues the story raises. They make connections between their lives and the story and write about times they’ve encountered someone like Mean Jean—or acted like her themselves. In thinking about Mean Jean, they imagine that she might be feeling lonely and unhappy. That leads students to the insight that when people act mean, there may be things going on underneath the surface. One student recalls a time when he got angry and started throwing kids’ coats on the floor. “I was feeling hurt inside and needed to get my anger out,” he explains. The class offers other ways he might have dealt with his hurt.

Sometimes the children use the 4Rs puppets (Kobe and Lily) to act out real-life situations. After a puppet skit, the class talks it over: How is Kobe feeling? How about Lily? What are their choices? Kobe and Lily act out the various options, and students discuss which seem best.

“The kids have grown tremendously since the beginning of the year in their ability to analyze their actions, predict consequences, and see other things they could have done,” observes Meijer. “The process is transformative.”

Roberta Davenport, PS 307’s principal, sees similar changes throughout the school. She says PS 307 is undergoing “a slow transformation—starting with the tone and the climate.” The lunchroom and hallways are calmer, and the quality of interaction between teachers and students has improved. Student suspensions have dropped. She credits the 4Rs: “It’s the missing piece in schooling.”

The 4Rs, developed over ten years by Morningside Center, integrates social and emotional learning (SEL) into language arts for grades pre-K to 8. We are currently supporting thirty New York City public schools—and seven in Ohio—in implementing the program. In our twenty-nine-year history, we have implemented an array of programs in public schools and are committed to making social and emotional learning an integral part of every child’s education. SEL programs like the 4Rs are part of the broad spectrum of approaches aimed at fostering prosocial values and skills.

The journal Child Development recently released the findings of a major new scientific evaluation of the 4Rs (Jones, Brown, & Aber, 2011). The rigorous three-year study found that compared to children in control schools, those in schools implementing the 4Rs were less aggressive and less likely to ascribe hostile motives to others, showed fewer symptoms of depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and had greater social competency. Children judged by their teachers to be at greatest behavioral risk showed marked improvements in attendance, academic skills, and standardized test scores. The study also found that classrooms in schools implementing the 4Rs had higher levels of emotional support, instructional support, and overall classroom quality.

The 4Rs approach to prosocial education is to integrate social and emotional learning into the academic curriculum. In weekly lessons, students engage in reading, writing, discussion, and skills practice aimed at fostering caring, responsible behavior. Students develop skills to help them better understand and manage their feelings, relate well to others, make good decisions, deal well with conflict and other life challenges, and take responsibility for improving their community—all strengths essential to success in life. The program fosters a positive school culture that discourages behaviors like bullying.

“We talk about having high expectations for children in reading, writing, and arithmetic,” says Davenport. “But we also need to have high expectations for children’s social and emotional learning—and to believe that children can build the skill set that will enable them to make successful and right choices for their lives.”

The 4Rs reflects the latest stage in a long evolution for Morningside Center. The organization, which got its start in 1982 as a response by educators to the threat of nuclear war, quickly got its feet wet in New York City public schools. Through the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (RCCP), we developed a practical, field-tested curriculum that aimed to “increase the peace.”

Viewed as a promising way to curb youth violence, the RCCP expanded rapidly during the 1990s. But it was always more than a violence prevention program. Teachers use a challenging interactive pedagogy to build students’ skills in anger management, listening, assertiveness, and problem solving—the same skills Meijer’s students are now mastering through the 4Rs.

In 1995, Daniel Goleman popularized a term that more accurately describes what both the RCCP and the 4Rs are really about: social and emotional learning (SEL). Goleman’s (1995) book Emotional Intelligence cited the RCCP as an exemplary program for fostering emotional intelligence. Goleman is a founder of CASEL (the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning), which is partnering with Morningside Center and other organizations working to make social and emotional learning a part of every child’s education.

In 1999, we began developing a new program for fostering social and emotional learning, one that builds on the RCCP but uses children’s literature and is part of the core curriculum: The 4Rs.

Lessons Learned

We’ve learned a lot during our twenty-nine years of implementing SEL programs in the schools. We’ve benefitted greatly from our relationship with the dedicated researchers who have collaborated with us since the early 1990s, first on a major study of the RCCP and now on the even more rigorous one of the 4Rs. These multiyear studies have enabled us to examine what works and what doesn’t work, and they have pushed us to keep improving our approach based on the evidence. Here are some lessons we’ve learned about how to make SEL programs effective.

Like math, reading, or science, social and emotional learning is a discipline consisting of knowledge, processes, and skills. Effective school-based programs require consistent instruction using a research-based SEL curriculum. The lessons give students a common vocabulary and provide opportunities to discuss ideas and practice skills. Listening actively, using self-talk to cool yourself down when angry, standing up for yourself without putting the other person down, mediating a conflict—these are skills you learn only by doing. You can’t learn to play the violin by talking about it. You have to practice, practice, practice! It’s the same with social and emotional learning.

Joining SEL instruction and literature, as we do in the 4Rs, greatly enhances the impact on students—and makes it easier for teachers to find time for weekly lessons. High-quality children’s literature introduces stories, images, and memorable characters—like Mean Jean and Katy Sue—that make an indelible impression. At the same time, the 4Rs strengthens the language arts curriculum by helping children see the relevance of literature to their lives.

The 4Rs puts the classroom teacher front and center. This is because Morningside Center sees SEL as an integral part of life in the classroom. It’s not an add-on that can be parachuted in. In addition to the weekly lesson, teachers integrate 4Rs ideas and activities into other subject areas. They use teachable moments to reinforce skills. And, since children learn what they live, they make every effort to model the behavior they’re trying to foster in the children.

This kind of teaching is gratifying—and challenging! The curriculum offers new content and uses interactive methods of teaching that require the teacher to be more a facilitator than a dispenser of information. To succeed, teachers need support. This begins with a thirty-hour introductory course followed by a number of coaching contacts with a Morningside Center staff developer. In each contact, the staff developer works with the teacher in the classroom (providing a demonstration lesson, cofacilitating a lesson, or doing an observation) and then meets with her or him to debrief and plan next steps.

Support from colleagues is critical—and easier to achieve if every teacher in the school is teaching the curriculum. If a school phases in the program, it’s best to do so by whole grades. The principal has a key role in supporting teachers as well. When the 4Rs is first introduced, Morningside Center meets with the principal to develop a written agreement spelling out expectations for teachers, the training and coaching schedule, the assessment plan, and who will serve as liaison with our staff developer. This up-front planning is essential. The principal must agree that the 4Rs are a priority—and that means making sure that teachers have time in their schedules for at least one 4Rs lesson each week. An SEL steering committee representing key constituencies in the school, and led by the principal, monitors progress and fosters support for a comprehensive vision of SEL in the school.

In the growing number of schools that fully embrace SEL, students not only receive weekly instruction in a curriculum like the 4Rs but also learn from the way discipline is handled. Through the 4Rs, students learn that they have choices—for example, when their anger is triggered, they can use strategies to cool down so that they can think more clearly about an appropriate response. When a child lashes out in anger without thinking, that’s an opportunity for him to reflect: What were his options? Why didn’t he apply his anger management skills? How might he make a better choice next time? When school discipline policies are aligned with SEL, adults encourage students to go through this process of reflection so that they can see connections between what they’re learning in the lessons and their real life choices.

Student leadership programs are another powerful way to reinforce social and emotional skills. In many schools that are implementing the 4Rs curriculum, we also help establish and support a schoolwide peer mediation program, training selected students to mediate disputes among their peers. Serving their school in this way not only deepens the mediators’ understanding and skills, but it also helps create a positive peer culture in which younger kids aspire to become mediators and help their school. We’ve learned to start young: our Peace Helpers program has kids as young as pre-K helping their teachers create a peaceful classroom environment (see more on prosocial early childhood approaches in chapter 15).

Looking Forward

The field of social and emotional learning is a work in progress, and we face challenges in the years ahead. If SEL is to become an integral part of every child’s education, we will need to decide what social and emotional competencies children should have at each stage of development. Anchorage, Alaska, and the state of Illinois have developed standards and benchmarks that provide a starting place for this. These standards need to be revisited, refined, and widely adopted as new SEL research emerges and SEL practice evolves.

We need to create assessment tools aligned with the standards and benchmarks to help schools evaluate program effectiveness. Scientific evaluations like the 4Rs study are expensive, and the findings may not come out for several years. Schools need assessments that are inexpensive, easy to administer, valid, and helpful in improving program implementation now—not three years later. Teachers also need ongoing ways to gauge children’s strengths and weaknesses so that they can tailor instruction to children’s needs.

Every school has an SEL curriculum, whether acknowledged or not. Every day, kids get messages about how to handle feelings, relationships, conflicts, and decisions, and about how—or whether—to serve their community. Usually this “hidden curriculum” is haphazard and inconsistent. No one has thought it through; it simply happens, as busy adults do their best to cope with students day by day.

The social and emotional development of our young people is too important to leave to chance. And there’s no reason to, since research-based approaches are ready for us to use.

Demand for SEL programs is increasing—a positive sign that educational leaders are recognizing the importance of SEL and other approaches to prosocial education. The challenge for Morningside Center and other providers of research-based SEL programs is how to go to scale with fidelity—without watering down our programs.

We need to make the best possible use of technology while always remembering that our core work is face to face. Technology presents the SEL field with both challenges (like cyberbullying) and opportunities. Morningside Center is working with the University of Virginia to improve our coaching of teachers by using videos of classroom lessons and Internet communication between teachers and staff developers. We’re developing an online video library of 4Rs lessons. We’re exploring how to best use social media to spread information and ideas. But technology will never replace the personal relationships at the core of social and emotional learning. SEL is about helping people see things in new ways and develop new habits of mind. It’s “transformative,” as Meijer says, and that transformation grows out of personal relationships.

Ultimately, school districts will need to make SEL a priority and create staff positions to be filled by talented local people. This means convincing the public that social and emotional learning must no longer be, as PS 307 principal Roberta Davenport says, “the missing piece in schooling.”

It won’t be easy, but, adds Davenport, “once we figure this out, once we integrate this into the regular school day, once we give it just as much value as we do to everything else we do instructionally, the difference is going to be amazing.”

References

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New York: Bantam Books.

Jones, S. M., Brown, J. L., & Aber, J. L. (2011). Two-year impacts of a universal school-based social-emotional and literacy intervention: An experiment in translational developmental research. Child Development, 82(2), 533–554. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01560