Featured Discussion 59

The No Child Left Behind Act, with its focus on achievement scores and measurable outcomes, has been criticized for forcing teachers to “teach to the test,” instead of providing a well-rounded education for young people. Somewhat paradoxically, a recent report demonstrates that it actually might be more beneficial for teachers to spend less time teaching basic facts and instead pay attention to the emotional development of the students.

Social and emotional learning (SEL), the process of teaching skills such as self-awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making, is often seen as a luxury and not the sort of material that makes up “real” course material. However, according to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), SEL not only reduces problem behaviors and emotional distress, but also increases test scores and grade point averages. More specifically, CASEL cites a meta-analysis of 207 school-based SEL programs involving 288,000 students which found that teaching social and emotional competencies was associated with:

SEL programs take time out of the school day, yet they do not detract from the learning process. In fact, they seem to both enhance student learning and create well-rounded, emotionally healthy children.

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"Do you think it is important for schools to teach social and emotional competencies?" Not so much emotional, because I think every child has the right to their own feelings, but social things such as manners and stuff like this are better modeled not taught. If a child is not getting it at home, then if the school is not modeling it for them they don't get it. I find fault with how we are going to decide what should be socially modeled when we have so much mass education that we have so many different children from so many different social backgrounds. I think they finally figured out that was why some psychological measurements of intelligence were not working wasn't it? "Do you feel that the No Child Left Behind Act is mis-prioritizing the goals of education?" I fault the settings that can't really meet every childs learning style no matter what they do. The set up doesn't allow for each child to learn till they get it or to learn to love learning. For some it can be torture and they still don't get it they only learn to hate learning. "Why do you think teaching social and emotional learning increases academic performance?" I actually don't, I think a community and home model those things more than anything else. We can not do away with poverty in the mass until the ideas of what poverty means and how poverty is done is changed. As sociologist you can label just about anything, but if the labels set up self fullfilling prophecies or other issues then they become unuseful and perhaps even harmful. "Should we mandate social and emotional learning in schools the way we mandate teaching the ?basics? of reading and math?" There is a lot that can be done, but the way it is done and what it really teaches is going to be what matters in the end. I don't like the idea of mandatory education, not at all, because is it really teaching our children of our country to be more successful and have better lives, that is the issue. What I see is that it is making some paychecks and some failures and that our country as it does the bail out and things of this nature is seeing the result of all of the mandatory programming that isn't really working to meet real needs and build real competency into our society as a whole! We are actually leaving half or more of our social, intellectual, emotional survival skills way behind us. Posted Sunday, November 30, 2008 by Janie Lee, M.Ed. at 02:35 PM

I teach Art in a public special ed school in which all of our students are on an IEP, FBA (Functional Behavior Analysis), and other individualized plans. Nearly all of our students are ED or SED. We have an occasional 4th grader but are basically grades 5-12; I work with all of the elem. kids and many of the secondary students. Social/emotional learning is a critical part of our day, with all teachers teaching/modeling affective ed. Our school is piloting the highly successful Why Try? program for our district, which includes about 50,000 students. Our nearby Title One schools include Affective Ed as part of their regular weekly curriculum. Many single parents are highly committed and are loving, successful, conscientious parents, but as we experience a continued increase in number of single-parent homes, blended families, and parents economically forced to work more than one job, many kids benefit from positive modeling of affective social and emotional skills. These skills are a vital part of the school day. Posted Tuesday, November 11, 2008 by Bev, Alaskan special ed teache at 10:33 PM

I would state the issue a different way. Schools cannot avoid social/emotional learning. If teachers run a strict classroom and teach to tests, that is a form of negative social/emotional learning that deemphasizes both interpersonal relationships and the very nature of the thinking process. So we are faced with how we use schools as part of the social/emotional learning process no mater what we decide. I am more interested in children and youth learning to think in school. It seems to me that this is a core goal of school and so many teachers have the knack of doing this when freed to teach properly. The "no child left untested" approach actually stifles learning, especially the process of figuring things out on ones own, getting a sense of a process of thinking, testing the validity of ideas and critical analysis of what curriculum committees demand children learn; i.e. are our assuptions about the settling of the west distorted by our Eurocentric attitutes and how might Native American's view that same period in history. It is my observation come voting day in America that the vast majority of Americans go about choosing our leaders with very little ability to think critically about issues due to massive failures in our educational system over the years. Posted Tuesday, November 11, 2008 by Charles Huffine, MD at 11:15 AM

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The Benefits of a Well-Rounded Education

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