Integrating SEL into Your ELA Curriculum

Practical Lesson Plans for Grades 6-8

John Dacey, Lindsey Neves Baillargeron, Nancy Tripp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429785726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

In this helpful book, you'll learn how to seamlessly infuse social-emotional learning into your middle school English language arts curriculum. With the growing emphasis on student assessment and learning outcomes, many teachers find they lack the time and the encouragement to begin implementing SEL techniques into their instruction. This book offers a solution in the form of practical lesson plans—all of which can be implemented without tedious preparation and all of which are designed to boost self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and other key SEL skills. Your students will discover how to…

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• Practice mindfulness and think positively,

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• Exert self-control and employ self-management skills,

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• Become independent thinkers and make sound decisions,

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• Be resilient and develop a growth mindset,

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• Improve relationship skills and avoid bullying,

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• Be authentic and develop leadership skills,

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• And much more!

Each activity is ELA-focused, so students will develop social-emotional learning while meeting key literacy objectives such as reading a nonfiction speech, looking closely at symbolism, analyzing Shakespearean sonnets, and more. The book also includes reproducible tools for classroom use. You can photocopy them or download them as eResources from www.routledge.com/9781138345263.

1

Why You Will Want to Integrate SEL Into Your Curriculum

The survival of the human race depends at least as much on the cultivation of social and emotional intelligence as it does on the development of technical knowledge and skills.

—Roger Weissberg¹

For many years, the predominant way we provided intervention and instructional support followed a straightforward formula. We used ability grouping and, during core instruction, sent the students who needed extra support to a separate classroom…. We now know that this model of “pull out and replace the curriculum” isn’t effective for the students who need supplemental instruction and intervention. This model even impedes the growth of teachers and students who do not need extra support…. This approach also promotes a school culture in which students who struggle don’t “belong” to special education or specialists; instead, all students belong to all teachers. [They need SEL as well.] Win, win, and win!

—Lee Ann Jung²

We could cite many other international experts who now urge including social/emotional learning (SEL) in the general curriculum, for its own sake³ and for the many ways it facilitates academic learning. They agree: “The need for a new accountability system [worldwide] has never been greater. Standardized testing has done little to close persistent achievement gaps by race, income, and language.”⁴

Furthermore:

When 7,000 Chicago-area students sat down for a standardized test a few years ago, they got a pleasant surprise: If they did well, they’d receive rewards ranging from a trophy to $20. It worked: The students (randomly chosen to participate in a study) demonstrated, on average, 5–6 months more learning than students not promised rewards, leading the economists who conducted the study to suggest they’d solved “the urban school problem”—bribe kids and they’ll test better.⁵

But there may be a different takeaway. These students had no prior knowledge of the rewards, so they didn’t prepare any differently for the exam, or learn anything more. They just took it more seriously, and miraculously, looked six months smarter. Yet this was the same type of high-stakes exam that was used to rate their schools, leaders, and teachers—which might lead us to wonder how much trust to place in standardized measures and the accountability systems built upon them.

On top of that, the two key indicators that drive most college acceptance decisions—high school GPA and entrance exams—only explain 20–25 percent of the variance in student performance in college. The rest of what predicts student success remains an “X-factor,” yet research points to a handful of student attributes that seem to be powerful predictors of college success, including having a can-do attitude (feeling a sense of control over one’s life and pursuing goals), a studious orientation (avoiding procrastination and buying into the purpose of a college education), and being an active learner (engaging in classroom dialogue and talking about one’s studies outside of class). Together, these factors account for about 45 percent of college success.⁶

So why is that? Why is AL (academic learning of facts and skills) so dominant in the West, and also, to a lesser extent, in the East? Emphasis on the academic core is not the major problem; the rigid multiple-choice tests used universally to measure its acquisition are. For students to succeed on these tests, they must be doggedly drilled on the correct answers. No wonder so many drop out. And what teacher enters the profession out of a love for drilling students?

Another impetus for SEL is the surging number and severity of problem behaviors, especially among secondary school students.⁷ They are receiving messages about social and emotional norms through multiple media, and at a faster rate than we have ever seen before. Many of these messages are negative—selfish, cynical, and often hyper-sexual. Most teachers want to remediate this trend. They genuinely want to make a contribution to the life success of their pupils, and they don’t believe that AL alone does that. Many teachers resent being forced to “teach to the test.”

In our preparation for this book, we have interviewed dozens of English Language Arts (ELA) teachers in the United States, Britain, and six other countries. They all agree: schools are currently too deeply invested in academic evaluation. There is now significant evidence that nether governmental tests, nor school grades, nor college readiness tests such as the SAT in the United States are good predictors of success in life. The SATs are not even predictive of college grades (and yet we still use them to sort applicants!).⁸ Nevertheless, our interviewees concur that their primary responsibility is meeting academic goals. They just don’t see a separate curriculum for SEL happening.

The solution most teachers would subscribe to is integrating social and emotional instruction into ELA teaching. They especially espouse the idea if it can be done without losing instructional time, and without tedious preparation.⁹ And it can. According to a recent meta-study in Child Development,¹⁰ infusing SEL has been found to improve academic scores by between 11% and 17%! Conduct problems, emotional distress, and drug use were all significantly lower for students exposed to SEL programs, and development of social and emotional skills and positive attitudes toward self, others, and school was higher.

As the new CASEL Guide to SEL Programs puts it,

Social and emotional learning can serve as an organizing principle for coordinating all of a school’s academic, youth development, and prevention activities [italics ours]. When systemic social, emotional, and academic learning becomes the overarching framework for a district or school, the result is an organization whose integrated programing activities are greater than the sum of its parts.¹¹

A recent resolution by Massachusetts in the United States proclaims its legal requirement of its school systems:

An effective English language arts and literacy curriculum promotes social and emotional learning. Curriculum and instruction that develop students’ self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, responsible decision-making, and relationship skills can increase academic achievement, improve attitudes and behaviors, decrease negative behaviors, and reduce emotional distress. In ELA classrooms, for example, students should practice recognizing aspects of themselves in the texts they encounter (self-awareness), engaging in productive struggles with challenging texts and topics (self-management), tailoring speech and writing to audiences’ needs and interests (social awareness), grappling vicariously with difficult choices faced by others (responsible decision-making), and collaborating respectfully with students from backgrounds unlike their own (relationship skills).¹²

For integration of ELA and SEL in secondary schools to work, though, several criteria must be met:

• Teachers are busy. SEL lessons must be well organized and easy to implement. Assuming that all teachers already know the ELA part of our lesson plans, each of the SEL strategies in this book should average no more than 30 minutes of preparation time.
• SEL must not interfere with ELA learning.¹³
• The relevancy of SEL to the required ELA curriculum must be apparent to the teacher.
• The positive effect of SEL on classroom climate—an atmosphere that fosters concentration—ought to be apparent in the classroom.

We believe this book meets all these criteria, and to date, it is the only resource that does.

Format of This Book

This book has the following features:

• Each of the SEL strategies (also called activities) are closely integrated with a typical learning goal. For example, when learning to describe themselves objectively (SEL), pupils will identify principles of characterization (ELA)—see introduction to Chapter 2.
• All ancillary materials such as charts, checklists, and stories also appear on the book’s website www.routledge.com/9781138345263, for ease in downloading or printing out in multiple copies. The website also offers several other types of helpful materials, organized by chapter in the book.
• The book has an international orientation, with a variety of cultural exemplars.

There is one area of SEL that is the source of great conflict: sex education. Certainly it can be argued that this arena has many problems that societies around the world struggle with:

Adolescents frequently cite mass media is a primary source of information about sex. Unfortunately, accurate, healthy, and responsible messages about sex are not typical in the entertainment media. Studies of music videos show pervasive sexual objectification and degrading sexuality, especially regarding girls and women. Other studies find regular exposure to certain sexual content on TV, glamorizing early sexual relationships and teen motherhood, was found to predict earlier sexual activity and higher rates of teen pregnancy. And with a large percentage of teen boys, and many teen girls, now being exposed to online pornography, researchers are just beginning to see the effect that images of highly unrealistic sex and bodies, and often violent, degrading sex, are having on young people.

—Tamara Sobel, Director, Media Literacy Now

Few educators or adolescent psychologists would disagree with this dismal picture. What is the responsibility of SEL? We find the answers to that question to be so freighted with situational differences and with values disagreements, religious and otherwise, as to make the topic beyond the scope of this book. Sorry for the “cop out,” but we can only hope that you and your colleagues will do your best to attend to it.

Indeed, the teaching profession has gone through difficult times for the past several decades, to put it lightly.¹⁴ Much of the problem has been due to a misunderstanding of the true causes of the decline in effectiveness of public education worldwide. However, schooling is, we believe, about to be freed from this misdirection of societal complaints. We are convinced that the problems in schools today are not academic in nature, but rather the direct result of the decline of SEL. There is every indication that this imbalance is about to change. We sincerely hope that this book will contribute to that reversal.

Notes

1 Weissberg, 2016.

2 Jung, 2018.

3 A good film on the need for SEL may be found at: facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/10155512752052217/

4 Center for Collaborative Education, 2017.

5 Levitt & others, 2012.

6 Goodwin & Hein, 2016.

7 E.g., WebMD, 2017.

8 Paul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• eResources
• Meet the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Why You Will Want to Integrate SEL Into Your Curriculum
• Part I: Self-Awareness
• Part II: Self-Management
• Part III: Social Awareness
• Part IV: Relationship Skills
• Part V: Responsible Decision-Making
• Part VI: Achieving Teaching Goals More Effectively
• Bibliography