Taking Social-Emotional Learning Schoolwide

The Formative Five Success Skills for Students and Staff

Thomas R. Hoerr

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781416628408
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

What's the secret to making schoolwide SEL work?

Growing numbers of people recognize that social-emotional learning (SEL) is central to a well-rounded education and to success in life outside and beyond the school building. What's missing is the know-how and framework for weaving SEL into the fabric of the school.

In this highly practical and eminently readable book, Thomas R. Hoerr shows teachers, administrators, and other school staff how to integrate the Formative Five success skills (empathy, integrity, self-control, embracing diversity, and grit) with school culture essentials by answering these questions: 1. How can you ensure that your school or district is helping students develop their SEL skills across disciplines? Address your values, vision, mission.
2. What effective programs and activities support student development of SEL skills at the classroom, school, and district levels? Consider your practices.
3. How can you leverage personal relationships within the school and in the community to cultivate students' appreciation of how the differences among us make us stronger? Involve your people.
4. How can you weave an SEL narrative into your school's culture? Live your narrative.
5. What can you do to establish and nurture a welcoming school environment as you strive to enhance students' SEL skills? Embrace your place.

Replete with real-life examples from the author's years as a school leader, relevant findings from the research, and helpful strategies for use at all levels and with all K-12 populations, Taking Social-Emotional Learning Schoolwide is the ultimate blueprint for making sure students and staff are equipped to thrive.

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Chapter 1

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SEL: It's About Time!

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• Teachers: It's a Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. Picture two students: the one who sits in the third row, second seat, and the one in the first row, third seat. Consider these two children's faces as you read this chapter.
• Administrators: Please think of the last two times you spoke to two or three students. Consider these children's faces as you read this chapter.

Perhaps Albert Einstein put it best when he said, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." It's only natural to focus on qualities that can be readily measured, compared, and shared. Unfortunately, that approach leads us to focus on discrete topics that can be assessed by multiple-choice tests. As a beginning 5th grade teacher, I was aware of this obsession because my principal continually talked about the need to raise our school's test scores, and it was a topic at most faculty meetings. Our school was in a high-poverty area and we had myriad issues to address—school safety was a concern, we had several new teachers, student discipline was a challenge, and so on—yet our strongest focus by far was on standardized tests.

This inordinate emphasis on the results from a few hours of tests administered during one week in the spring caused me to question the validity of the tests. I wondered what score would be generated if an answer sheet were submitted with random responses. What if the multiple-choice response bubbles on the answer sheet were filled in to create a nice, wavy pattern, irrespective of the questions that were asked? Would that yield terrible results, or might the randomness lead to an average score? Could pure luck lead to an above-average score? What an interesting question! (I am sure that you can see where this is heading.)

I decided to find out by completing and submitting a random-response sheet, naively thinking, "What could go wrong?" Not wanting to penalize any of my students by submitting this answer sheet with their name, I created a new student, Sam Suedo (my not-so-clever way of writing pseudo, hoping it wouldn't be noticed), and included Sam's answer sheet in my class' packet when I submitted it to the main office. So far, so good.

What I didn't realize was that before submitting the completed tests to be scored, the principal perused each teacher's class packet of answer sheets. I figured that something was amiss the next day when I found a note from the principal in my office mailbox, requesting that I see him ASAP! The combination of ASAP and an exclamation mark was not good, I knew. So much for "What could go wrong?"

The principal told me that he was surprised to see that an answer sheet from a new student was included in my class' packet. "Who is this Sam Suedo?" he asked, raising his voice and waving Sam's sheet in front of me. He was quite unhappy when I told him that I had created a fictitious student to see what standardized test score could be obtained from random responses. He exhaled loudly, rolled his eyes, and talked at length about how important it was for our school's students to do well on the test and how Mr. Suedo's scores would lower our school's average. I left his office a bit chagrined after Sam's unsubmitted answer sheet was torn into pieces and put in the waste can.

This fixation on test scores was driven home even further when I became a principal. In fact, during my final interview for the position, a one-to-one session with the superintendent, she told me that my priority would be to increase my school's test scores, period—that was the only educational issue we discussed. There was no mention of creativity, responsibility, or empathy. As principal, I attended the district's twice-monthly Board of Education meetings and regularly heard community members rail about our district's low test scores during the public forum at the beginning of the agenda. In fact, occasionally there were so many parents and community members wanting to complain or express concerns that the 10-minute open-microphone period was extended to an hour or longer. That made for a long night.

Many of the educators with whom I have talked and worked were bothered by this test-score orientation but were given neither the voice nor the opportunity to view students more broadly. The test-score mantra of legislators, school board members, the local press (schools' test scores were often front-page news), and some parents has made it very difficult to go beyond percentiles and address the needs of the whole child. That's because in most cases test scores have been viewed as the barometer of a school's quality. Educators share some of the responsibility for this because we typically haven't promoted any other formal, official data on student progress. If we only give parents one tool for measuring, why should we be surprised when that is the tool they use?

The lemming-like pursuit of high standardized scores received a significant boost from the 1983 report commissioned by President Ronald Reagan's education secretary, Terrel H. Bell, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (National Commission on Excellence in Education). It ominously noted, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Nearly 20 years later, in 2002, the federal government's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation put even more emphasis on standardized tests. Educators' jobs were tied to students' test scores, as was the very continued existence of schools. (More than once I heard No Child Left Behind referred to as "No Teacher Left Standing.") In 2009, the Race to the Top program broadened the issues on which the government would focus but retained a strong emphasis on test scores.

In The Tyranny of Metrics (2018), Jerry Z. Muller says it well: "But what can be measured is not always worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know" (p. 3). He goes on:

The unintended consequences of NCLB's testing-and-accountability regime are more tangible, and exemplify many of the characteristic pitfalls of metric fixation. Under NCLB, scores on standardized tests are the numerical metric by which success and failure are judged. And the stakes are high for teachers and principals, whose raises in salary and whose very jobs sometimes depend on this performance indicator. It is no wonder, then, that teachers (encouraged by their principals) divert class time toward the subjects tested—mathematics and English—and away from other subjects, such as history, social studies, art, music, and physical education. Instruction in math and English is narrowly focused on the sorts of skills required by the test, rather than broader cognitive processes: that is, students too often learn test-taking strategies rather than substantive knowledge. (p. 92)

Our battle for high test scores has caused us to lose the larger educational war. Children do need to learn to read, write, and calculate, but there is much more to consider in their education. We must also be focused on developing the kinds of people that these children will become. Will they be caring and productive, respectful and honest? Will they be good neighbors and understanding friends? Will they work to improve their communities? We need to prepare students to succeed in life, not just to do well in school, and for that we need to address their social-emotional learning (SEL).

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (n.d.) describes SEL as "a framework that focuses on the core social and emotional skills necessary for students of all ages to be healthy and successful." Evidence is clear that an educational SEL focus helps students in many ways. According to the foundation (2018), "There is strong scientific evidence that social and emotional learning (SEL) programs improve children's well-being, behavior, and academic outcomes. Evidence-based SEL programs at all levels from preschool to high school have been shown to promote the development of social, emotional, and academic competencies." The foundation also notes that a "cost-benefit analysis of six SEL programs found that for every dollar spent on SEL programming, society reaps an average benefit of $11 (2018)."

In their 2018 Educational Leadership article "SEL: What the Research Says," Joseph L. Mahoney and Roger P. Weissberg point to a meta-analysis of SEL programs that showed student participants had improved in SEL skills, attitudes toward self and others, positive social behavior, conduct problems, emotional distress, and academic performance. Further, they note that "SEL programs enhance academic achievement" (p. 34).

In another 2018 article for Kappan Newsletter titled "An Update on Social and Emotional Learning Outcome Research," Mahoney, Durlak, and Weissberg conclude from a meta-analysis of more than 300 research studies that "SEL programs appear to have as great a long-term impact on academic growth as has been found for programs designed specifically to support academic learning." They continue: "SEL programs are both feasible and effective in a variety of educational contexts around the world. SEL is neither a fad nor a flash in the pan but represents a useful way to improve students' social and emotional skills, which are associated with several positive behavioral and academic outcomes."

Momentum for using SEL to see the whole child is gaining. An article by John Fensterwald in EdSource (2019) notes:

A national survey this year of 15,000 teachers and 3,500 principals by the RAND Corporation found that 72 percent of principals said that promoting social and emotional skills was their top or one of their top priorities, with more principals in high-poverty schools rating it as their top priority. More than 80 percent of teachers said that social and emotional learning programs can improve school climate and student behavior; 64 percent said school achievement can be improved as well.

In this book, I expand the definition of SEL to also include adults. Although SEL efforts are directed at students, the adults in schools—teachers, administrators, support staff—will also need to be engaged in furthering their SEL. Kimberly A. Schonert-Reichl makes this point in her 2017 article for The Future of Children titled "Social and Emotional Learning and Teachers":

Teachers are the engine that drives social and emotional learning (SEL) programs and practices in schools and classrooms, and their own social-emotional competence and wellbeing strongly influence their students. Classrooms with warm teacher-child relationships support deep learning and positive social and emotional development among students. … But when teachers poorly manage the social and emotional demands of teaching, students' academic achievement and behavior both suffer. If we don't accurately understand teachers' own social-emotional wellbeing and how teachers influence students' SEL … we can never fully know how to promote SEL in the classroom" (p. 137).

Simply put, we—the adults in schools, regardless of the professional roles we play or titles we hold—must also work on developing our SEL if we are to succeed in teaching these skills to our students. When we do this, everyone gains. (This topic is addressed more fully in Chapter 9, "Leadership Musings.")

What's in a Name?

One challenge administrators have faced in garnering support for SEL has been a lack of consensus on the terminology. Noncognitive skills is an oft-used term, but it isn't productive to define something by what it is not. (Further, I would argue that SEL has a strong cognitive component.) I've seen SEL skills referred to as 21st century skills; the second curriculum has been used, too. Sometimes I see soft skills, which makes me cringe. At one point, the most common way to describe SEL skills was emotional intelligence (popularized by Daniel Goleman's 1995 book of the same name). Sometimes the teaching of SEL skills is referred to as character education or social-emotional and character development, but I do not see the need to refer to character as a component separate from SEL. Fortunately, consensus has emerged that social-emotional learning—coined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) in 1994 (Gresham, 2018)—is the best term to describe this key area of human growth. And often using or saying the letters SEL suffices.

Figure 1.1 shows how CASEL's components of SEL align to the Formative Five success skills of empathy, self-control, integrity, embracing diversity, and grit. (See Figure 1.2 for a list of similar SEL components from a variety of organizations.) It's clear that each of the Formative Five skills has a unique identity, yet it's also clear, particularly as we think about implementation, that they often overlap. For example, there is a strong relationship between empathy and embracing diversity, which feed off one another: As our empathy increases, it becomes easier for us to embrace others who are different from us, and as we embrace those others, our empathy becomes stronger. Similarly, our self-control and grit build upon one another, with gains in one area resulting in an improvement in the other. And our integrity is very much relevant to both empathy and embracing diversity because there will invariably come times when we need to take a public stand that runs counter to the majority view.

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Figure 1.1. CASEL's Components of SEL and Related Formative Five Skills

Orientation: Self (intrapersonal intelligence)

Competency: Self-awareness: ability to recognize one's emotions

Formative Five Success Skills: Self-control, integrity

Orientation: Self (intrapersonal intelligence)

Competency: Self-management: ability to regulate one's emotions

Formative Five Success Skills: Self-control, integrity, grit

Orientation: Other (intrapersonal intelligence)

Competency: Social awareness: ability to understand others

Formative Five Success Skills: Empathy, embracing diversity

Orientation: Other (intrapersonal intelligence)

Competency: Relationship skills: ability to maintain positive relationships with others

Formative Five Success Skills: Empathy, integrity, embracing diversity

Orientation: Collaborative (intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences)

Competency: Problem solving: ability to make productive choices and solve problems

Formative Five Success Skills: Empathy, self-control, integrity, embracing diversity, grit

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Figure 1.2. Other Approaches to Social-Emotional Growth

Organization: CASEL

Social-Emotional Components

• To identify and understand one's own feelings
• To accurately read and comprehend emotional states in others
• To manage strong emotions and their expression in a constructive manner
• To regulate one's own behavior, to develop empathy for others
• To establish and maintain relationships

Organization: VIA Institute on Character

Social-Emotional Components

• Conscientiousness
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism
• Openness to experience
• Extraversion

Organization: Committee for Children

Social-Emotional Components

• Empathy
• Impulse control
• Emotion recognition
• Emotion management
• Communication
• Assertiveness
• Problem solving

Organization: Wallace Foundation

Social-Emotional Components

• Cognitive regulation (attention control, inhibitory control, working memory/planning, cognitive flexibility)
• Emotional processes (emotion knowled...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Other ASCD publications by the author
• Preface
• 1. SEL: It's About Time!
• 2. The Formative Five Success Skills
• 3. What Is Culture?
• Vision, Mission, Values Survey
• 4. Vision, Mission, Values
• Practices Survey
• 5. Practices
• People Survey
• 6. People
• Narrative Survey
• 7. Narrative
• Place Survey
• 8. Place
• 9. Leadership Musings
• 10. Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright