In his popular blog for teachers, Larry Ferlazzo takes a stab at what is going to happen in education in 2012. “I think I batted close to 50% in last year’s predictions,” said the English teacher from Luther Burbank High School, CA, “That can’t be much worse than those made by professional pundits.”
Ferlazzo addresses hot topics such as new efforts in school reform including the expansion of charter schools; newspapers backing off trying to publish teacher salaries; No Child Left Behind waivers; and other educational politics. His prediction on Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is a “quieter” one that is intriguing.
Read all of Ferlazzo’s predicitions here: “Eduction-Related Predictions for 2012”
“There will be a surge of interest in the concept of Social Emotional Learning—the idea of explicitly helping students learn about and develop character traits like self-control and perseverance,” he writes.
Back in February, the journal Child Development published findings by researchers led by University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Joseph A. Durlack. The report states that students who took part in social and emotional learning earned improved grades and gained 11 percentage points in their standardized test scores. They also showed improved social skills and better attitudes, exhibited less emotional distress, and had more positive behaviors than before.
“We learned this [SEL] is very practical for schools, and doable in schools” Mr. Durlak said in an Education Week analysis article. “There can be a payoff academically for these kids that compares to a lot of straightforward academic interventions, which is really sort of amazing.”
According to the EdWeek article, SEL programs focus on getting along with other students, self-management, and decision making. These types of programs are different from anti-bullying type programs that try to “fix” problems.
The researchers looked at 213 school-based studies that covered 270,034 students in grades K-12 and issued an initial report in 2007, stating that the programs yielded academic gains. This final report narrowed to programs that were provided as universal programs during school, and not ones targeted for students with behavior issues.
To access the full report, check out the Wiley Online Library here.
Corinne Gregory, president of the SocialSmarts SEL program, told Education Week that students who learn the “soft skills” through social and emotional training tend to be calmer and more cooperative. Thus, there are fewer disturbances in the classroom. Teachers can lose as much as 30% of their teaching time handling behavior issues, according to the policy-research group Public Agenda’s finding in 2003.
“We focus all of our efforts on that nasty endpoint of the social-emotional continuum, bullying, rather than preventing all the other problems that lead up to that,” Gregory said.
Character education is embedded in the mission of many private-independent schools, and ISM research shows that after safety, parents choose a school based on its ability to teach or transmit values. Advisory programs, another hallmark of the private-independent school, also helps shepherd your students through these waters. The report in Child Development shows that teaching these social and emotion skills has an impact on academics as well.
Additional resources of interest from ISM
ISM Free PDF, Academic Dishonesty: Put a Stop to Cheating in Your School
ISM Free PDF, Stopping Bullying: A Private-Independent School’s Responsibility
Committee for Children, Social and Emotional Learning
Additional resources for ISM Consortium Gold Members
Ideas & Perspectives, Vol. 32 No. 9, Why Character Education Matters: Competing in the Marketplace
Ideas & Perspectives, Vol. 33 No. 6 How Character Education Fits Your Price/Value, Product, or Process Platform
