Updated April 7

Attending a mostly white boarding school in Connecticut allowed Dena Simmons to escape the danger of her poor, Black and Latino neighborhood in the Bronx, New York. But it also separated her from her culture and made her feel like she didn’t belong. “There is emotional damage done when young people can’t be themselves,” she said six years ago during a that has received almost 1.4 million views.

That’s why Simmons, who became assistant director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence in 2018, worked to make the center’s popular K-12 program on understanding feelings more meaningful for marginalized students. She pushed to include figures such as former President Barack Obama and girls’ education activist Malala Yousafzai in lessons and challenged teachers with bold statements about schools being systems of white supremacy.

Her drive for cultural relevance, however, repeatedly clashed with the views of her supervisor, Marc Brackett, the center’s prominent director and best-selling author of .

“The political examples automatically alienate people (Black or white) and we can’t judge people for being Democrats or Republicans,” Brackett wrote Simmons in one of several emails and documents shared with ����Ӱ��.

His insistence on staying on the political sidelines ran afoul of Simmons and others at the Yale center who viewed his stance as tone deafness toward issues of historical injustice. Their lessons — for example, using a book about a transgender boy to teach about feeling understood — might get the curriculum “banned” in some parts of the country, Brackett said in one email. The conflict has put the center in the middle of a controversy that has rippled from the university to the larger world of what has come to be known as social-emotional learning.

Simmons, 37, resigned from her position in January, seven months after she was targeted by anonymous racial slurs during an to memorialize the death of George Floyd. She left, she told the university at the time, due to a “hostile work environment” at the center, where she was subjected to “unconsented hair touching” and once received a reprimand from a supervisor for calling out social-emotional learning practices she viewed as harmful to students of color.

In interviews, four other former staffers supported her account, describing what they saw as an unwelcome atmosphere at the center toward issues of diversity and inclusion.

“There was no emotional intelligence afforded me,” Simmons told the 74. “I hope to push the field and institutions to do better — to put their actions where they say their values are.”

In a lengthy statement on her resignation sent to roughly 2,500 schools and organizations it works with around the world, center leaders said they were “deeply disheartened by our colleagues’ hurtful experiences at Yale.”

“We want to stress that we do not tolerate discrimination or bias in any form,” they wrote. “We care deeply about our team’s well-being and safety, and we continuously strive to create a workplace that fosters a sense of belonging where all people feel valued and connected.”

Despite strides toward “creating and sustaining an antiracist workplace,” the statement acknowledged “there is much more work to do.” Contacted by ����Ӱ��, Brackett said he is taking “a pause on interviews” and sent a link to his center’s on diversity, equity and inclusion — developed after the online incident.

The episode at one of the nation’s most elite universities offers a window into how social-emotional learning programs — and schools more generally — are grappling with issues of historical discrimination as well as a growing backlash from those who say such efforts are politicizing the curriculum.

“As goes the consciousness of the country, so goes education,” said Robert Jagers, vice president of research at the (CASEL), a hub for research and policy expertise in the field. “There is a measure of urgency that was not present two years ago.”

Mood Meters and Meta-Moments

In many ways, the Yale schism reflects the enormous growth social-emotional learning has experienced since the term’s first invocation at a . Today, the concept is ubiquitous. It is not unusual for large school districts to have whole departments devoted to helping students form positive relationships, manage difficult emotions and make sound decisions. It’s also big business, drawing $21 billion to $47 billion annually on programs and teacher training, according to a .

While some criticize the field for “” definitions and unclear targets, a formidable body of research now says social-emotional learning can improve and lead to .

After completing post-doctoral work in psychology with Peter Salovey, now Yale’s president, Brackett became one of the field’s early pioneers. Like Simmons, he came to the study of human emotion from painful personal experience. In an last year with Brené Brown, author of and , he described being sexually abused as a child and turning to his uncle, a teacher, for help.

“When I disclosed what was happening, he was the only adult who was there for me,” Brackett said. “He just listened. He didn’t say, ‘Toughen up!’ like my father did, and he didn’t have a breakdown like my mom did. And God bless my parents, they did everything they could, but they just had no resilience, they had no strategies to deal with their feelings.”

His center’s signature program is RULER — an acronym for “recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing and regulating” emotions. The “Meta-Moment,” one of its stock tools, prompts students to imagine their “best self” when responding to tense situations. Lessons on “feeling words” ask students to study how a book character or a well-known person might have felt in a particular situation.

“Marc’s vital voice regarding the connection between emotions, cognition and learning has resonated in the field,” said Chi Kim, CEO of Pure Edge, a nonprofit that provides health and fitness programs for schools and funds research in social-emotional learning.

The Yale center, which sits in the medical school, draws in millions of dollars in grants, including at least $5 million in from the U.S. Department of Education since 2012. It has even earned the endorsement of current Secretary Miguel Cardona. As state chief in Connecticut, he hired Brackett’s center to give all educators in the state access to a 10-hour , funded in part with $500,000 from Dalio Education, a state foundation. CASEL cites RULER as an example of a program based on research, and Brackett sits on its board.

He has also brought to the field pop-culture cachet. He teamed up with Lady Gaga in 2015 for on how teens feel about school and frequently on TV talk shows. Even parents who don’t know RULER or recognize Brackett’s name are familiar with the “Mood Meter,” which teaches children to associate feelings with colors. The resulting boards of multi-hued Post-it Notes produced by parents and teachers have become mainstays on .

A former middle school math and English teacher in the Bronx, Simmons joined the center in 2014. She believed in its mission and called the opportunity “a dream come true.” Her doctoral studies had focused on how middle school teachers can address bullying. Now, she wanted to help schools become more compassionate places for marginalized students.

But as the program grew, so did Simmons’s view that the center’s leaders saw equity as an “add-on.” She became convinced that common practices in social-emotional learning, such as taking deep breaths in times of stress, wouldn’t serve students of color well.

“Try telling a child in poverty to breathe through racism,” she said in an interview. “That is insulting.”

She recruited others with classroom experience to the center and blended Learning for Justice’s — like showing “empathy when people are excluded or mistreated” — into RULER materials.

Susan Rivers, who co-founded the center with Brackett in 2013, recalled that Simmons “emerged as an education leader, despite not having the support, encouragement or collaboration to do anti-racist, inclusive work while at Yale.”

“She asks really tough and essential questions about equity in education, and she has the courage and conviction to do and lead the work,” said Rivers, who left the center in 2016 and now runs iThrive Games, a foundation that supports game-based learning for teens.

That quality often put Simmons at odds with the center’s leadership. In commentaries such as 2019’s “Why We Can’t Afford Whitewashed Social-Emotional Learning,” she argued that sidestepping the “larger sociopolitical context” in which students live keeps them from developing skills to confront hate and injustice. Ignoring that background, she said, could turn their teachings into “.” That statement, she said, earned her a warning from Linda Mayes, director of the Yale Child Study Center that oversees the emotional intelligence program, to be more careful with her words.

Mayes declined to comment on the incident.

‘Dead presidents’

In charge of teacher training and curriculum, Simmons directed her energy toward integrating that real-world context into RULER’s “feeling words” — the vocabulary students develop to describe their emotions and match them with the red, blue, green and yellow quadrants on the Mood Meter.

For “hopeful” — in the yellow, energetic and highly pleasant range — Simmons thought Obama, author of 2006’s , would be a natural fit. But at a lunch meeting with two other center leaders, Brackett blanched at the idea, she recalled.

“He said … that if we focus on presidents, we should only focus on dead presidents,” she said. “He must not have realized that all of the dead presidents were white men.” The two others she said were present — Scott Levy, the center’s executive director, and Nicole Elbertson, the director of content and communications — did not respond to requests for comment. Levy announced his resignation from the center March 10. Karen Peart, a spokeswoman for the Yale School of Medicine, said he is “pursuing another opportunity” but will remain on the center’s board.

The center’s leaders ultimately acquiesced on using those examples, but drew the line on others. For a lesson on “despair,” Karina Medved-Wu, who worked on RULER’s lessons for afterschool programs, dipped into current events and wrote a vignette about an undocumented parent stuck in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center.

The example was replaced with the story of a runaway cat.

Medved-Wu noted the irony of a workplace devoted to emotional intelligence where many workers felt uncomfortable sharing their emotions.

“If Black employees, non-Black employees of color, employees who have self-identified as LGBTQ+and employees with disabilities do not feel safe, valued or heard in-house,” she asked, “then what biases and messaging are being sent locally and globally?”

She also proposed a fifth-grade lesson about , the book about a transgender child that sparked pushback from Brackett. “We can’t be in a position that our curriculum is banned,” he wrote in an email to Simmons and other staff members. “We have to be neutral.” To respond to his concerns, Medved-Wu included an alternative assignment: in which a father took a forgiving approach to confronting a boy who had bullied his son.

In October 2019, she said she spoke to Darin Latimore, the medical school’s deputy dean for diversity and inclusion, who indicated he had launched an investigation into the working environment at the center; at the time of their talk, he told her he had spoken to 15 people, she recalled. Latimore did not respond to requests for comment.

Peart, the Yale spokeswoman, declined to discuss the results of his “climate assessment,” but said without elaboration that “action is in process to address the themes gleaned during the review.” The center’s goal is for RULER to be “non-partisan,” she said, adding that it regularly seeks feedback on content to make it more inclusive. A school that wanted to use The Other Boy, she said “would be met with our full support.”

To the bewilderment of some staffers, Brackett appeared to have no resistance to such themes in his personal life. Brackett, who is gay, supports finding ways for young people “” to feel accepted, and he recently completed with his cinematographer husband on a camp for youth devoted to “exploring gender diversity.”

But inside the center, staff members say they heard a different message. “I recall him frequently emphasizing … that the appeal of our work had to be for everyone,” said Sarah Kadden, a former program manager for early childhood.

Simmons and Medved-Wu suspect Brackett’s motivation for keeping the lessons free of controversy was financial. A six-week training institute for three district staff members costs $6,000.

“If RULER were to be banned, it would impact the bottom line,” Simmons said.

The issue most important to Simmons — equity — was where she felt the least support. She had been pushing for years to brand the term into the center’s mission statement. In 2019, Brackett proposed in an email that she “create the vision … for how we infuse equity/culturally responsive practices, etc. into our training and curriculum.” By that point, Simmons said, the center was sending mixed messages, pushing inclusion while resisting her attempts to broaden the curriculum. In one email, she told Brackett that she did not want to become “a prop” for the center’s work on diversity.

“We were discouraged from raising equity issues, such as the school-to-prison pipeline, racist discipline practices [and] the cultural mismatch often found between students and teachers,” said Kadden, now a social worker in Connecticut’s New London Public Schools.

Then came the Zoom bomb.

On May 25, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody sparked an outcry in cities and campuses across the country. In early June, thousands of Black Lives Matter flooded the streets of New Haven, where Yale is located, presenting a list of demands, including the removal of resource officers from local schools. Weeks later, during an online event devoted to racial healing held by Yale’s Child Study Center, Simmons was reading a poem when several anonymous gate-crashers interrupted her with racial slurs, both verbally and in the chat field. Simmons logged off of the event, which was not password protected, but returned at the urging of colleagues. The harassment resumed.

In its statement, the Yale emotional intelligence center decried the “horrific, racist Zoom bombing” and said it had taken steps to curb its online “vulnerabilities.” Leaders have offered workshops on cultural sensitivity, hired a chief diversity officer and scrutinized RULER to “ensure it is equitable and inclusive,” the statement said. But Simmons, who took a seven-month medical leave, said the experience followed a pattern of incidents in which she felt dehumanized, such as colleagues touching her hair and calling it exotic. She left the university Jan. 19, the day she was supposed to return.

For those who view Simmons as a leader, not only in social-emotional learning but in the broader anti-racist movement, her departure raises troubling questions.

“Dena’s star was certainly on the rise … because she brought a perspective in content that was transformational,” said Andre Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t know how you lose somebody like that.”

Some districts that use RULER and sent teachers to learn from Simmons have taken note of her departure. An official in the Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma said any further expansion of RULER in the district is “on pause [until we] see the response from the university.” And the executive director of the Tauck Family Foundation in Wilton, Connecticut, which funds RULER in Bridgeport early-childhood programs, said she wants to see what “progress has been made in addressing the issues raised” by Simmons’s resignation before continuing its support.

Many schools are playing catch-up in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests, which sparked a reckoning on issues of race in education, from hiring practices to teaching history. “I think that Marc and Yale feel constrained about what they can do and they can’t do,” said David Osher, vice president and fellow at the non-partisan American Institutes for Research. “Probably many organizations prior to this past summer were … more timid about taking on issues that involved being explicitly anti-racist.”

Osher’s work on school safety and student engagement includes social-emotional learning. He’s collaborated on grants with the Yale center and credits Brackett’s work with helping him understand the importance of training adults before children. But he noted that curriculum developers must create programs that “play in both blue and red states.” Of the Yale center, he added, nothing about Simmons’s departure “would make me stop working with them.”

The push for educators to address structural racism has prompted its own outcry, turning critical race theory and new histories such as The New York Times’ “1619 Project” into fodder for the nation’s ongoing culture wars. At , for example, a former staff member has attracted a passionate YouTube following for criticizing the school’s insistence that employees undergo anti-bias training that centers on white privilege. Several academics recently formed the to combat what they see as an overly cynical emphasis on race, gender and sexual orientation, rather than “.”

“There is no such thing as a values-neutral [social-emotional learning] program,” said Ian Rowe, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a member of the foundation’s board. “But integrating reductionist ideas that carry oppressor [and] oppressed identities based on race will only perpetuate false, corrosive notions of superiority and inferiority.”

‘Sins of our history’

With Yale behind her, Simmons is free to approach social-emotional learning her way.

She has launched — a curriculum with equity at the center — and next year, St. Martin’s Press will publish her book, . “I needed my voice to ring louder than other people’s doubts, slights and limitations,” she wrote recently. “I left so that I could save myself, so that I could dream. And I left so that I could invest my time into changing the very system that failed me and is failing so many others.”

Dena Simmons is finishing her book, White Rules for Black People. (Nuria Rius for ����Ӱ��)

But her message still rattles. When she spoke in February to teachers in a predominantly white, affluent Chicago suburb, a writer for a right-wing website called out some of Simmons’s more provocative statements, such as saying the nation’s education system is “based on a foundation of whiteness.” Simmons later that coverage of the event sparked threats and hate mail.

Dan Iverson, president of the Naperville Union Education Association, said he heard complaints from a few participants, though he and most teachers present saw the speech in a more positive light.

“It’s not a sin to be white,” told ����Ӱ��. “We’ve always had a hard time in this country with the idea that the sins of our history are still relevant. It’s inherently very difficult to exist in a place where you can be OK with who you are as a white guy, but to understand you are better off.”

Flare-ups like the one in Naperville do not surprise Kamilah Drummond-Forrester. For years, she has asked teachers to examine their attitudes and biases toward students as part of the training for Open Circle, a social-emotional learning program based at Wellesley College, an elite liberal arts school in Massachusetts. The program is used in about 300 schools across the country.

In workshops, teachers sometimes drop comments, such as, “Those students don’t care about school,” or “Their parents aren’t interested,” said Drummond-Forrester, the program’s former director. Teachers call out what they view as “coded language” toward Black and Hispanic students, only to anger colleagues who think they’re being branded as racists.

But like Simmons, Drummond-Foster views such encounters as necessary. “You can’t talk about teaching skills around social awareness devoid of the systems that these kids are navigating,” she said.

That’s not the only thing they have in common. Just 10 days after Simmons’s resignation, Drummond-Forrester left her position as head of the Wellesley program.

In a statement, the college’s Centers for Women, which includes Open Circle, called Drummond-Forrester “a thought leader” for her work exploring social-emotional learning “through an equity lens,” and said staff would continue to work with her on other . Echoing Simmons’s concerns, Drummond-Forrester said the responsibility for equity work fell on her shoulders because she is Black.

“I was burned out,” she said.

Disclosures: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to and ����Ӱ��. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to and ����Ӱ��.

Lead Image: Dena Simmons spent seven years striving to make the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s popular RULER program more culturally responsive. Now she’s leading her own efforts to incorporate equity into social-emotional learning. (Nuria Rius for ����Ӱ��)

As schools continue to grapple with coronavirus outbreaks, displaced students and classroom reopening decisions, much of the focus has been on how educators can help students catch up academically after months of virtual learning and, in many cases, limited interactions with their teachers. But what about students’ social-emotional growth, which could be stunted after months of limited time with peers and stress over the pandemic, economic difficulties and racism?

That question is at the center of work by , a psychology professor and executive director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center at Bridgewater State University. Her project, “,” offers free resources and advice to help educators meet the challenges of this pandemic school year, with an eye toward social-emotional learning. (She has also co-authored a new book on the topic: )

����Ӱ�� spoke with Englander — via Zoom — about how socialization looks different online, what teachers should know about trauma and cyberbullying, and how parents should set limits on screen time.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: I’ve heard you speak about how kids can distinguish between connecting with someone online and building up a relationship over time with someone in person. I imagine that’s going to be a really big challenge for teachers this year, both in building relationships with children and in kids connecting with each other. Can you share more about that research and what that means for education right now?

Englander: The research is an ongoing study that we’ve done since about 2010 with about 5,500 older teenagers. We ask them a lot of questions about their lives and their social function and their school function and their relationships with peers and teachers, parents and families. That particular issue was about drawing a distinction between feeling connected with somebody in the moment when you’re having an interaction with them versus building a really strong and intimate relationship over time. We found that kids understood that there was a difference — but it doesn’t seem like it’s a distinction that many of them had thought about before we asked about it.

To understand what social media’s good for and what it’s not so good for, you have to be aware of that [difference]. A large part of our work in social and emotional learning is raising that awareness. It’s important to draw a distinction between how social media is advertised in the marketplace versus what it actually is good for. And I think it’s promoted as a way of connecting people, and it does, but there are limits to that connection, and in order to be smart and savvy consumers of it, we have to understand what those limits are and teach them to kids.

Do you think there are the same limitations with online learning tools? Is there something similar where you’re connected with your teacher in the moment talking on Google Classroom or another tool, or she’s giving you feedback in an email — but that’s different than seeing a teacher in person every day?

I’m not sure, because with the exception of really small children, I don’t think there’s an expectation with teachers that you’re going to have a really strong personal relationship with students. But there’s sort of a qualitative difference that I haven’t really put my finger on yet. There is something very different about talking to somebody when you’re physically near them than when you’re not.

Right now, if you and I were meeting in a coffee shop, talking at a table, it would feel different. I do a lot of speaking and training in schools, and it feels quite different having somebody who comes in person versus somebody who does it virtually, even though from an objective point of view, you might say, “Why would it feel different? You’re conveying the same information. You can still see each other’s faces.” And yet, there is something different about it. That’s one of the things we’re trying to understand because we want to be able to teach kids about this difference so they can understand it for themselves. To a certain extent, I think they know it, but it’s obviously complicated, or we would have a really easy time with it, which we don’t.

What does this distinction mean for teachers and parents going through the new school year, when there’s a lot more virtual learning than there was before, and there isn’t a close proximity between children and teachers?

School is going to be quite different, and it may be more difficult for students to connect on an emotional level with their teachers. That does have an impact. Children learn best from adults who they’re emotionally attached to. Attachment is not a bad thing in education, even though there has been some movement away from it in recent decades. It’s actually a healthy thing. And the fact that it’s going to be more difficult to achieve in this environment is going to impact how children learn.

I don’t know what it means. Maybe it means we’re going to have to lower our expectations, which I hate the thought of, but it’s possible we’re just not going to make as much progress. I think everybody’s kind of knocking themselves out trying to figure ways around this, but it’s very difficult to teach children online 100 percent of the time.

The good news is that I think parents and students appreciate school and teachers in a way that they haven’t for quite a long time. So, that’s the silver lining, but it’s a pretty tough situation.

What do you mean by lowering expectations?

It’s hard to see how children are going to achieve the same level of social-emotional growth that they would in person. Children are very resilient, and we may find that when kids go back to school, they sort of snap back into shape. We really don’t know. This is a unique situation, and there’s almost no research on this. There’s a little bit of research out of Louisiana on kids who had extended absences following repeated hurricanes. But even that, I think, was three or four months. Now, we’re looking at kids who may be out of school for six months or a year.

It’s really a mess.

You’ve said you haven’t seen much media attention paid to how adults can mitigate the risks of children having been isolated because of the virus. How should we be thinking and talking about those risks, and what should parents and teachers do to mitigate them?

To mitigate the effects of social isolation, we have to seize upon every opportunity for in-person interactions in a way we normally wouldn’t have to. For example, as long as the weather is even a little bit decent, we have got to get kids playing with peers outside, where it’s safe to do that. We’re going to have to teach them to wear masks and socially distance, but they can play outside and be with other kids.

There are also opportunities at home, such as eating dinner together, eating breakfast together, playing board games together, cooking together, cleaning together — anything you can do, you need to bake it into the routine. This can be hard, because in social isolation and in situations where parents are very stressed, because they’re trying to do their job and their kids are trying to do the schoolwork, it’s very stressful and the impulse is to just say, “If I have any flexibility at all, what I want to do is run away. So, if I have any chance to do anything on my own, I’m going to go to my bedroom and do it because I’ve got to have some breathing space.”

But it actually lowers stress a little bit to do things that aren’t high-pressure. For example, eating dinner together is not a high-pressure activity. And in our research, we find kids have better social outcomes when their families eat dinner together. They have more peaceful and better social relationships with their peers if their families eat dinner together. This is true both online and in school. And it was also true, although less so, even if their families didn’t get along.

Now, interacting with family members isn’t the same as interacting with peers. Think back to when you were a kid: Interacting with your family’s relatively easy. They love you. No matter what you do, they like you. With peers, it’s much more challenging. So, family is not the same as peers, but it’s a lot better than nothing. The point is, we have to think about this. We have to say, “Any opportunity I have to have my kids interact with another human being in person, including me, I have to seize on, because they’re getting so little of that.”

We’re hearing so much about what schools should do academically to catch students up when they get back. Are there things that teachers and parents should be doing to catch kids up in social and emotional ways?

There are some teaching techniques that can help and can kill two birds with one stone — that can help the kids academically but also help them socially. For example, assigning the kids to small-group work. When you ask about small-group work, a lot of kids say they hate it. Small-group work with peers is challenging. There’s no doubt about it. But sometimes, that challenge is good for you. It hones your skills. So, while it might not be always fun, it is an academic technique that can help kids socially as well. So, teachers should be thinking about doing things like that or having projects that involve social interactions, such as having students interview people. You want to look for opportunities to give kids that face time as much as possible.

Parents are worrying about academic and social-emotional effects of screen time at a time when even mental health supports might have moved online. What advice do you have?

It’s a very, very hard thing right now. It was hard before, wasn’t it? And the fact that all our interactions have gone online has made it even harder.

I think there are limits to what we can do. Nobody is going to keep up in school on an hour of screen time a day. So, there are practical and functional limits.

What I’ve always thought, even before the pandemic, is that the most productive thing would be to carve out either situations or pockets of time where all agree that you don’t use screens. For example, you could say, “Every day at 5 o’clock, we’re going to cook dinner together, and then we’re going to sit down and eat it together. And that’s going to be a scope of an hour and a half to two hours where we’re not going to use any screens. We’re not going to answer cell phones.” Some people say, “No recreational screen time during the week, or not on weekends, or not on Sundays, or none before 10 a.m., or none after 3 p.m.”

However you want to structure it, it seems like it causes fewer arguments to carve out non-screen time than it does to try to say something like, “Okay, two hours of screen a day, and that’s it.” Because then you sort of get into an endless loop of, what counts? What doesn’t count? Does schoolwork count? If your 12-year-old says, “Mom, I’m reading The New York Times online,” does that count? What about texting? Every text message is about 10 seconds. Are you going to add them all up? It feels like you’re getting yourself into this thing where it requires constant monitoring, constant quarrels.

As a general rule of thumb, I don’t like policies or approaches that increase conflict in families. I think conflict is very damaging for children and families, and for parents too, so I prefer to look for approaches that minimize conflict, even if that means that you might end up doing a little bit more screen time.

But in general, there need to be pockets of time where you’re away from it, where you’re relaxing with a book before you go to sleep or eating dinner with somebody or taking a bike ride or walk. We found generally that kids are very receptive to the idea that screen time is a health issue. They’re a little bit more skeptical about the whole idea of safety. Adults push safety a lot online, and kids feel like they’re savvy and adults are exaggerating dangers. The general approach of saying, “This is an issue of how healthy you want to live” does seem to work better than saying, “There are terrible dangers. And I’m going to warn you about them.”

Are you seeing or hearing about increases in cyberbullying during this time?

I’ve heard anecdotally of it. I don’t think anybody’s published any research on it, so I don’t think we actually know. But anecdotally, we’ve heard, and it kind of makes sense when you have more screen time that you would expect everything to move online a little bit more in that regard. I would be very surprised if we didn’t see some increase. Of course, we’ll see a decrease in bullying in person.

Do you have advice for teachers and parents on handling that and looking out for bullying online?

The ultimate source of information about this are the kids. And if you want to hear from the kids, you can’t just say, “Report, report, report.” What you have to do is build a relationship with them. You have to be interested in their lives. You have to ask them how things are going. And if you build a relationship with them, then you hope that they’ll come and describe to you what’s happening or let you know if they’re in some distress. That’s the goal. But there’s not really a shortcut on this.

Lots of events in the past several months have potentially caused trauma for children, from a deadly virus to an economic crisis to very public violence that we’re seeing against African Americans in the news. Plus, there are personal things like child abuse. What should adults be thinking about going into a new school year to make sure classrooms are trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive?

As part of the “When the Kids Come Back” project, we recommend that should be taken. We have a handout for teachers on trauma — understanding the symptoms, the symptoms that are probable and those that are not very probable. School counselors can send notices to parents saying, “Let me know if your child is struggling emotionally. Let me know if they’re having problems sleeping, problems eating, that kind of thing.” That way, if I’m the school counselor and I know I have this list, say, of 35 kids whose parents say they’re really struggling, I can keep an eye on those kids. I can check in with them. I can make sure they know me and where my office is. They know that they can come see me anytime they want, and that really can really help smooth it.

Also, you want teachers to know how to handle these issues because they are very likely to come up in the classroom. One of the things we did in the project is pull on the research from Louisiana, which suggested that when kids come out of these situations, some of them tend to be talkers. They feel anxious about it, and they want to talk about it. Other kids are completely withdrawn, and talking about it makes them more anxious. So, how do you handle it when you have a class of 25 kids and some of them are talkers and some of them are freaked at the idea of talking?

The answer is you don’t force non-talkers to sit through a classroom discussion. You give talkers other ways that they can express what they’re thinking. You might say to them, for example, “We’re going to journal about what we’ve all been through or what we’re thinking about. And you can go write in your journal, or you can go see the school counselor, or you can hang on knowing that the school counselor’s going to come to our class and we might have a chance to talk about it this afternoon,” something like that. You want to give them an outlet.

It’s really important. There are some kids who are coming back to school, and they have seen people get sick. Some kids have seen people who they know die. Some kids have had parents who’ve lost their jobs. Some kids have had parents who’ve lost their homes. There’s a lot of potential trauma here, and it’s really, really important to be sensitive to that and to understand that. The social-emotional stuff was always important, but this year, it’s really front and center.

As the creators of the most widely cited SEL definitions, CASEL now sees a need to clarify what’s necessary to achieve the vision of SEL for all educators, adults and young people. We’ve and to pay close attention to how SEL affirms the identities, strengths and experiences of all children, including those who have been marginalized in our education systems. CASEL has continued to highlight the importance of enhancing the social-emotional competence of all young people and adults, while putting additional emphasis on how we can all learn and work together to create caring and just schools and communities.

CASEL’s Definition of SEL (2020 Update):

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) is an integral part of education and human development. SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.

SEL advances educational equity and excellence through authentic school-family-community partnerships to establish learning environments and experiences that feature trusting and collaborative relationships, rigorous and meaningful curriculum and instruction, and ongoing evaluation. SEL can help address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving schools and contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities.”

As we continuously learn and refine our collective understanding of SEL and accelerate the movement across research, practice, and policy, we’ve highlighted four priorities:

CASEL will be explicit about how SEL can advance educational equity and excellence

We know from research that attention to students’ holistic learning and development can promote high-quality educational opportunities and outcomes for all children across race, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation and other differences. Importantly, SEL has potential to promote the academic, social and emotional development of all children. SEL can also help adults and students co-create more equitable schools and communities. While SEL alone will not solve the deep-seated inequities in the education system, it can help adults and students build more meaningful relationships and develop knowledge, skills and mindsets to interrupt inequitable policies and practices, create more inclusive learning environments and nurture the interests and assets of all individuals

CASEL will work alongside researchers, educators and policymakers to address issues of identity, agency and belonging that are fundamental to human development

By elevating young people’s perspectives and experiences, SEL affirms who they are as individuals and helps students and adults understand how their unique identities support and shape their learning. By offering opportunities for students to use their voice, examine social problems and work alongside adults to co-create solutions, SEL can help cultivate change agents and leaders who will meaningfully contribute to their communities and the world. By fostering deeper connections and meaningful relationships, SEL can help create a sense of belonging and more inclusive learning environments and communities.

With these priorities in mind, our reflects expanded definitions and examples of five core social and emotional competencies — self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. The updated language pays attention to personal and social identities, cultural competency and collective action as part of SEL. It also emphasizes the skills, knowledge and mindsets needed to examine prejudices and biases, evaluate social norms and systemic inequities, and promote community well-being.

CASEL will continue emphasizing how environments, relationships and broader contexts shape learning and development

SEL is most beneficial when school leaders and educators enhance both the competencies of young people and adults and the systems in which those competencies are promoted. Poorly implemented SEL will be less beneficial and actually may harm kids when contexts are ignored. Authentic partnerships among schools, families and communities are critical to creating equitable learning environments, supportive relationships and coordinated practices to truly promote SEL across all the settings where students live and learn.

Our framework continues to underscore the importance of establishing equitable learning environments and coordinating SEL practices across classrooms and schools, with additional emphasis on the essential roles of families and community partners.

CASEL will support schools, districts and states to infuse SEL systemically into curriculum and instruction, out-of-school time, discipline, student support services, professional learning and ongoing assessment for continuous improvement

When SEL is woven into the — from academic instruction to discipline practices — it is more likely to produce the many benefits that has documented, including the promotion of students’ skills and attitudes, improved school climate and long-term academic achievement. This requires district and state policies and resources that help adults strengthen their own SEL and professional skills to support and sustain the healthy development of one another and the young people they support.

Given the uncertainties and challenges of today’s world, our education systems should prioritize SEL to build healthy relationships, engage students and support adults to contribute to more equitable schools and communities. SEL is not a panacea or silver bullet; there is much more to learn about how best to implement SEL to promote equitable outcomes, and how to sustain high-quality implementation long-term.

At the same time, SEL is grounded by a growing body of research and bolstered by overwhelming demand from principals, teachers, parents and students. Our hope is that SEL will not only improve schools today, but help build a better world tomorrow.

Karen Niemi is president and CEO of , the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning.

Several years ago, Harvard University professor Stephanie Jones found herself sitting in a meeting where she and her peers were once again debating the meaning of social-emotional learning.

It was a common pattern Jones found herself in. Even though many groups around the world have identified important skills students should learn — self-regulation, self-management, social awareness — it didn’t always feel as if people were talking about the same thing.

So Jones decided to take on the task of connecting the ideas of these dozens of groups who had created models around social-emotional learning, character and personality. Her Harvard team looked at some of the most popular frameworks worldwide, analyzed how each group defined skills like self-efficacy and conflict resolution, and took note of how these definitions varied. They launched a visual, interactive display of this multi-year taxonomy project, called , with the hope that policymakers, advocacy groups and educators can better understand the hundreds of words being used in this field.

“What we’re hoping to do is to ease some of the confusion on the terminology so that those connections between what we know, what we do and what we measure are really tight so we are more effective and efficient,” said Jones, the Gerald S. Lesser professor in early childhood development at Harvard University.

As Jones discovered, there is no lack of interest in groups that want to define which social-emotional skills are important. But the skills they choose vary, and even those that share common skills don’t necessarily define them identically.

Take the word “self-management.” It’s a term that appears in eight social-emotional learning frameworks. But not everyone has the same definition. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) controlling impulses, managing stress, motivating oneself and setting goals, among other things.

The European Commission Network of Experts on Social Aspects of Education and Training similarly with ideas like managing stress and setting goals, but its definition also emphasizes positive self-talk and overcoming adversity.

The Harvard site lets users see how similar frameworks, like those from CASEL or the European Commision, align. Thick lines between the two frameworks connote similarities in definitions, while thin lines or no lines show that the terms don’t match.

The site also allows users to see how frameworks that use different terminology may actually be talking about similar ideas. For example, not every social-emotional learning model includes the term “conflict resolution.” But 18 models include this idea of addressing disagreements or problems in a productive way; they just don’t call it conflict resolution. Instead, they might include it under the umbrella of social management, relationships with other children, behavioral skills or relational strength. Filtering the interactive chart by skill allows users to see the variety of terms that look different but are actually similar:

The tools also provide a unique window into what types of skills major frameworks may be favoring and which ones they might be neglecting. Many of the major models emphasize cognitive, social, emotion and values skills, but very few focus on identity and perspective.

To some, this project might show that the social-emotional learning field needs to align its terminology to create clarity or cohesion. But Jones doesn’t see it that way.

“If we force a viewpoint, a terminology, a lexicon onto everybody and demand standardization, we’re going to miss the viewpoint, the values, the perspectives of people out there, things that are important to folks, that are meaningful in their community,” Jones said. “Forcing standardization in one lexicon didn’t seem feasible or viable or appealing or, in a funny way, just. Who gets to decide?”

Robert Jagers, vice president of research at CASEL, agrees with Jones that it’s not necessary to align every social-emotional learning framework. What is important, he said, is that schools make sure the framework and programs they’re using are connected.

“It is alignment between the framework, the programs, practices, approaches, and professional development and assessments that actually helps you determine the degree to which what you’re attempting to do is [being] accomplished,” Jagers said. “The absence of that alignment makes it difficult to set goals for your students and adults and then to determine whether you actually achieved those goals.”

In the next iteration of the Explore SEL project, Jones plans to show how specific social-emotional learning programs and measurement tools are most aligned with the frameworks outlined on the site.

Measurement is a particularly challenging issue for social-emotional learning, as people debate whether skills like self-management, social awareness, optimism or growth mindset could and should be measured. If they are measured, people also worry about grading students or attaching outcomes to accountability requirements for schools.

The site highlights the importance of making sure school leaders know exactly how the framework they use is measuring skills like self-regulation, and whether the assessment tool they’re using to measure self-regulation aligns with the model they are using to teach it.

Many schools and districts use multiple social-emotional learning frameworks across grades. Jones hopes this tool can help school leaders see how those different frameworks connect, so a student who may be learning with one social-emotional model in elementary school might not get lost when she encounters a different model in middle school.

Bena Kallick, co-director of the Institute for the Habits of Mind, one of the models included in the taxonomy, sees the project as useful for schools using multiple frameworks at once. Kallick sometimes works with schools that pick and choose from different models to find what best meets their needs.

“What I really believe is most important is that we’re not overwhelming teachers and we’re not overwhelming students, because we all have good intentions,” Kallick said. “So how do we really consider simplifying as much as possible what’s expected [and] what really matters?”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to Harvard’s and .

As a former social studies and English teacher, I watched students grow, progress and struggle in moments large and small. I remember watching a high schooler routinely stick chewing gum under his desk — and while it seemed like a harmless, meaningless action at the time, it was a lightbulb moment for me: If students don’t manage their interpersonal skills in the classroom, how will they learn professional norms? Principles of SEL learning help students develop self-control and social awareness while fostering self-confidence — skills vital to a successful professional future.

Over the years, I’ve witnessed a strong correlation between these skills and success in the workforce. Today’s employers demand flexibility, critical thinking and project-based collaboration. But to help all students learn these skills, a holistic approach is needed: one that focuses on academic subjects like math, writing, science and history — and, simultaneously, ensures that students develop socially and emotionally. Students who learn to listen, empathize and work together will find success throughout their futures. SEL addresses these areas with equal importance, yet the practice has been met by two opposing schools of thought.

Often, “SEL” circulates in academia as a buzzword rather than as a concrete concept. Some champions of SEL have unrealistic expectations with respect to implementation: They push for a total overhaul of our nation’s education system. Meanwhile, detractors of SEL are often dismissive and worry that students will be socially re-engineered.

Despite these misunderstandings, there is a middle ground.

To better understand how SEL implementation helps students develop holistically and prepare for their future careers, the Ronald Reagan Institute recently hosted a RISE Collaborative summit in Columbus, Ohio, titled “The Case for Social Emotional Academic Learning: Workforce Success.” This forum brought together more than 30 national and regional leaders in education. The group discussed new models and best practices, identified new partnerships and built shared understandings on how best to educate the whole child and prepare students with not only hard skills but also the soft skills needed in order to succeed.

The implementation of SEL is illustrated by The Aspen Institute’s “From a Nation at Risk to a Nation at Hope” , which makes three key recommendations for implementation. The first is to create learning environments that are physically and emotionally safe for young students, respect all cultures, serve people equitably and foster meaningful relationships between adults and youth. Second, the report stresses that educators should work to develop social and emotional cognitive skills in all young people. Third, opportunities must be provided throughout the school day to integrate these skills with academic content. When these recommendations are put into practice over time, students reap the benefits. They are more civically engaged in their communities, feel better-connected to their school’s culture and enjoy both academic success and career preparedness.

Some states, like Ohio, have already prioritized SEL implementation. Dr. Wendy Grove of the Ohio Department of Education discussed how the Buckeye State has had SEL standards in place for kindergarten through third grade since 2015. In 2016, the state received a grant from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning to examine the need for SEL standards throughout its primary and secondary schools.

As a result of this implementation, Ohio schools have charted enormous progress. At the collaborative, Dr. David James, superintendent of Akron Public Schools, presented statistics from the city’s I Promise School, founded by NBA star LeBron James. The I Promise School has integrated SEL programming on a wide scale by listening to the needs of students. The curriculum centers on problem-based learning and supplements this with afterschool trauma-recovery and health services, an extended school day and a 20:1 student-teacher ratio. The results speak for themselves: 90 percent of students met or exceeded their expected growth on the Northwest Evaluation Association math and reading assessments.

SEL principles also encourage agility and can more effectively supplement regular academics while fostering a healthy classroom culture. Ross Wiener, executive director of the Education & Society Program at The Aspen Institute, warned that today’s education system rewards students who memorize discrete bits of knowledge. Students must instead develop real-world problem-solving skills, and they should be equally rewarded based on principles like civic leadership and good character instead of only hard skills.

Wiener also emphasized how vital it is for students to develop strong relationships throughout their careers, especially since personal connections are responsible for .

It’s time the American education system merged its original civic mission with learning that supports the whole student, well beyond the classroom years. With SEL standards in place, students will graduate as well-rounded members of their communities, ready to tackle the challenges of the modern workforce. It is imperative for education leaders to understand how SEL, when properly applied within the framework of traditional classroom instruction, can help today’s graduates prepare for the modern workforce.

Janet Tran serves as the director of learning and leadership for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which is scheduled to host its third annual Reagan Institute Summit on Education in Washington, D.C., this summer.

“Who cares how a child feels about themselves if they can’t read or write?” Laird recalled the words denying her application.

That was nearly two decades ago. Laird, who is now the CEO of the $5.5 million-a-year Charleston-based nonprofit, has spent those years trying to prove why feelings actually do matter when it comes to learning. Her free program, which gets support from private and government grants, has since taught 10,000 elementary school students from 11 low-income schools in South Carolina, Georgia and North Carolina how to manage their feelings through afterschool games and lessons.

A new study of Wings supports Laird’s mission. A — considered the gold standard in research — found that after two years, kindergartners and first-graders who participated in Wings improved in skills like self-awareness, self-regulation and decision-making. The students also boosted their reading and vocabulary skills, compared with their peers who hadn’t been in the Wings program. Researchers did not find any effects in math.

“The message that schools need to get is that the almost-exclusive emphasis on improving math and reading instruction as the way to improve long-term effects is a flawed model,” said David Grissmer, research professor at the University of Virginia, who conducted the Wings study. “The long-term effects depend on kids developing a broader set of skills than just what they learned in math and reading instruction, skills of executive function, social-emotional skills, [visual-spatial] skills and what we call curiosity-based general knowledge.”

The study provides a look into a rare but growing venue for teaching social-emotional skills: afterschool programs. As interest in social-emotional learning grows, so too does interest in teaching these skills outside the classroom. As one of the oldest afterschool programs focused on this work, Wings is starting to share what it’s learned with others.

Inside the nest

How do you put yourself in someone else’s shoes? For students in Wings, it’s easy. They pay attention to the Sound of a person’s voice, How they act, their Outer appearance, their facial Expressions, even their Surroundings. That just so happens to make an acronym for SHOES.

They even make a game of it, taking off their shoes and competing with their friend to throw them like a horseshoe. If they win, they stop and consider how their friend who lost might be feeling.

These kinds of activities are common at Wings, where about 140 elementary-school-age students gather each day for three hours, five days a week.

Students are assigned by age to small groups of 10 to 12 students called “nests,” led by a college-age group leader who is in , a national organization that connects people with community service projects in exchange for a modest living allowance. These leaders often reflect the socioeconomic backgrounds of their students, to help provide role models the kids can look up to.

Each day, the leaders go over the learning objective, which might be how to see someone else’s perspective or how to focus and limit distractions. The students then play a game based on that objective.

Students also get choice time during which they can dance or play basketball. The learning objective is still incorporated into these activities, so if students are playing basketball, leaders will remind their kids how to focus and zone out distractions as they’re shooting. Later, students work on homework and eat dinner together.

For Laird, the amount of play incorporated into Wings is part of the secret sauce of why this program works. It’s an element she wants to see in more social-emotional learning programs.

“You walk in and it might even look a little too fun, but that’s why kids like it,” Laird said. “For 5-to-12-year-olds, [fun] should be the top of their list. Sometimes it’s not because we’re working in some schools where kids have really challenging situations at home. They can come and have fun at Wings, it can be a place for them to relax, and if they can do that while gaining social-emotional skills, that’s a two-fer.”

And this approach also complements the way young children learn, said Stephanie Jones, the Gerald S. Lesser professor in early childhood development at Harvard University. Jones like Wings that teach social-emotional skills and found that they are relatively rare.

“These ways of teaching that are deeply experiential and physical are so meaningful, especially to kids in their first 10 years,” Jones said. “[Wings] has been able to use what is a less constrained context to try out different ways of teaching and learning that are likely more aligned with how kids actually learn things, and I think that’s really exciting for social-emotional learning.”

Parent Aja Patterson, who is also a teacher at Mary M. Bethune Elementary near Atlanta, which participates in Wings, signed up her daughter so she could have an activity rather than sitting with her mother until 6 p.m. every night as she graded papers. Patterson said the program has exceeded her expectations, as she’s watched her daughter, Serenity Brown-Patterson, come out of her shell around other kids and take initiative on starting homework.

“A lot of afterschool programs, you can just keep a kid safe until their parents get there at 6 p.m.,” Patterson said. “But I think Wings does a great job of providing activities for them to do that looks at the child as a whole person and not just as a student who’s trying to make A’s. How can this child be functional in society years from now?”

Serenity Brown-Patterson, who is in third grade, said she enjoys the activities, like recess, dance and the social-emotional lessons.

“Last week, we were learning about stepping into somebody’s shoes, and yesterday we were learning about loving and accepting ourselves and showing your ID [a kid-friendly term for accountability]. That means if you took something and somebody else is looking for it, you have to tell the truth that you took it,” Brown-Patterson said.

Tre’ Cobbs, a Wings program coordinator and coach at Bethune Elementary, has been working with Wings for six years, beginning when he was in college. Cobbs said he’s drawn year after year to the program because of the way he is able to see students develop social-emotional skills and even improve their grades.

“Seeing the kids we serve have a form of self-realization and seeing, ‘Oh, these are actually skills I need in my life. I need to know how to be kind to people. I need to know how to read people’s body language … and, you know, ultimately live cohesively with everybody else.’” Cobbs said. “For me, to see it in kindergarten and for me to see that in fifth-graders in the areas we serve is a rare sighting, and it’s good to see and inspiring. I didn’t have those kinds of opportunities growing up.”

It can be challenging at first for his students to open up, Cobbs said. Often his male students were taught to hide their emotions and aren’t so eager to share. That’s why Wings leaders have their students write about their feelings in a journal, which the leaders read and respond to privately.

While schools like Bethune also have social-emotional learning programs during the day, Bethune’s Principal Taylor Pratt sees the value of an afterschool component reinforcing these skills. Pratt said he would recommend this program to other schools, as long as there’s strong leadership from the Wings staff and good training for the college students who assist.

“I think we have a good team at our school,” Pratt said. “I’m always very excited to welcome them back in and know that for those [three hours], my kids are going to be somewhere safe and are going to have opportunities to learn and engage in extracurricular activities and get support on their work. So I think it’s a very beneficial thing for them.”

A rare look into afterschool social-emotional learning 

Grissmer was one of several researchers who conducted the study on Wings and analyzed the data over six years with funding from two federal agencies — $2.6 million from the and $1.4 million from the . They compared the progress of students starting in kindergarten who were in Wings and those who were not. Any parent at a participating Wings school can apply to have their child in the program. The waiting list is usually not too long, Laird said. For the purpose of the study, parents who applied to Wings and consented to be in the study were randomly sorted, with 209 children assigned to Wings and 145 assigned to the control group.

The researchers didn’t find any effects after the first year of Wings. It wasn’t until the second year, in first grade, that the students started showing results. This may mean that social-emotional learning skills build with time, Grissmer said, and students who stay in Wings up until fifth grade may experience even greater gains. He also said that other studies that only look at social-emotional learning programs over one year may be underestimating the long-term effects.

The study found that parents are big fans of Wings and want their students to be in the program, but interestingly, while teachers found that their students’ social-emotional skills improved over time, parents did not. Parents with children in Wings were also likely to have higher levels of stress than parents whose children did not participate.

Grissmer attributed these findings to a few things. First, parents are often less objective than teachers when it comes to rating their own children and don’t have a large sample of students with which to compare their child’s behavior, unlike teachers.

Grissmer also guessed that parents might feel more stressed than parents who don’t have children in Wings because students in Wings don’t head home until after dinner and might be more wound up after a long day at school. Grissmer said he would recommend more parental involvement to help teach families skills that might help them with their students’ behavior.

Parental involvement in Wings has always been important, Laird said, but Wings has recently strengthened efforts to make it more so. Many schools host monthly events for parents, such as carnivals, karaoke nights and family-friendly paint-and-sip evenings, and are more intentional about teaching parents social-emotional skills that they can use with their students.

Laird also said that high stress levels reported by Wings parents might have been affected by a late release schedule of one of the schools in the study, where students weren’t able to get home until 6:30 or 7 p.m. Laird said that situation has since been fixed so that students are now able to head home by 5:30 p.m.

Teaching self-awareness before it was cool 

Although more philanthropists, policymakers and educators have been championing social-emotional learning today, the idea wasn’t popular when Ginny Deerin founded Wings in 1996. Deerin is currently the major gifts officer at Charleston’s , expected to open in 2021, but before that, she was in marketing and fundraising and managing local political campaigns. Later in life, Deerin learned about skills like self-awareness that she wished she’d known when she was younger, and she wanted to share them with children. Learning these skills inspired her to run for political office — rather than just supporting others — though she was unsuccessful in her bid for mayor.

Around the same time, Daniel Goleman’s book was published, starting the popularization of these ideas for the next two decades. Deerin started connecting with some of the few experts who were studying emotions and enlisted their help in designing the Wings curriculum. Wings centers on the same five social-emotional competencies, such as self-management and relationship skills, as the — a leader in the field of social-emotional learning.

From the beginning, Deerin wanted to make the program fun. She felt this was integral to motivating students to actually want to learn concepts like empathy and focus.

“Most of the programs, I think, that were around in those early years felt sort of like guidance counseling,” Deerin said. “And of course, no kids want to go to guidance counseling.”

What started out as a summer camp to help test Deerin’s curriculum soon transformed into an afterschool program in high-poverty Title I schools. Deerin wanted her program to serve low-income students, not because she thought that they needed social-emotional training more than their wealthy peers — she argues all kids need this education — but because that was the population that rarely had access to good afterschool programs that students from wealthier backgrounds could afford.

Keeping the program afterschool rather than in the classroom allowed the Wings team to innovate outside of the rules of a school. But even so, there are still challenges to working in a district. For example, Laird has experienced a school suddenly deciding to halt Wings because it wanted its students participating in an academic afterschool program to help improve their math and reading.

It’s a common tension that can come up in schools, that when budgets are tight, more emphasis will be placed on academics than social-emotional learning. Some argue that’s exactly how it should be, that academics should take a priority. But Deerin hopes that school leaders will see that social-emotional learning aids students’ academic learning, as research has shown.

“I don’t think the resources have caught up with the belief of social-emotional learning,” Deerin said. “My opinion is that social-emotional learning is so important not only for individual students to learn, but for the collective impact on the classroom. I just think the classroom becomes much more amenable to kids’ learning.”

Supporting social-emotional learning outside of school

It’s certainly not new that afterschool programs from soccer to band will teach children skills like collaborating with teammates or persisting even when practices are challenging.

What is new is a growing interest in designing afterschool programs that are intentional about teaching these skills, especially as research indicates they impact not just academics but also life outcomes and well-being. And Wings, with its long history and new research to back its work, is jumping at the opportunity to share what it’s learned.

Wings has been partnering with , such as the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Atlanta and the YMCA in Greenville, South Carolina, to host workshops and offer resources and consulting on how to incorporate social-emotional learning into their activities. These programs pay Wings, though some funding assistance comes through grants. Wings also created lessons through a to share with educators. There are a free version and a paid version being developed.

It’s a more practical and economically feasible way to share their work than it would be to expand the Wings afterschool program to schools across the country, Deerin said.

Other organizations are taking on this work too. gave grants of $1 million to $1.5 million each to six communities across the country to try to connect and improve social-emotional learning experiences between the classroom and afterschool programs, from Tacoma, Washington, to Dallas, Texas.

Even though many schools teach social-emotional skills, Jones, the Harvard professor, sees a need for students to learn these skills in other settings so they can apply them outside the classroom.

“Social-emotional learning is kind of an every-moment thing, meaning it’s in every interaction, it’s in all relationships, and so it doesn’t turn on and off depending on the setting,” Jones said. “One thing that’s interesting about making it an intentional focus in schools and in out-of-school time is that those two settings are so different, the demands are different, the activities are different, and it’s a way to think about how can we build and transfer them from one setting to the other.”

She has her fifth-graders play a bingo game that requires them to find people who share common interests and life experiences. While the kids do this, she instructs the parents to watch for how the kids’ faces light up when they discover that they share hobbies, habits and favorites. Students assume they are very different, Barth explains, so her goal is for them to unearth points of connection. She then lets parents know that she will be counting on them to reinforce these ideas at home, enlisting them as partners from day one.

She remembers what it was like stepping into a system where such partnerships did not exist.

When she first started teaching in Los Angeles Unified School District 15 years ago, Barth said, she felt compelled to change the way her students felt about school. In her former high-poverty Title I school, she could see the demoralization on students’ faces. As soon as she called their names, she said, the students “assumed they were in trouble.”

In that environment, Barth said, phone calls home just turned into parent apologies — not a productive discussion of how to help the students.

So she started looking for “backstory,” she said, the reason for behaviors. Parents are critical to discovering backstory, and Barth could also share her pieces of the puzzle in return. It became about understanding, problem-solving, and empathizing between the parent, the student and the teacher. With a team of coordinated adults seeking to understand and support them, Barth said, students are quicker to accept help and quicker to resolve conflicts instead of getting defensive.

“They know they are not alone,” Barth said.

Who owns the knowledge

Parent-teacher relationships can be challenging for both parties, especially when trying to get to the bottom of a student’s academic or behavioral challenges. When these important adults get locked into a blame game, power struggle or cultural disconnect, it’s the students who lose, .

However, when teachers and parents dig deeply into social-emotional development as partners, that they strengthen the educational experience not only for individual kids but for whole schools as students grow in self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relational awareness and responsible decision-making.

Those five skills are known as the “competencies” promoted by the growing field of social-emotional learning, or SEL. More schools are adopting social and emotional learning practices like restorative justice circles, “soft skills” training and mindfulness exercises, all aimed to help students succeed and thrive in a complex, interconnected world. However, unlike academic curricula, social-emotional learning is happening all the time — at school, at home, with friends, with teammates — and more research has emerged to support the idea that parents may have a critical role to play.

that when teachers enlist parents as partners in specific, highly valued social and emotional work, parents will be more engaged than if they are merely asked to volunteer for events or fundraisers. To not do so, argues researcher Jennifer Miller, would rob teachers of a deep repository of insight into their students, some of which could be key to their success. Parents, Miller said, “are the owners of the knowledge.”

Susan Ward-Roncalli is the social-emotional learning facilitator for LAUSD’s Division of Instruction. Her department places a strong priority on parent engagement when selecting curricula and developing services. Parents of students in grades 4-12 are surveyed on their experience with their school, including their student’s social and emotional well-being while there. Those surveys provide valuable guidance, Ward-Roncalli said: “We don’t want to put our resources behind something parents aren’t [behind].”

Her departments keeps parents informed through newsletters and initiatives that involve at-home conversation starters, but it’s difficult to scale such things or quantify their effectiveness. Social-emotional learning initiatives involve relationship building and systems change that can be slow. Explicit social-emotional instruction is beginning to spread throughout the roughly 486,000-student district, Ward-Roncalli explained, and it has also been integrated into other services, especially special education interventions.

Because social-emotional learning works best when done systemwide, there’s no reason to stop at just parents and teachers, experts say. The New York State Education Department issued a in March 2019 that pulls custodial staff, administrators, bus drivers and cafeteria staff into the mission of social-emotional learning.

At Franklin, the whole school feels highly relational, says Catherine St. George, a single mother of two daughters. This school year is the first one in 11 years that St. George has not had a child at Franklin, a high-performing K-6 school that serves around 500 students in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her daughters were there from 2008 to 2019, and in that time she said she never had a bad experience — or at least not one that she and her daughters didn’t learn from.

When her younger daughter was being bullied by a girl who had once been a close friend, St. George felt her mom instincts kick in. But she knew that if she stepped in on behalf of her daughter, she would likely be in opposition to the other child, a little girl she had known for years. That didn’t feel right. Luckily, St. George trusted Barth, her daughter’s teacher.

She mentioned the situation to Barth, who shared that she’d noticed some tension between the girls. “Ms. Barth is so in tune with her students,” St. George said.

Barth had taught St. George’s older daughter in fourth grade seven years prior, and they had developed such a rapport that St. George knew she could trust the teacher to guide the girls to a mutually beneficial outcome.

“I left a lot of it with Ms. Barth,” St. George said, “It could not have gone better.”

Barth would often share insights about the students with their parents, St. George said, but never in a way that overstepped the boundary between a teacher’s expertise and a parent’s.

‘Cultural humility’

The careful negotiation of sharing but not overstepping is something Miller and her research partner Shannon Wanless have examined in depth. The two study parent-teacher relationships, particularly around teaching social-emotional skills. Miller is the author of , and Wanless directs the Office of Child Development at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education.

In October, the pair presented some ideas for how this might look during a daylong seminar at the first-ever Social and Emotional Learning Exchange hosted by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning in Chicago.

Ultimately, a successful parent-teacher partnership requires “cultural humility” on the part of the teacher, Miller said, because a child’s development is first shaped by their neighborhood, family structure and culture.

Whether teachers are trying to teach explicit lessons around social-emotional learning or incorporate it into their classroom throughout the day, they will be more successful if they know what messages the students are getting at home, the researchers explained.

“We tend to look at parents at receivers of our expertise,” Miller said during the seminar. “If we’re going to develop an authentic partnership, then schools have to be receivers of parental expertise as well.”

Cooperation, self-expression, standing up for oneself and many other interpersonal skills are developed at home first in ways that are “culturally specific,” Wanless said. When teachers know how students relate to their parents and siblings, they can adapt their classroom expectations and instruction.

During the seminar, participants brought up different scenarios where changes in language might help parents see the value of social-emotional learning. Switching from words that sound like New Age or psychological jargon to more familiar terms — e.g., “self-control” as a more mainstream version of “self-regulation” — might help parents realize that they already value the concepts at home.

Others noted that behaviors mean different things in different cultures. For instance, one teacher noted, while eye contact is a sign of respect and attentiveness that many teachers try to instill in their students, in some cultures, particularly in Asia, it is more respectful for children to avoid eye contact with their elders.

Adapting, Wanless said, is different than abandoning. The that social-emotional development is beneficial for every child, and she sees no need to withhold that from a child altogether just because skills like empathy and emotional expression look different in their home.

While parents are the keepers of their children’s foundational learning, Miller explained, teachers often have more access to scientific, developmental expertise than parents do. Rather than taking a know-it-all approach, she said, their knowledge should make them more nimble and flexible with the curriculum, and able to find a middle ground with parents.

This is where kids get the best results, Miller said. The alignment and common messaging shared by these two important adults helps them feel at ease in the classroom and develop stronger attachment to their teacher. This will help them in all subjects, not just social-emotional learning. Students also see the relevance of what they hear at school when it is echoed at home.

Building these connections usually requires some proactivity, Miller said, but that can be difficult.

“I think it is scary for teachers to reach out to parents,” she said, because what comes back may be skepticism, criticism or daunting challenges at home. Even so, she said, it’s better to make first contact on a positive note than to wait for a tense moment when the stakes are high — like a pending disciplinary action or a failing grade.

Some districts encourage teachers to reach out to parents early in the school year, just to say “Hi,” and to share one positive thing the teacher has noticed about their children. It’s a great goal, Miller said, but very few do it in practice.

That doesn’t mean the chance for a relationship has passed, she said, or that the door is shut on enlisting the parent as a partner.

SEL not like math

The partnership of Bath and St. George began when the latter’s older daughter Aurora started fourth grade in Barth’s class. Mother and daughter were constantly “butting heads,” St. George said. She shared this new and unnerving dynamic with Barth during their first parent-teacher conference, and she was surprised at how much insight the teacher could offer into Aurora’s developmental stage, her unique personality and how best to navigate the choppy preteen years ahead.

“She shared things I never would have thought of,” St. George said. Even better, St. George said, she followed up. The two developed an open line of communication, filling in helpful observations as Aurora moved between home and school.

Social-emotional development is not like math, Wanless points out, where kids learn everything they need to know at school. No curriculum can cover the wide range of skills required for successful relationships throughout life. During the Chicago conference event, researchers emphasized this repeatedly. Teaching and measuring SEL must take context into account.

For example, practicing self-regulation in the classroom is different than doing so with siblings in the family den. While the structure of a classroom should support a student’s efforts to heed the rules, sibling dynamics in unstructured playtime make it much more likely that at some point someone is going to cross a line.

Emotional expression with a teacher asking “How are you feeling right now?” is different than emotional expression when facing down a bully on the playground — in one case it is safe to show vulnerability, and in the other it might be wise to be more restrained.

Miller’s and Wanless’s research shows that parents and teachers can collaborate to cover more of these bases than either can do alone. Working together, Miller said, they reinforce a system of support and cohesion for each other and the children they love.

“There is not ‘them,’” she said. “There is only ‘we.’”

The underlying problems we face in our communities and country are becoming clearer. We see the emergence of a culture of scapegoating, blaming and bullying at a time when our nation is becoming more diverse; repeated eruptions in hate-inspired violence; vanishing civic intermediating institutions such as religious congregations, daily newspapers and unions that in previous generations taught us how to work together across our differences; growing isolation and separation of groups into hardened camps; and political dysfunction with a loss of core values and civility itself.

The personal consequences of such a culture are all around us too, with rising substance abuse, anxiety, depression and suicide. This is not the America we know we can be.

So what’s to be done?

In schools across the nation we have visited over the past 15 years, we have started to see a shift in understanding of how children learn and develop as whole human beings and how schools, families and communities partner to support the optimal growth of young people. We hear school leaders talk about creating school cultures and climates where every student is known and counts. We see principals and teachers greeting every student by name at the schoolhouse door and taking responsibility for student success. We also see morning meetings and responsive classrooms where students are at the center of their own development and learning: defining issues, asking questions, marshaling relevant facts and engaging classmates with divergent views in thoughtful conversations.

We see teachers and students working in teams and in small groups, learning not only academic content but also how to work well with others, solve problems, express empathy and share different perspectives. And we have seen hundreds of research studies showing that well-implemented social and emotional learning (SEL) is a booster rocket to nearly everything we already measure in school — attendance, grades, test scores, ability to get along well with others, high school graduation, college enrollment and attainment, and success in work and civic life.

School leadership matters immensely in creating these environments, so we decided to take the pulse of school principals across the nation on how they view the value of SEL, how it is being cultivated it in schools and districts and what they recommend in terms of steps for the future.

In 2017, that the vast majority of principals saw how important SEL was to a wide range of student outcomes. But as seen in our new report, , 2019 may represent a tipping point in how America’s school leaders are embracing SEL.

Education standards can spark controversy, and many administrators and teachers already feel overwhelmed by what is required of them, so it was powerful to see a near-doubling of the percentage of principals from 2017 to 2019 (now at 87 percent) who say state standards should explicitly include SEL. We see the same trend unfolding in the classroom, with the number of principals believing that a formal SEL curriculum is necessary for teachers jumping from 43 percent to 70 percent in just two years. Three-quarters of principals, up from about 7 in 10 in 2017, believe students’ social and emotional skills can be accurately measured and assessed; 70 percent, up from 58 percent, believe such skills should be assessed; and 83 percent are using some type of assessment, up from 77 percent in 2017. The voices of principals amplify those of teachers and students who are asking for more SEL in schools.

But the nation has significant work to do to make the promise of social and emotional learning available for all students. One in three principals say their district does not meet any benchmarks for systemic, high-quality SEL — SEL being explicitly identified by a district as part of how it defines student success, the district’s senior leadership speaking knowledgeably and regularly about SEL, the district collaborating with community partners who work with students outside of school hours to support their social and emotional competencies, and more. In fact, only one-third of principals believe their district strongly emphasizes developing students’ social and emotional skills.

Schools in small towns and rural areas continue to lag significantly behind those in the rest of the country. Principals cite a lack of reinforcement of SEL skills outside of school, an absence of funding streams dedicated to SEL and teachers needing more time and training to support students’ social and emotional development as the largest challenges to successful implementation.

Our communities and country are experiencing historic levels of mistrust in each other and in key institutions, and we have lost our confidence in solving big challenges together across our differences in an increasingly diverse nation.

A critical element to moving the nation forward is the cultivation of social and emotional skills in the next generation of leaders; now is the time for each of us to join principals, teachers and students who are pleading for SEL in the classroom.

John M. Bridgeland is CEO of Civic and former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. Roger Weissberg is chief knowledge officer at CASEL and UIC distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Matthew Atwell is senior research and policy analyst at Civic. 

As much money and effort have been put into demonstrating that, the need to consider the “whole child” in education was never really the subject of debate.

“Nobody’s in favor of half-child education,” quipped Chester Finn, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute senior fellow, during a discussion of social-emotional learning, or SEL, at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

To his point, the goal of the Dec. 10 conversation at the conservative think tank among a high-profile panel of education researchers, policy people and advocates was not to debate whether social-emotional learning is necessary, but whether the movement swiftly building behind it is the most effective way to deliver on its promises.

Rick Hess, moderator and AEI’s director of education policy studies, wondered if, as with other reforms, the enthusiasm for social-emotional learning at the national level would “end up turning ideas into something they were never intended to be.”

To prevent that, panelists agreed that the quickly growing field needs to carefully balance local priorities and values with instruction rooted in the more universally accepted science of human development that underpins SEL and its goals of teaching students skills like self-regulation, collaboration, social awareness and empathy.

Panelists pointed to standardized testing and Common Core as top-down reforms born out of widespread agreement that high standards and consistency from school to school were inarguably good. Once put into practice locally, however, they were plagued by controversy, resentment and unintended consequences.

Hess mused that social-emotional learning could go the same way if “shoddy vendors” and insufficient training opened the door for more political and ideological motivation to creep in.

If social-emotional learning became a bastardized version of itself, a cheap tack-on to academic curriculum, Finn argued that it may be no more than a distraction from academics. found that social-emotional learning, when properly executed, improves academic outcomes, but Finn pointed out that the length and complexity of that report alludes to how difficult fidelity might be to achieve. If overtaken by ideologues, he predicted, SEL would find itself with a “cadre of enemies.”

Tim Shriver, one of the founders of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), might share Finn’s and Hess’s concern for quality, but he doesn’t see SEL as a negotiable value-add or a volatile movement waiting to fall into the wrong hands. Shriver sees social-emotional learning as inevitable, even if it can’t be done perfectly.

Children are growing as emotional and social beings influenced by their environments all the time, he said. Many of the issues panelists pointed to as being on the rise among kids — depression, suicide and bullying — demonstrate what fills the void when instruction rooted in developmental science is absent.

“Anybody who thinks the way we’ve done it is working is not paying attention to kids,” Shriver said. “We don’t have a choice as to whether we have a social and emotional learning program in our school. We have a choice as to whether it’s any good.”

To reach good, panelists said, requires governments, schools and funders to embrace a slow, intensely local roll-out of social and emotional learning, beginning with teachers. Not only would this help the quality of the programs as teachers have time to properly train and develop, they said, it would also address another great risk with social-emotional learning — community disconnect.

This happens when local teachers and parents are not included in the conversation, said Devin Carlson, a University of Oklahoma researcher and associate director for education at the National Institute of Risk and Resilience, and community engagement, so far, has not been a strength of education reformers. These movements, he said, have a history of promising one thing — the dignity of high expectations, for instance — and delivering another — such as constant test prep.

Both funders and governmental agencies usually drive things at a scale and speed that steamrolls communities, panelists agreed. In the rollout of the Common Core, as Karen Nussle, president of Conservative Leaders for Education, recalled, communities were left out of the conversation on why such a change was needed. Teachers and parents confused by, for instance, new ways of doing math “unified against ‘The Man,’” she said. The federal zeitgeist had failed to justify itself to them.

Repeating that with SEL would be an unforced error, she argued, because grassroots demand for it as a concept is already there. Parents want life skills and pro-social behavior from their kids, she said: “They are terrified they’re not doing enough of that at home.”

However, as other panelists pointed out, they might not want it in the form of transcendental meditation and Eastern philosophy.

Education is, by nature, formative, much in the same way that religion is, said Jay Greene, chair of the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, and if schools begin to encroach on the areas of formation usually addressed by religion — character, values, identity — “it’s as if we’re trying to start a new religion.”

For nonreligious people, it will be difficult to get the benefits of what is essentially moral education without “the icky God part,” Greene argued. At the same time, he said, people who do have a religious tradition already have “elaborate pedagogy around character that has been refined over centuries and millennia.”

Social-emotional learning would be well served to find the common strands between these value systems rather than ignoring them, Greene advised.

To do so will take some reversal of what Teachers Who Pray founder and CEO Marilyn Rhames characterized as a “scrubbing of God out of public education.” While she did not advocate proselytizing or enforcing moral codes that violate the safety of others — such as anti-LGBTQ policies — Rhames did point out that to reject the work already being done by churches and places of spiritual guidance would be detrimental, even if those institutions don’t reflect the entirety of what social-emotional learning is trying to accomplish.

Faith groups have been doing for generations what schools will require time to learn, Rhames said, pointing to a partnership in Nashville where churches offer afterschool social and emotional learning programs for public school students.

Many teachers have relied on personal faith for their own social and emotional well-being, and they will have a hard time divorcing the two, she said: “I believe hope comes from a spiritual place. So does diligence and excellence.”

None of the panelists addressed it at length, but the separation of church and state looms large over these types of discussions, with school districts left to contemplate the line between religion as a content subject and religion as an enforced practice.

Although values and goals differ from place to place, the science of learning and human development is not subjective, said Jacqueline Jodl, a University of Virginia professor and former executive director of the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. Social-emotional learning isn’t “pulled out of thin air,” she said.

Panelists gave various examples of SEL’s universal foundations. Knowing that environment affects learning isn’t a value-laden statement. It’s scientifically based, they said. The effect of the stress hormone cortisol on the brain is a studied phenomenon, not an opinion.

Ultimately connecting the universal “how” of the human machinery and the local and personal “why” of education and identity requires trust, said Bror Saxberg, president of learning science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He acknowledged the role of funders, like CZI, in giving permission to “slow down” and build that trust one community at a time.

The catch-22 for social-emotional learning is that the more success it sees, the more momentum could push it in the direction of the sweeping education reforms of years past. But it was exactly those funding tsunamis, bickering think tanks and cramped timelines that gave rise to grassroots movements against standardized testing and Common Core.

Better community engagement now, before mandates and assessments are imminent, could keep the grassroots on the pro-SEL side, Shriver said.

“If we play the old game, we’re in trouble.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to the American Enterprise Institute and to ����Ӱ��.

Social-emotional learning, once seen as a soft “nice to have” to help kids get along on the playground, has evolved into a rigorously researched global movement to improve learning and outcomes in the classroom. Much of that growth has been driven by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL).

In October, the nonprofit celebrated its 25th anniversary by hosting the inaugural “Social and Emotional Learning Exchange” in Chicago. Some 1,500 practitioners and researchers from countries around the world shared innovations and challenges for the growing field, while hearing from the founders of CASEL about how the movement, which focuses on teaching students skills such as self-regulation, persistence, empathy, self-awareness and mindfulness, has gained momentum over the past two and a half decades.

Karen Niemi is the president of CASEL. Following the gathering, she spoke with ����Ӱ�� on the current state of social-emotional learning, as well as its future.

This interview has been edited throughout for clarity and length.

����Ӱ��: What is the most pressing issue in social and emotional learning today?

Karen Niemi: With the increasing awareness and demand for social and emotional learning, there is a great need to maintain quality. It is critical for us to capture the opportunity to bring social and emotional learning to more schools and more kids across this country, but we have to do it well. That can be tricky. While in some places there is clear evidence and clear implementation models that can be replicated under certain conditions, the study of what works for whom and under what conditions is still evolving. We have to be very careful.

So, it seems like the challenge is to define “quality,” because of the contextual nature of social and emotional learning. It’s not one-size-fits-all, right?

Right. People are are adopting social and emotional learning for many different reasons. Based on the priority that a school district or school has set, implementation will not only look different, but will be different. So, for example, a lot of urban schools are deeply concerned about culture and discipline. They may adopt social and emotional learning with a driving focus on [methods like restorative justice and positive behavior intervention systems], while at better-resourced schools, you may see social and emotional learning more integrated into academics, or used to strengthen a school’s sense of community. However, we would suggest that the strength-based approach is warranted in both settings.

So that must make assessments tricky … 

It depends on what kind of assessment you’re talking about. If you’re talking about assessing individual students’ social and emotional competence, it shows the developmental aspect of this kind of learning. You don’t expect a high school kid to have the same social and emotional competence as an elementary student.

However, assessing where a particular student is in that development can be tricky, because social and emotional competencies are not stable over time or across contexts. Kids are different in the classroom, on the playground and under stress. That’s why we do not recommend social and emotional learning measures as “screeners” — for special ed, for gifted and talented, for anything. There are times when kids are getting identified and classified because people aren’t understanding the limitations of the measure.

There is also an overemphasis on self-report rather than performance measures in most social and emotional learning assessments. That’s not the most reliable metric, so we have to be careful.

Overall, rushing to assess students’ social and emotional learning competence de-emphasizes the attention on the adults creating the contexts in which students are functioning. If we’re going to assess social and emotional learning, we really should be looking at the learning environment in which kids are expected to grow, perform and develop. That’s the more important assessment: the learning environment.

So should we be testing kids’ SEL at all? If we get the environment right, will they automatically absorb what we want them to learn?

I do think there is a very appropriate role for social-emotional competence assessment if it is used as a formative measure, to guide and improve practices, and not used in a punitive way. Context is king, so the learning environment matters. At the same time, sometimes social-emotional competence is not just absorbed or intuitive for students or adults. These things also need to be explicitly taught, as well as integrated into academics. It is both what and how we teach. Finding that balance requires delicate nuance. And sometimes in an effort to move quickly, people will focus only on one aspect or the other. That’s an oversimplification and a risk to the field.

What do we know about the connection of SEL to academic performance? 

We know from rigorous evaluation that social and emotional learning is linked to improved grades and standardized test scores. So when you incorporate social and emotional learning, kids do better academically. We also know that it is linked to other academically relevant outcomes like attendance, discipline, school bonding and those types of things. Wanting to be at school and how a kid feels when they are there is naturally linked to how well they’re going to engage in content and subject matter.

Where has the movement taken off the most, geographically speaking? 

CASEL has tracked social-emotional learning in every state, and our resources are downloaded in 186 countries across the globe. So the movement is actually widespread and doesn’t seem to be limited to certain local geographic locations or certain types of schools. People everywhere recognize the importance of paying attention to whole-child development. Their entry point might be motivated by one thing or another, but in many ways these are just common sense and practical policies, practices and programs that help schools. I see a groundswell of commonality in the interest in helping kids gain the academic, social and emotional skills they need to be successful in their lives. In some places, it’s equally focused on adults as well, as it appropriately should be.

Speaking of adults, at the CASEL 25th Anniversary event, co-founder Tim Shriver mentioned the need to bring SEL into politics and other adult spheres. Do you see that need?

If people learned how to listen to each other more, understand themselves and each other better, it would lead to a society that would get along better. It sounds very simple, but when you look at what’s happening and you look at how adults are behaving, [clearly it’s not]. Sophisticated societies depend upon individuals who know how to listen, communicate and work together to solve problems that ail not only their own society but the world. Whether you’re on the red or blue side of the spectrum, whether urban, rural or other — these skills are common to human development and I think are crucial to getting us through where we are politically at this moment in time.

But I actually have great hope for the future in that respect. I was at [the Social Emotional Learning Exchange this October] and saw the level of excitement, engagement and intentionality around helping kids and adults become happier, healthier, more productive members of their families, their communities and global society. It gave me great hope.

In the past 25 years, what have been some discoveries that CASEL could not have anticipated but that have led to exciting new work?

I don’t think we could have anticipated that at this moment in time there would be as much uptake and excitement as there currently is, particularly in the connection between public education and the world of work. Twenty-five years ago we had a lot of ideas about how kids and adults with social and emotional competence can be better prepared to do well in school and in life. However, I don’t think we fully recognized that it would become a “need to have,” not just a “nice to have,” when it came to the workplace. The world of work is looking to public schools for that preparation.

So that world of work alignment is definitely a new frontier — what else is next for SEL? 

Like I mentioned before, we want to pay more attention to adult social and emotional learning. We’re also excited about really understanding how social and emotional learning can lead to more equitable learning environments for kids as the practices are woven into every part of the day.

When we understand how learning happens, it should affect everything about school. So that you don’t just have an SEL class for 20 minutes a day and then everybody closes their doors and forgets everything about it. An educational model that prioritizes all aspects of human development and the environment in which kids learn — that’s a game changer. Again, it is not only what they’re learning, but how they’re learning.

The tragedy sparked a reckoning in Alfano — and educators across the country — who questioned whether school systems had failed to support individuals who acted out so violently. For Alfano, part of preventing a shooting, bullying, or any other form of violence in schools meant addressing childhood trauma, helping students understand and manage emotions, and training educators in this work.

This year, Alfano launched a new education doctorate at to do just that. One of the first of its kind in the country, the doctorate focuses on social, emotional and academic leadership. Alfano, who is now the dean of the Fairfield, Connecticut, university’s school of education, hopes the program can prepare principals, superintendents and other school leaders in supporting teachers and students as well as becoming experts in the fast-growing field of social-emotional learning.

“What do you do with children who are coming to your classroom from poverty and haven’t had breakfast or dinner the night before or any other myriad sets of challenges that teachers live in, day in and day out?” Alfano said. “[Teachers] need the leadership and management of their principals and their superintendents and their directors and coaches to have the skill set and expertise to manage in those spaces.”

The program also fills a need in the social-emotional learning space: teacher training. from researchers, educators, parents and students called for redesigned teacher preparation programs that focus on understanding trauma and teaching social, emotional and cognitive development skills. A of teacher colleges found that few programs are instructing educators in how to support students’ social-emotional learning.

“We felt like this would be an opportunity to fill a need in a market because this is an area that is not going away — in Connecticut or anywhere else,” said David Title, program director for the EdD at Sacred Heart University.

This is the first doctorate focused on this topic in the state, college leaders said, and it may be one of the first in the country. However, other universities also offer education programs that target social-emotional preparation. In New Jersey, the College of St. Elizabeth and Rutgers University in social-emotional learning and character development. The University of British Columbia with a concentration in social-emotional learning. in Sunnyvale, California, has received attention for integrating social, emotional and cultural competencies into teacher training programs like those at .

Title, who used to work as a superintendent in Fairfield and Bloomfield, Connecticut, had noticed increasing student mental health needs, the spread of bullying onto social media platforms, and economic stressors on families that were impacting students. Research from the has found that diagnoses for anxiety and depression in children have increased by three percentage points over eight years.

Eighteen students make up the first cohort of graduate students at Sacred Heart University, who began their studies this fall. The course is online, so while students can come to campus a few days per year for meetups, the majority of their work will be virtual, through video lessons, discussion boards and social media. This will allow them to continue their jobs as educators while completing the course at their own pace.

The education doctorate, or EdD, will take three years to complete. The first year is focused on academic research and writing skills, though the research these students will be studying is often related to social-emotional learning. The second year is a deep dive into social-emotional learning and childhood trauma. The third year will be focused on the students’ dissertations, in which they will research a problem of practice in their schools connected to social-emotional learning, such as assessing how well students are acquiring skills.

The framework for the doctorate is based on the , which distinguishes an education doctorate (EdD) as a degree meant for school leaders to apply research to real-world education issues. This is different from a PhD in education, which prepares candidates to become professors and conduct research.

“I cannot change society. I can’t change that it’s more rigorous and demanding of children and adults. However, I can give them tools.”
—Kimberly Atkinson, SEL doctoral student

One student, Kimberly Atkinson, says she and her fellow classmates put in 15 to 20 hours of studying a week on top of their busy lives as educators. The doctorate is a financial lift as well for students at $900 a credit for a 60-credit course load. But Atkinson, who is a kindergarten teacher at Booth Hill Elementary School in Shelton, Connecticut, sees this program as an investment in something she’s passionate about: helping students and adults express their emotions in productive ways.

An educator of 17 years, Atkinson had started to notice that her kindergartners were coming to school stressed, angry and high-strung. At the same time, she observed that adults were also having similar problems of being unable to express or regulate their emotions. Atkinson started researching solutions and came across a yoga program for her students, which helped them calm down and control their emotions. She started to embed this work into her daily lessons in the classroom, and she shared what she learned with other teachers in the district.

“I cannot change society. I can’t change that it’s more rigorous and demanding of children and adults,” Atkinson said. “However, I can give them tools.”

The graduate students don’t need to have their specific research projects decided on yet, but right now, Atkinson said she’s interested in how social-emotional learning can be better infused into curriculum. This kind of work could spur her onto a path like district curriculum writing, though she said she’s keeping her options open.

While some schools have turned to social-emotional learning as a response to violence or aggression, others have opted for “hardening” practices, from metal detectors to armed security guards patrolling campuses. Amanda Nickerson, who studies school violence as a professor of school psychology and director of the Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention at the University of Buffalo, said there is some danger in focusing too much on school security measures, as it can make students fearful.

“There is pretty good evidence that social-emotional learning programs do both increase those social-emotional competencies, but also reduce aggression, including bullying, peer delinquency, delinquent behavior,” Nickerson said. “Obviously, it’s harder with a very rare event like a school shooting to say whether or not social-emotional learning can reduce that, but when we look over hundreds of studies on social-emotional learning, they have pretty consistent outcomes showing that they do reduce aggressive behavior and they also increase academic achievement.”

It’s important for school leaders to have training in social-emotional learning because they are the ones making decisions about programs being used and how it is infused throughout the school, Nickerson said. She expects that social-emotional learning positions might become more common at schools or districts.

Some worry that as interest in social-emotional learning grows, there will be an expanded market for products being sold to schools that may not be evidence-based. Part of the appeal of this education doctorate program, Title said, is that it can help school leaders become aware of how to tell what sorts of tools are valid.

“There’s no shortage of people trying to sell you something on this,” Title said. “Somebody has to be a wise consumer. That’s going to be part of what this is: How do we evaluate these [programs]? How do we measure this? Are we making any progress?”

Although the term “social and emotional learning” is not new and has, in fact, been around for years, a growing evidence base has recently driven a tremendous surge in interest in this area — particularly among parents, educators and policymakers. Yet, amid a wide array of effective to draw upon, challenges still remain. One major area of is that SEL goes by many names, and the terminology can be confusing and misleading, ultimately impeding efforts to achieve meaningful results.

Common ways of describing the field include character education, personality, 21st century skills, soft skills and noncognitive skills. Each label draws from a slightly different theoretical perspective and employs different pieces of research, and each has its own related fields and disciplines. Moreover, major players in the field have put forward competing organizational schemes or frameworks that often use different or even conflicting terminology to describe similar sets of skills. The result is what has been described as the “” problem, which refers to the use of a single term to mean many different things (jingle) or multiple terms to mean the same thing (jangle).

This wide array of terms, concepts and ideas is not a bad thing in itself. Indeed, it makes for a broad, rich and vibrant field overall. The challenge is that inconsistent terminology makes it difficult to communicate clearly about what’s important and to make decisions about the right strategies and approaches to use in practice. In short, without a way to make sense of the words, it’s easy to misinterpret, overgeneralize or overlook the hard science that links evidence to strategies, and strategies to measurement and evaluation. The result could be cherry-picking teaching practices, interventions and assessments that may or may not be related to each other — or to the desired outcomes.

To address this challenge, the EASEL Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education created . This website and set of tools is designed to show relationships among different skills, terminology and frameworks (organizing systems that communicate which skills and competencies are important, and that serve as a road map or guide for policy and practice), organizing, describing and connecting them across disciplines in a way that is agnostic to brand and sensitive to development and context.

Explore SEL includes the following interactive tools, with more to be added in the future:

●&�Բ�����;Compare Domains: See which domains, or broad skill areas common to the field of SEL, are emphasized in different frameworks; see all frameworks at the same time and identify broad trends in the field;

●&�Բ�����;Compare Frameworks: See where skills, competencies and behaviors in one framework relate to those in other frameworks; select any two frameworks from the database and compare them side by side;

●&�Բ�����;Compare Terms: See where specific skills like conflict resolution, attention, empathy, self-efficacy and critical thinking are included across all the frameworks in the database; select any skill and identify its prevalence; and

●&�Բ�����;Thesaurus: See related terms, regardless of terminology and research tradition or discipline (whether the term is common to the study of early childhood vs. adolescent and youth development, or SEL vs. character education, etc.); select any skill or term in the database and see a list of related terms in order of similarity.

Ultimately, Explore SEL will provide education decision makers with a way to sort through frameworks and terminology to make sense of existing information, allowing them to better align strategies and goals to achieve real impact. As efforts to build social, emotional and related skills are integrated into schools, practitioners, policymakers and funders need to know which skills are important, what they are called and how they relate to one another, in order to focus on the skills and approaches to SEL that best meet their students’ needs. The tools are designed to help stakeholders in the field select, adapt or develop organizing frameworks that will guide their SEL efforts in ways that make clear the skills they intend to address, ultimately enabling greater alignment among those target skills, the strategies used to build them and the measures used to assess them.

To this end, Explore SEL encourages and supports users to (a) reflect on the goals, priorities and needs of their target population and setting; (b) identify, compare and align relevant skills and frameworks; and (c) think about which types of strategies and measures will best fit the skills they have identified as important. For example, school and district leaders can use the site to better understand the subtle nuances and differences between various frameworks in the field in order to select one that guides their approach to SEL in ways best aligned with their specific goals and needs.

Similarly, policymakers can use the site to explore which skills appear across multiple frameworks and how they are related to ensure that SEL standards don’t focus too narrowly on a particular skill area while missing others that matter for children’s success. At the same time, the site can help researchers, funders and program evaluators be more clear and precise in how they understand and define the skills being targeted by a particular program or intervention, thus increasing the likelihood that their evaluation, measurement and assessment strategies are closely aligned with the target skills and outcomes on which they should reasonably expect to see impact.

This is an important moment for SEL — interest is high, and promising approaches abound. But poor communication and coordination threaten to undermine efforts. Now is the time to take advantage of the current energy to drive forward more precise, careful and transparent work that will maximize impact. Explore SEL is designed to make it easier for educators, policymakers and researchers to be intentional about the skills and outcomes that are best aligned with their mission and goals, and to identify frameworks, programs and strategies that effectively meet their needs and enable them to achieve results.

Stephanie M. Jones is the Gerald S. Lesser professor of early childhood development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, director of HGSE’s and co-director of the .

As a mother, Carter was growing frustrated by how schools were teaching issues that require empathy. Education — even in her own child’s progressive Manhattan school — simply “was not full enough” when it came to addressing multicultural affairs.

“Our kids are learning a very patronizing sense of how to actually engage in the world,” Carter said. “I was beginning to see that was not a solution for preparing our young people for empathy and participation on a global stage.”

Then it struck her: Adults are often driven by ego and politics. But children are much better at telling things the way they are.

Carter set out to create something that would allow young people around the world to tell their own stories — their own way — in hopes that American students could learn to understand and empathize with people different from them.

In 2007, Carter founded , an organization that helps young people around the world make short, personal documentaries about their lives by pairing them with accomplished American filmmakers. BYkids’ goal is to help children become better global citizens by using the films — either in the classroom or at home — as a starting point for a deeper understanding of cross-cultural issues.

The process of film creation starts with the BYkids team, which comes up with a broad list of topics they’d like to explore in the coming season. Carter said the stories should reflect universally shared truths but ones that may not necessarily be found on the front page of the news. From there, the team chooses a country to focus on and partners with a local nonprofit organization to help find a subject, who also doubles as the director of the film. BYkids then sends professional film mentors, like showrunner Neal Baer (Law & Order: SVU) and cinematographer Hollis Meminger (The Blacklist, Narcos, Younger), to the countries with camera equipment to mentor the kids throughout the filmmaking process.

Although the stories are told through the lens of a child, BYkids doesn’t stray away from addressing tough topics in their films: What’s it like to be 17 years old and incarcerated at Rikers Island? What about being a 16-year-old and living in displacement for nine years as a result of the Colombian civil war? How about being one of the 500,000 Mozambican children who lost both parents to AIDS? All nine BYkids films document the struggles the teens have faced and aim to bring awareness to issues that children who grew up in the United States may not know about.

“Because they’re kids … we’re able to lean into some really hard conversations,” Carter said. “You can experience that story that could feel very foreign or sometimes intimidating or scary, you share that life, and when the lights come up, you’re actually a friend of this kid.”

The authenticity young people bring to the table while storytelling is a key reason the films resonate with so many people, Carter added.

Today, of students attending public schools are students of color, yet white teachers comprise the majority of the profession, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Despite having a culturally and linguistically diverse student population, many schools lack a culturally competent curriculum, which to have a dangerous impact on students’ academic success and mental health. BYkids aims to address this need by producing films that bring representation to other cultures — Yemeni, Nicaraguan and Senegalese, for example — and providing American students with access to global conversations.

In one of BYkids’ films, “Walk on My Own,” 13-year-old Ndèye Fatou Fall tells the story about her village, Keur Simbara, which was one of the first in Senegal to publicly abandon the practices of female genital cutting and child marriage, two traditions that have afflicted West African women for centuries. Ndèye’s film documents the hardships of the women in her village: One has lost two daughters due to complications from female genital cutting, and another was forced to marry a friend of her stepfather at the age of 12. But it also aims to help the world make sense of such traditions while simultaneously bringing forth change to those communities that still practice them.

“Tradition is very strong, and to abandon these practices is difficult,” Ndèye wrote in a statement about her film. “When people from other countries watch the film, if they are still practicing child marriage and female genital cutting, they will wake up after they see this film and will want to stop doing those things.”

Teachers who use BYkids films in their classrooms are — intentionally or inadvertently — employing tactics for social-emotional learning — a blossoming approach to education that emphasizes the importance of skills like self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. that SEL trainings can provide positive effects on student achievement, graduation rates, mental health and earnings for students across all socioeconomic backgrounds.

But some experts warn that SEL programs that are divorced from cultural relevance or those that lack an equity perspective can be dangerous for students of color.

“It can be used to really help discipline black and brown children to be better managers of their feelings and emotions, rather than equipping them with skills they need to change a system that rightfully produces anger and resistance,” said Lacy Asbill, the founding director of Moving Forward Institute, a nonprofit organization that focuses on students’ emotional well-being as a critical strategy for improving their academic achievement.

Social-emotional programs, when coupled with culturally relevant content, can, Asbill says, be used to empower all students to reclaim their own stories and equip them with the knowledge and skills they need to rebuild broken systems. This gets at the heart of what BYkids as an organization is trying to accomplish.

The BYkids films air on PBS station , which reaches 84 million households in America. But Carter said the real impact manifests when educators use the films to inspire students to learn through moving image, as well as start cross-cultural conversations in their classrooms.

BYkids has a partnership with the online collaborative learning community , which allows students between the ages of 12 and 18 to engage in conversations with other young people globally through a series of . Students choose from multiple project options on the site, then collaborate with their global peers to help create their project. More than 17,500 students in 64 countries have utilized these BYkids film lessons, according to data released from PenPal Schools.

The team at BYkids wants educators to do more than just show the films in class, so it offers lesson plans to help turn students from passive viewers into active participants in conversations.

Teachers can download learning guides for each film on the and then choose from three sample lesson plans — each driven by an essential question designed to challenge students’ thinking.

Questions like “How can you help make change without feeling resentment for those you see as wrong, or even hurting others?” connect to themes from the films as well as other relevant topics in all areas of life. Film summaries, mentor bios, multiple discussion starter questions and suggested projects for future use are also available for educators to use in their classrooms.

Matt Nink, a former teacher and current executive director of the Global Youth Leadership Institute, said he shows the films in his student and teacher workshops because of how well they align with his to tackle diversity, equity and multicultural issues in schools.

Founded in response to September 11, 2001, the Global Youth Leadership Institute is an educator-led organization offering a wide array of programs ranging from educator expeditions in the Dominican Republic to customized high school workshops, to its signature “High School Sequence,” in which students “explore ways to make schools stronger and more inclusive” while sailing on the Atlantic Ocean for five days. All of its programs touch on educating faculty and students in four main areas: collaborative leadership, cross-cultural communication, religious pluralism and environmental sustainability. Similar themes can be found in BYkids films.

To get kids thinking about the real effects of climate change, Nink might kick off the workshop with “My Beautiful Nicaragua,” a film by 12-year-old Edelsin Linette Mendez, documenting how warming temperatures and erratic rainfall have damaged her family’s coffee farm, pushing them into poverty. Coffee crops account for more than 30 percent of the country’s exports, and Mendez’s film highlights the severity of her family’s situation as well as the trajectory for her country’s future, stressing how important it is for young people to seek a more sustainable way forward.

To instruct students on the dangers of religious intolerance and racism, Nink will screen “Poet Against Prejudice.” In the film, Faiza Almontaser, a 17-year-old Yemenese immigrant, recalls how she used spoken word to combat the Islamophobia she experienced from her classmates at her Brooklyn school. Faiza’s film documents her current work as a peer trainer with the Anti-Defamation League, where she instructs her classmates on the repercussions of racism.

And Nink might show “Fire in Our Hearts” at any workshop aiming to cultivate meaningful cross-cultural conversations. In this film, Jayshree Janu Kharpade of India illuminates the social and economic importance of educating girls in the developing world. She tells the story of her own struggles to obtain an education after being taken out of school at the age of 7.

Above all else, Carter hopes that the films will empower other students to tell their own stories.

“To me, that’s the real purpose of education. It’s not getting an A; it’s not going to Harvard,” Carter said. “It’s finding your own voice so you’ve found your power in life.”

And in a world that has become dangerously siloed, “This is meant to be a way to have us remember that we have a shared humanity.”

Want to know the best thing about being kind? It’s contagious. And Joanne Miller, a fourth-grade teacher in Deltona, Florida, is out to spread the kindness virus.

Every Friday, about 20 students from Miller’s Kindness Squad line up to spread good cheer and welcome the students at Pride Elementary School.

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But the good works don’t stop at the front door. The squad spreads happiness before school, after school, during lunch and at recess, Miller says in a video made by Volusia County Schools.

“We want to start small here in our classroom, and then to the school and then to the community,” she says. “One of my biggest goals is to teach kindness in the classroom, and then we will spread it.”

“If you’re having a bad day, this class will make you feel better,” Elizabeth Johnson, principal of Pride Elementary School, says in the video. “It’s a focus on academics and behavior and how do we make other people feel better.”

It’s also a way to prevent bullying before it starts, part of an emphasis on social-emotional learning. Students in Miller’s class learn to regularly give props to one another, complimenting classmates on everything from good grades to a nice smile. They pull “positivity pranks,” like anonymously dropping off a bag of candy in a nearby classroom. Later in the year, the class will go on a road trip, bringing their joy to a nursing home, and one student plans to ask for items for her birthday that she can donate to a homeless shelter.

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While she’s gotten recognition in her school district, Miller has global goals.

She is out to start a kindness revolution, and she knows how to wield social media to create a movement. Her Instagram account has 170,000 followers, while her has nearly 30,000 fans. Not bad for a mother of three who has been teaching for 24 years.

Recently, Miller’s Kindness Squad caught the eye of an editor at Time for Kids, who put them on the magazine’s cover.

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“The small things we do for our class and our school make everyone happy,” 9-year-old Deliana Black told .

“It’s pretty easy to be kind,” Luis Toro, 9, told the . “Just a small thing that’s kind could spread all around the world.”

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It may be easy, but that doesn’t mean teachers should take for granted that kindness will always come naturally, Miller told the paper.

“Kids aren’t born with kindness,” she said. “You have to teach it.”

Trauma is one of the biggest epidemics in education I’ve seen in my time teaching in Arizona. Many of our students come into their classrooms with toxic stress. This often negatively impacts their learning and their relationships with their peers and teachers, many of whom are not equipped or prepared to deal with students’ trauma. Yet before students can begin to address academics, teachers must address students’ emotional and mental needs. This takes a toll on teachers, many of whom are experiencing mental health issues of their own.

In the recent “,” nearly 1 in 5 teachers said they had considered leaving the profession because of stress, pressure and burnout. Results such as this show the burden that educators often feel, and this hurts teacher retention across our state, most significantly in schools where families struggle with poverty. We need dedicated teachers in every classroom so that all students, no matter their zip code or family income, can get a good education and be college- and career-ready. If our teachers are cared for, we will have students who feel supported and are able to thrive.

As a school board member in the Osborn School District in Phoenix, I hear these concerns from my fellow teachers. In that role, I have created and facilitated conversations on how we can best support our students and teachers. I am fortunate that our school board puts equity at the center of our work and serving our community, and we have made important progress on these fronts.

In 2018, the board passed a . It includes a commitment to teacher training in this area, as well as an investment in curriculum that centers children’s social-emotional needs. After hearing that many of our teachers, particularly those with dependents, had trouble paying for health insurance for themselves and their families, we found an insurance group that was more affordable and tailored to the needs of our educators. This allowed them to seek out support when they needed it, ensuring that they were physically and emotionally prepared to support their students.

The Osborn school board took this collective action by focusing on how to improve educational equity in our community. This led us to listen to the perspectives of all teachers and staff in our community — many of whom had not been part of these conversations in the past — who were struggling with the cost of their health insurance and the emotional toll of helping students address trauma. Prioritizing equity in our work guarantees that we will approach situations with a critical lens to ensure that it benefits every student, especially those most in need of support in the classroom. When a student struggles with engaging in class, it is a teacher’s expertise, coupled with supportive policies for both the student and the teacher, that creates opportunities for success and greater equity for kids.

Teachers who receive strong health benefits and training and have access to affordable health care can do their best in the classroom, year after year. This starts at the most basic human level: taking care of ourselves so we are equipped to take care of our students. We must make sure that our teachers are prepared to deliver quality instruction for every student, which means they must be cared for and supported in every aspect of their job. After all, we entrust them with the most valuable part of our community: our children.

Katie Paetz is a member of the Osborn Governing School Board and a fifth-grade teacher in Phoenix Public Schools. Reach her on Twitter @kpaetz.

After the first bell, member Christina Oluwole noticed if Arthur (not his real name) trailed away from his English class. If he wandered away, she redirected him by walking with him to class where she could tutor him.

Throughout the day, Arthur encountered City Year members in the lunch area or in the hallways who encouraged him to “get to class.”

These seemingly small interactions led to big changes in Arthur by building strong connections and creating a sense of belonging.

At first, Arthur reluctantly attended class. But soon he became more engaged as Christina and Lizette provided him with individual support when he got stuck. By the end of the school year, and after connecting with the City Year team over Japanese comic books and advice on how to handle high school drama, Arthur was eager to go to class and began working independently.

Arthur’s story illustrates what extensive research has already proven: Supporting the success of students goes far beyond just making sure they know how to add fractions or write a persuasive essay. Students also need to develop social-emotional skills to learn how to make responsible decisions, problem-solve and work toward a goal.

The cultivation of social-emotional learning has emerged as a top priority for schools to advance both student achievement and whole school improvement goals. Social-emotional skills are also increasingly in demand by employers, including self-management, self-confidence and optimistic thinking. Yet in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, millions of talented children experience adversity that affects their readiness to learn.

In Arthur’s case, he went from being a quiet kid who flew under the radar to a highly visible student who was consistently being engaged by City Year’s “near-peer” mentors — young adults mature enough to offer guidance and young enough to relate to students’ perspectives.

As the Inglewood Unified School District works to improve schools and better support students and teachers, we are proud to partner with City Year Los Angeles at Crozier Middle School and Woodworth-Monroe Academy to implement a “Whole School Whole Child” approach to student success — including a strong focus on social-emotional learning.

City Year AmeriCorps members serve as tutors, mentors and role models in schools every day in 29 cities nationally, providing students with critical academic and social-emotional supports — and the encouragement they need — to help them attend class, work hard, dream big and graduate from high school, on time and on track for future success.

City Year’s approach directly aligns with Inglewood’s mission to nurture, educate and graduate students who are self-responsible and self-disciplined. Moreover, found that schools that partnered with City Year were two to three times as likely to improve on standardized English and math tests as schools that did not.

So, what does social-emotional learning look like?

Learning doesn’t happen in silos; in order to develop the whole child, learning needs to work a lot like the process of weaving together different skills to build strong “skills ropes.” All of us pull together strands of various skills to solve problems, work with others, formulate and express our ideas and learn from mistakes. We continuously weave together academic or cognitive skills with social and emotional skills, such as self-management or conflict resolution.

For example, to complete a research project in school, a student might need skills in planning, conducting research, reading and writing. Each of these skills — or strands — is equally important for learning. This approach is based on a growing body of evidence about how students learn and how caring adults can support the learning and growing process of students.

Collaborating with Inglewood’s dedicated teachers and principals, City Year AmeriCorps members will be another adult that students can rely on to help them strengthen their social, emotional and academic skill ropes, which are essential for success in and out of school, and ensure students feel valued, supported and invested in their learning.

City Year AmeriCorps members receive ongoing professional development throughout their service year, including formal training, coaching, observation, guided reflection and peer learning. Working in teams, they become embedded in the fabric of the school and are uniquely positioned to form relationships with the students they serve every day.

Over the past several years, Inglewood schools have made tremendous progress —  have been designated as California Distinguished Schools and one has earned the . In the fall of 2019, four elementary schools will expand and ultimately become K-8 schools, and our high school graduates continue to raise the bar of achievement for all students.

Yet we know there is room for improvement. Together with City Year, we believe that developing the social-emotional skills and mindsets of all children and young adults will contribute to a stronger, more vibrant Inglewood for all.

Thelma Meléndez is the Inglewood Unified School District state administrator and Mary Jane Stevenson is the City Year executive director. 

But her teacher Patricia Gardner saw something very different. One day, she pulled Irizarry aside and asked why she didn’t speak up more, because she was such a good writer. Irizarry said that she didn’t feel smart and didn’t want to be embarrassed.

“‘No, your ideas are worthy,’” Irizarry recalled Gardner saying. “‘You need to know you can do this.’”

Irizarry — now a middle school principal in Farmington, Connecticut — didn’t have a term for it then, but her teacher was acting as an “emotion scientist,” a new phrase that describes what some educators have been doing for a long time: investigating what lies behind student behavior. If you haven’t heard the phrase, you probably will soon. The concept — coined by Marc Brackett, director of the — is becoming increasingly popular through its use in the Center’s social-emotional learning program, . Helping students and teachers investigate their emotions can lead to healthier humans and better learners, Brackett said.

Brackett has used the phrase for several years, but he really only started to explicitly define it as he was writing his book, , to be released in September. When Brackett talks about “emotion scientists,” he often contrasts the phrase with “emotion judges” — people who are quick to label someone else’s emotions or dismiss them without figuring out what’s behind their reactions.

He estimates that the world is likely filled with far more emotion judges than scientists because it’s much easier to quickly make assumptions about someone else’s feelings. But this can create problems in schools if educators and students incorrectly make assumptions about each other’s feelings and experiences — and subsequently make decisions based on those false inferences.

A teacher, for example, might think a student with his head on his desk is bored and being disrespectful. In reality, that student might be depressed or tired. If the teacher doesn’t first investigate what the issue is, there’s a risk that the underlying problem will go unresolved, Brackett said.

“How many times have any of us been misread?” Brackett said.“It’s a big ‘aha!’ for teachers because they realize how frequently they probably are misreading students.”

Irizarry, who now works at Irving A. Robbins Middle School and attended the RULER training with Brackett this summer, discovered that she was finally able to put a label on how her teacher had helped her years ago.

“She acted as an emotion scientist,” Irizarry said. “I didn’t realize that until the training. She sought to know me as a person and a learner.”

The work requires teaching both educators and students to ask themselves questions about how they’re feeling, why they might be feeling this way, and how they can regulate their feelings so that they can continue teaching and learning. For teachers to be able to set aside their own feelings to address uncomfortable student behavior, they also have to be trained on how to understand and regulate their own emotions, Brackett said.

Adrienne Wheeler, assistant principal of Justus C. Richardson Middle School in Massachusetts, who also attended the RULER training at Yale, sees this work as important for not only her teaching staff but also the students who are sent to her office for discipline. Before staff meetings, for example, Wheeler plans to use the “Mood Meter,” a RULER tool that allows staff to privately share their energy levels and emotions. This then helps Wheeler understand what her team members need before she puts them to work.

It’s important to build a relationship with students, Wheeler said, so she can figure out the root cause of misbehavior. Often after summer vacations or long breaks, students might act up more frequently because something may have changed in their family life while away from school. Asking questions to understand this greater context is important to addressing the real problem, she said.

“Emotion scientist” might sound like an oxymoron — after all, can something as intangible as a feeling be understood? Some of the educators Brackett has worked with have also been skeptical, questioning whether it is really necessary to invest time toward dissecting emotions during a school day packed with academics. And Brackett admits this work does take time.

But educators like Wheeler who have seen how emotions affect academics aren’t surprised by the phrase.

“When I think of science, I think of an action and a reaction, and for every cause there’s an effect, and I see a correlation there with emotions,” Wheeler said.

Both Wheeler’s district in Massachusetts and Irizarry’s district in Connecticut are adopting the RULER approach to social-emotional learning this year, but both said they’ve been practicing this kind of work in their schools already. Research shows that having support for social-emotional learning in school can boost academics, increase graduation rates and improve student well-being.

“Helping students collaborate, be autonomous in the classroom — all of those things are emotionally based,” Irizarry said. “Emotional intelligence is as important as academic intelligence.”

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At least, this was a pattern that emerged when teachers filled out surveys about their students’ skills. But when their pupils took assessments to measure their social-emotional abilities, the educators found the exact opposite to be true. Their students from disadvantaged backgrounds were more likely to persevere, while those who were the best in the class found it much harder to persist when faced with challenges.

The results were eye-opening and were possible only because the school district used several different assessments to measure how social-emotional learning is being taught in their schools. It sounds like a lot of work, but right now, it’s a best practice for schools interested in seeing whether their efforts to teach students skills like self-regulation, collaboration and social awareness are working.

Most educators say they’re assessing social-emotional learning in their classrooms, according to from the RAND Corporation of national teacher and principal survey data. But the report found that the assessments they use don’t always capture the whole picture.

A majority of teachers and principals are measuring school climate — whether students feel safe to learn, whether they have good relationships with adults — but fewer are testing how well students can demonstrate actual social-emotional skills like self-management, compassion and taking someone else’s perspective.

“Measurement of student social-emotional competencies is kind of a newer field, and there are fewer resources out there,” said Laura Hamilton, director of the RAND Center for Social and Emotional Learning Research and a co-author of the report. “It’s not something that most teachers and principals have experience doing, even though there’s a lot of interest in doing it.”

The most common way educators measure social-emotional learning is through observing the classroom environment and their students’ behavior, with nearly half of all respondents saying they use this method. The next three most common measurements are student, teacher and parent surveys of how the school environment promotes social-emotional learning.

The least popular assessment used in schools was performance tasks that measure a students’ social-emotional capabilities, with only about 1 in 10 educators saying they use this method.

Thirty percent of teachers and 14 percent of principals said their schools don’t measure social-emotional learning at all. The RAND report said this seemingly strange difference in response might be because principals are more aware than teachers of the different ways SEL is being assessed in a school.

The focus on school climate rather than student social-emotional capabilities is not a surprising finding for researchers, who are also grappling with how to assess these so-called soft skills. Surveys to measure a school’s climate or culture have been around for awhile, while testing for social-emotional competencies is newer. That’s why both and the (CASEL) have resources to help educators find assessments for measuring their students’ social-emotional skills.

In the case of the Woodridge district, these types of analyses can change instruction. After educators discovered their own biases in evaluating students’ social-emotional abilities, they were able to set higher expectations for their students who demonstrated grit and perseverance. They were also able to encourage their students who had fixed mindsets to persevere with difficult tasks.

Just like a bird needs two wings to fly, so too do students need support for both their social-emotional learning and their academics, said Greg Wolcott, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning at Woodridge.

“In schools, if we only develop the academic wing and not the social-emotional wing, our kids go in a circle,” Wolcott said. “If we feel it’s important to assess students in multiple areas of academics, we need to assess multiple areas of social-emotional learning.”

All schools in the district use two different social-emotional assessments at the beginning of the year and again at the end of the year — a teacher evaluation of their students’ abilities and students’ self-report surveys. The elementary students also take a third assessment that measures their social-emotional strengths and needs. This is a performance task, so students might watch the changing faces of characters on a screen and be prompted to describe how they’re feeling.

Clark McKown is a social-emotional learning researcher and the founder and president of , which runs these performance assessments that Wolcott’s elementary students use. McKown says it’s critical to use different types of social-emotional assessments to analyze different skills.

For example, to understand a student’s growth mindset — whether kids believe that they can learn and grow with effort — you have to ask the students directly, so a student survey would be a better method than a teacher evaluation or a performance test, he said. But if you’re measuring student behavior, a teacher’s report would be the best method. And to see whether students can act on their knowledge — such as being able to take another person’s perspective — a performance test would be better.

“My hope is that there’s increased recognition that measuring both climate and student competence provides a richer picture than just measuring the one or the other,” McKown said.

Not everyone is a fan of measuring students’ abilities. Both Hamilton and McKown said there are concerns about the potential for assessments to be misused, from labeling students inappropriately to parents who might be worried about giving a measurement to their child’s emotions. While McKown said there’s not a lot of evidence that these things are currently happening, Hamilton added that it’s important to make sure educators have training on how to appropriately assess students on social-emotional competencies and how to use the data.

“Many [SEL skills] actually are measurable with the same level of precision that you can measure a reading skill or a math skill. Not all of them, but some of them.” McKown said. “They’re not as soft as you might think.”

The funding is divided into :

1. $170 million through the Education Innovation and Research program to provide grants for evidence-based innovations that support students’ social, emotional and cognitive well-being;

2. $25 million to support teacher professional development, which comes through the Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) grant program;

3. $40 million for the Full-Service Community Schools Program to support students’ and families’ holistic needs; and

4. $25 million for School Safety National Activities to add more school counselors, mental health professionals and social workers who are qualified to work in schools.

“Research shows that building the capacity of students to develop social and emotional skills, and take responsibility for their community, can reduce bullying, violence, and aggressive behaviors, making schools safer,” the House appropriations committee .

The (CASEL) applauded the funding.

“I think we definitely see this as a political landmark in thinking about how to support children in their social-emotional and academic growth and developing skill sets students will need to be successful,” said Nick Yoder, director of policy and practice at CASEL.

CASEL credited Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), chair of the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, for championing the funding. DeLauro, in turn, said the initiative was inspired by the work of James Comer, a professor of child psychiatry at Yale University who helped transform schools by focusing on child development in addition to academic learning.

“I am proud to have provided funding for a landmark federal investment of $260 million for social-emotional learning in this year’s Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education funding bill,” DeLauro said in a statement to ����Ӱ��. “Congress must invest in proven strategies that will help our kids, and I will not give up in the fight to make that a reality.”

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) has been a longtime advocate for social-emotional learning, pushing several bills during his time in the House and helping to support its inclusion in the reauthorization of the Every Student Succeeds Act. From Ryan’s perspective, this moment shows that social-emotional learning is gaining acceptance and that people are starting to understand its importance. But, he added, there’s still progress to be made.

“It really is a turning point,” Ryan said. “But we’ve got a long way to go — we’ve got to get this bill through the Senate and there’s a lot of people around the country who have not been exposed to [social-emotional learning].”

Amid disagreements about raising spending caps with both House Democrats and the White House, the Senate has yet to pass its own spending bills. Time is running short, with just a month to go before the August recess and three months to go before the end of the fiscal year and another possible government shutdown,

How a Democratic-backed spending increase for a not-well-understood educational approach will fare among pressing issues like defense spending and raising the debt ceiling is a big question. But the concept of social-emotional learning is becoming more mainstream. Ryan has made it , and, in another first, he addressed the topic at the June 26 Democratic debate, demanding social-emotional learning and trauma-based care in every school.

“[Social-emotional learning] tells kids how to handle stressful situations, how to handle conflict better, how to have empathy, how to work on a team, how to best resolve conflict with their friends, their peers — these are all qualities we want kids to have,” Ryan told ����Ӱ��. “By addressing the social-emotional needs of kids, you see an increase in test scores because they’re able to access parts of the brain that they need for learning.”

Social-emotional learning has drawn attention from policymakers, teachers and funders across the country over the past decade, as research has found that teaching students skills such as self-regulation, compassion and collaboration can improve not just test scores but also graduation rates as well as lead to better mental and physical health as an adult. Recently, an Aspen Institute convening of 200 researchers, educators, students and parents released recommendations for how schools can better support the whole child.

Yoder, who travels the country talking with state educators and policymakers about social-emotional learning, said he’s also seen a growing interest in the topic from the business community, which is concerned with hiring employees who are good at collaborating and communicating.

However, some people caution that educators should not prioritize social-emotional learning above academics, especially in schools that are performing poorly. They also recommend that SEL be implemented with rigor.

“SEL will be counted as a dismal failure if it encourages educators to settle for pillowy paeans to ‘happiness,’ ‘self-esteem,’ and ‘inclusivity’ at the expense of harder things such as character, ethics, virtue, and civility,” Chester E. Finn Jr. and Frederick M. Hess , a conservative think tank.

Funding for social-emotional learning was just one of included in a large package of appropriations bills for fiscal year 2020. House Democrats passed the bills 226 to 203, voting along party lines, with seven Democrats joining all the Republicans in voting no.

She’s one of the best bobsledders in the world. She was one of the first women to compete against men in the four-man bobsled. She’s won two world championships, Olympic silver and bronze, and is a favorite for the gold this year in PyeongChang, South Korea.

Olympian Elana Meyers Taylor is also a mentor for six classrooms in the United States, sharing her own lessons in perseverance, determination, and grit with hundreds of students every month.

Meyers Taylor is a Classroom Champion, one of 125 athletes who virtually mentor students to share social-emotional skills they’ve learned from their athletic experiences. Co-founded in 2009 by another American Olympic bobsledder, Steve Mesler, has grown to serve 25,000 students in 1,000 classrooms in seven countries.

“We want to make kids realize that [athletes] aren’t superheroes; they are just people who work really hard,” Mesler said. “These kids identify with the athletes in such a powerful way, it changes the way they treat each other.”

A former gold medalist, Mesler grew up in a family of teachers and often visited schools for one-off speeches, usually about the importance of staying healthy. But he left those events feeling as if he wasn’t having an impact other than potentially disrupting the school day. At the same time, Fortune 500 companies were inviting him to talk with employees about skills he’d learned as an athlete: overcoming failure, determination, goal-setting.

Mesler knew there had to be a way to more meaningfully impact students.

So he teamed up with his sister, Leigh Parise — an education researcher and former New York public school teacher — to create a program that could scale this kind of mentoring work. Classroom Champions pairs athletes with several classrooms, and the athletes make monthly videos on topics like fair play, determination, and community that they share with the students. Once a week, teachers present lessons on these skills, and they incorporate social-emotional vocabulary words such as grit, perseverance, and determination throughout the school day.

“I try to make it understandable,” said Meyers Taylor, who works with staff from Classroom Champions on her videos to make sure she’s delivering the appropriate educational goals. “[I’ll say] in bobsledding, my short-term goal is to lift as much as I can squat today in my workout. Your long-term goal is to have a B average, so today your short-term goal is to work hard on an assignment.”

The experience has created a community for the athletes and the students. Teachers say their students look forward to Classroom Champions lessons, and the athletes follow their classrooms on Twitter or Google Plus, encouraging the students through their comments.

“For these kids, this is their Olympian,” Mesler said.

Some classrooms will be watching their Olympic athlete go for the gold over the next two weeks. But lessons from athletes who didn’t make the Olympic team are just as powerful. Sugar Todd, a speed skater and Classroom Champion mentor who competed in the 2014 Olympics, didn’t make it through the Olympic trials this time around.

“The process of trying and failing and trying and failing and trying again only reads as captivating when you finally cap it all off with a success,” in a blog post afterward. “I was ready. I was capable. I was going to crush. But I didn’t. And the heartbreak that followed stunned me. At no point this season did I feel uncertain about qualifying for the 2018 Olympic Team.”

But Todd’s journey — even her failure to make the Olympic squad — was captivating and powerful for the second-graders in Racine, Wisconsin, who had been following her progress all year. Todd made videos about perseverance, discussing her training and athletic goals with the students, and teacher Amy Simon brought up that theme every day in class.

“The kids are much more willing to try something that’s difficult for them,” Simon said. “They’re much less likely to give up on something now than they were in September.”

Just as important was the lesson in sportsmanship Simon’s students learned when Todd shared how she congratulated the skater who had beaten her in trials for a spot on the Olympic team. Someone else gets to live her dream, Todd wrote. “I can celebrate that.”

Todd’s interactions and lessons were just as powerful for Simon, who had considered leaving teaching after feeling drained and frustrated. Delivering Todd’s lessons on perseverance helped Simon push through her own challenges, able to start each day with a positive attitude, she said.

https://twitter.com/asimon0215/status/949458505009979392

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During the 2016–17 school year, Classroom Champions to measure its impact around student engagement, growth mindset, goal-setting, and academics. Teachers said student perseverance increased, more students were engaged, the number of disciplinary referrals decreased, and fewer students reported bullying than national rates.

Athletes are attracted by the impact of the work, Meyers Taylor said. It’s all volunteer, and she estimated that creating videos, connecting via social media, and live-chatting with classrooms takes about 10 hours a month.

“I try to be as real as possible,” Meyers Taylor said. “I tell them when I struggle with something…. It’s amazing to see we’re having an impact.”

Mesler is excited by Classroom Champions’ model of scaled mentorship, which has transformed traditional one-to-one mentoring by using technology to pair one athlete with up to 300 students, or 12 classrooms. In five to 10 years, he hopes to see the program reaching millions of students.

That reach will extend even further this month, when Classroom Champions partners with NBC to host the first-ever livestream conversation between Olympic athletes and students around the topic of goal-setting.The event takes place at 1 p.m. ET on February 22. All schools are invited to and participate by asking questions of the athletes using the hashtag #CClivechats.

The report comes from the RAND Corp.’s evidence review of how ESSA supports social-emotional learning, commissioned by The Wallace Foundation.

“We were pleasantly surprised that there are a pretty good number of options for states and districts to consider when they want to adopt evidence-based SEL instruction,” Laura Hamilton, associate director of RAND Education, told ����Ӱ��. “ESSA doesn’t explicitly use the phrase ‘social and emotional learning,’ but there’s a lot of language in there that suggests opportunities to focus instructionally on students’ SEL skills that would be consistent with the goals of ESSA.”

Here are some of those funding sources:

• Title I: Schools with large populations of low-income students can select interventions that target the social and emotional well-being of these students.

• Title II: These funds support the retention and professional development of teachers. Schools can implement programs that train teachers in delivering SEL, as well as support their own educators’ social-emotional health.

• Title IV: Funds programs that support safe and healthy students and a well-rounded education.

The report identified 60 evidence-based social-emotional learning interventions schools and districts can use that align with the ESSA requirements.

For a school to receive federal funds, ESSA requires that its interventions meet a certain degree of evidence, with Tiers I–III being the most rigorous. But there is a fourth tier, sometimes referred to as “demonstrating a rationale,” which lets schools adopt a program that doesn’t have strong evidence but is informed by research and therefore “likely” to work.

While this is a loose requirement, Hamilton said this can be useful if evidence-based social-emotional learning programs don’t fit a particular school’s geographic or demographic needs.

“It’s tricky, because ideally you would want schools to be adopting interventions that are good at improving outcomes,” she said. But she added that research in SEL is new and still developing, which makes more flexible evidence guidelines friendlier for schools. “I think we’re at a stage where we’re experimenting with different [SEL] approaches,” Hamilton said.

More evidence-based SEL programs exist for elementary schools than for middle and high schools. This might not necessarily mean middle and high school students aren’t receiving social-emotional support, Hamilton said, but rather that it is incorporated into their school day in a way that is not curriculum-based, as with programming for younger students.

In their evidence review, researchers found that the recommended programs do a better job of teaching students how to develop interpersonal skills (communication, leadership) and intrapersonal skills (emotional regulation, grit) than of promoting discipline, school climate, academic attainment, and civic attitudes. Again, Hamilton said this doesn’t necessarily mean more programs exist to target interpersonal skills, but perhaps those skills are easier to evaluate than the others.

The funding and program identified in the report give schools and districts an opportunity to implement social-emotional learning on their own. Most states ignored SEL as an accountability measure in their federal plans, citing fears that data could be easily corrupted if given a high-stakes platform.

The report is one of several The Wallace Foundation has recently funded, looking at how education issues like and are being implemented under the Every Student Succeeds Act, especially in light of the evidence requirements mandated by the law.

That’s an observation from education researcher that rings a little too true for teachers and social-emotional scholars. Increased class sizes, student behavior problems, high-stakes testing, tight funding, and limited autonomy are just some of the stressors that place teachers in contention with nurses for the top spot for occupation.

Social-emotional learning programs for students are becoming more popular, and rightly so, as research points to gains in academics, graduation rates, and earnings. But what’s missing from these programs is support for the social-emotional needs of their teachers, who are experiencing stress and . Research that if teacher needs aren’t addressed, students feel the impact.

“The whole idea of teacher well-being and that teachers’ social-emotional competences influence what they do in the classroom is relatively new, which is just mind-blowing,” said Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, a professor at the University of British Columbia who studies social-emotional learning. “Of course teachers’ moods and well-being affect how they teach.”

Schonert-Reichl credits the beginning of an increased awareness for teacher well-being to 2009, when her research peers Patricia Jennings and Mark Greenberg for the American Educational Research Association on the importance of supporting teacher social-emotional competence to create better learning environments and positive development in students.

Some teacher-support programs are emerging, but only a few have evidence behind them. One that does was developed by Jennings, an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and co-author of that article. It’s called , a mindfulness-based intervention program that has been used in about 200 schools. Jennings and several other researchers studied the program’s effectiveness in high-poverty New York City elementary schools using a cluster randomized trial.

The program’s goal is to teach educators how to identify emotions like stress that occur during the school day and how to self-regulate. Teachers learned mindfulness practices like breath awareness, stretching, and compassion. The training included 30 hours of in-person sessions spread out over four months and several phone calls from coaches.

Published last month by the , the study found that CARE had positive effects on teachers’ ability to regulate their emotions. Additionally, it was the first study to show that a program designed specifically to help teachers’ social-emotional competencies had a positive impact on the classroom environment. This is important, as other shows that when teachers are stressed or burned out, students don’t learn or behave as well.

Not only has Jennings seen her program help teachers calm down during moments of stress in the classroom, but she’s watched teachers practice compassion with their students. She recalled one educator who, after getting frustrated with a student for always being late, finally asked the first-grader what was going on. The student said she had been getting herself to school every day, without parental help. Knowing this helped the teacher regulate her emotional reaction to the student’s tardiness.

“Kids who are coming from homes where there’s a lot of poverty and violence and stress, having a teacher who is more tuned in to them, more caring, and more able to provide the social-emotional support they need may make a big difference,” Jennings said. “This might be an answer to the achievement gap.”

Charlottesville, Virginia, third-grade teacher Lisa Shook participated in CARE after the district paid for its teachers to attend last summer. Shook said the classes helped her remember deep breathing in class and calm walking as she monitors her classroom and helps students with work. Shook has taught for 24 years and said she’s felt the demands on teachers increase over that time. Sometimes, even finding time during the day to use the bathroom can feel impossible.

“The job that I have to do is not a job for just one person … I have to teach [students] so many things in a really short period of time,” Shook said. “[CARE] helps to relieve stress and to put things in perspective and to help you remember what the important things are.”

is another mindfulness program for teachers, based in Boulder, Colorado, that was part of a randomized study, published in the in 2013. In addition to reducing stress, the researchers found, the training helped teachers focus better, improve working memory, and cultivate self-compassion.

These courses take two hours per week after school for eight consecutive weeks. SMART Faculty Director Rona Wilensky recommends that teachers take these courses with at least some fellow staff members, so they are a part of a cohort that can support one another’s mindfulness practice after the sessions are done.

More research is needed for teacher well-being programs, Jennings said, and more support for professional development. When President Donald Trump’s budget proposed eliminating Title II funding for teacher training, Jennings wrote in an : “These proposed cuts are difficult to square with the consistent calls for school improvement.”

But there might be hope still for the teacher well-being movement on a federal policy level. Reps. Tim Ryan of Ohio and Susan Davis of California, both Democrats, introduced the in the House in May. If passed, the legislation would support further research on reducing teacher stress. “Before they can take care of our students, teachers must take care of themselves,” Ryan said in a . “Their important work can be mentally taxing, and having the tools available to manage these stresses is crucial to making sure our students are getting a first-rate education.”

As teachers receive social-emotional training, they become models to their students for healthy behaviors, researchers said. After all, it’s hard for students to learn skills to cope with stress or anger if the person teaching them is frazzled or unkind.

“These are relational skills,” Wilensky said. “If you don’t have them, you can’t teach them.”

That’s according to a of K-12 principals from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Amid growing research showing the benefits of social-emotional learning for student well-being, graduation rates, and academics, the survey reveals what educators still need to do to make SEL work within schools.

While most principals believe that social-emotional skills should be measured, only 17 percent reported knowing which assessments they could use. Only one-quarter of principals are using the assessments for all their students.

But many principals are still skeptical that assessments are helpful. Only 40 percent reported their tests as very or fairly useful, and only 16 percent think their teachers know how to use the assessment data to help their students.

The survey findings weren’t surprising to Karen Niemi, CEO of CASEL, who has seen a shift in social-emotional learning work over the years, from trying to prove its importance in schools to now trying to figure out the best way to implement and measure it.

“This principals survey confirms that shift, not on the why, but the how. How do you actually do it? That’s something we’re working really hard on,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Created for CASEL, the survey comes from Civic Enterprises with Hart Research Associates and was conducted online in February and March 2017. It includes a nationally representative sample of 884 public school principals. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points, though higher for subgroups.

CASEL has been working on ways to effectively measure social-emotional skills with a design challenge the organization hosted. However, there are many barriers to successful measurement, including not having a consistent definition of SEL and trying to find programs that can scale across America’s diverse districts.

The challenge of assessing social-emotional skills came up as states debated what to include in their federal accountability plans as a fifth indicator, or a nonacademic skill for measuring student success, under the Every Student Succeeds Act. Many states chose something other than SEL, partly because of fears over corruptibility of data and difficulties measuring it.

“We are of the position right now that the appropriate role of assessment is not for accountability purposes, but to help improve instruction,” Niemi said.

Schools aren’t meeting SEL benchmarks

While 95 percent of principals said they are committed to cultivating SEL skills in their students, only one-third have plans to implement SEL across their entire school, and only 38 percent have plans to implement it for some students.

Few schools are implementing social-emotional learning sufficiently across their schools, according to benchmarks set by CASEL. For example, only one-third of principals reported that their school describes SEL skills for each grade level, that district leaders provide support for SEL, and that there is professional development around these skills.

“There’s an elevated sense of urgency about developing a plan for SEL without a lot of expertise on how to do it,” Niemi said.

Supporting the teachers

Teachers don’t have enough time to implement SEL in the classroom, principals said, highlighting that as the biggest barrier in increasing SEL, followed by a lack of funding. And less than half of principals think their teachers are prepared to do the work.

Still, 70 percent of principals said they expect their teachers to instruct students to be socially and emotionally competent. The report recommends more professional development to help fill this gap.

“We need to make the emphasis that every teacher is taking steps to deal with social and emotional needs of students, but I understand it’s hard because they have to get through so much curriculum for tests,” said one superintendent interviewed for the report. “It turns into an assembly line of information, rather than caring about a kid with divorced parents or who is in foster care.”

Teachers say they want more support when it comes to SEL. According to a conducted by CASEL of teachers in 2013, 82 percent said they were interested in receiving this training.

Lori Desautels wants to change that.

Desautels, an education professor at Butler University in Indianapolis, said bus drivers often develop strong relationships with students, so she is teaching them social-emotional learning strategies to strengthen those connections and help students build resilience.

Over the summer, she led a for more than a dozen bus drivers in Warsaw Community Schools in northern Indiana, part of a districtwide focus on student wellness. After conducting surveys and focus groups, district leaders realized that students needed help coping with peer pressure, bullying, trauma, and mental health concerns — and that the effort had to extend beyond teachers and school counselors.

“To be able to cover this need, we needed to have everybody involved,” Superintendent David Hoffert told ����Ӱ��.

Bus drivers often transport the same students year after year, so they can notice patterns of behavior that teachers and school administrators might miss, Desautels said. They also have an opportunity every morning to “set the brain state for the day,” which can help children succeed in class. Desautels said just checking in with someone can help students regulate their emotions, which can “change brain architecture in the moment.” Research shows that healthy relationships with adults are crucial for students coping with .

The drivers also learned how to report concerns about student wellness and identify and react to students in crisis.

Hoffert said they have tried out many of the , which include playing calming music, pairing younger students with older ones to work on breathing exercises, recognizing student successes in a weekly celebration, and checking in with students using hand signals like thumbs up or thumbs down. One even did a “kindness rocks” project, guiding students in writing inspirational messages on stones to build community and improve their school grounds.

The drivers were glad to be involved in the initiative. “They felt special because so much of the time we don’t spend the time training our bus drivers” in social-emotional strategies, Hoffert said.

The training is “really empowering for the bus drivers,” Desautels agreed. “They feel privileged, and they feel honored.”

She is planning a workshop with bus drivers from Washington Township schools near Indianapolis later this year.