The outstanding performance of the Nashville Metro Police officers likely drastically reduced the number of casualties, but six killed instead of 15 or 20 doesn’t feel like a win. We must not lose sight of an underlying reality: By the time a gunfight breaks out at a school, many systems have already failed. Defeating a shooter at a school should be the very last line of defense. Politicians and educators should commend the heroism of the Nashville police without creating the impression that this response is the ideal outcome.

That’s because when it comes to schools, the most effective gunfight is the one that never happens.

People will continue to disagree about gun policy and how to balance Second Amendment rights with responsibilities. But even with that debate stalemated, there are active and passive measures schools can take, because school shootings are rarely random. 

shows that in more than 3 out of 4 school shootings, there are warning signs ahead of time – the shooter signals or directly tells others of an intent to do harm or threatens the target. It’s too soon to know exactly what transpired in Nashville and why, but the parents of the shooter were concerned enough to try to limit their access to firearms. The Parkland shooter was pretty clear about what he had in mind. The parents of the Oxford, Michigan, high school shooter are for their lack of action in the lead-up to that incident.

Most school shootings are not attacks by outsiders. Rather, they are perpetrated by students or people known to students. Sometimes it’s a domestic situation that spills over into a school. That’s why the first line of defense is a healthy school culture where students have adults they trust and can share concerns with. Just as elite military units soak up intelligence, school officials must develop a culture where students share information of concern.

Schools should not profile students; there is no typical profile of a school shooter. But once a student exhibits warning signs, schools should act. The signs and signals are the sort of things common sense would suggest: a fixation with violence, weapons, past school shootings, dramatic changes in dress or behavior, threatening behavior or explicit threats.

What’s more, this is not just security work. A healthy school culture and a sense of belonging carry multiple benefits for students, including better academic outcomes. Bullying and alienation are a factor in many school shootings. Some anti-bullying and social-emotional learning initiatives are facing political pressure, and some are poorly designed or ideologically fraught. Yet the Secret Service, hardly a hotbed of leftism, , “it is critical that schools implement comprehensive programs designed to promote safe and positive school climates, where students feel empowered to report bullying when they witness it or are victims of it, and where school officials and other authorities act to intervene.”

Training also matters — for adults more than students. Active shooter drills in schools are too often just security theater. They convey the sense that officials are doing something, but in practice serve only to increase anxiety and depression among students. Training for adults, however, is crucial, with all staff knowing their role in an emergency. In the Nashville bodycam video, officers are greeted by school personnel relaying pertinent information and giving them access to the building. They don’t slow the officers down, inundate them or have multiple people creating confusion. Schools should take an “all-hazard” approach to emergency response, with “active shooter” just one contingency among many, much more likely ones schools will face. 

Of course, there are basic steps schools should take with regard to security, including controlling building access and implementing passive measures like making sure doors and locks work consistently and that there are clear lines of sight outside of schools. These steps do not adversely impact the experience of students but make schools safer.

In the end, schools are places of learning, filled with children, not forts or foxholes. The Nashville shooter shot their way into the school. That’s horrifying, but exceedingly rare. All the attention obscures just how low the risk is for any given school.  Regular communication from schools emphasizing this while also explaining steps that are being taken for safety should be the norm. 

Politicians and education leaders can turn schools into bunkers and “harden the target” to the point of absurdity or recognize that the best gunfights are the ones that never happen. And they don’t happen because of a healthy school climate that heads them off far upstream.

As education scholars who have spent over a decade in three cities talking to parents about their school choices, we found that a surprisingly large number are aware of and considering social-emotional factors in their decisions. Usual narratives about school choice focus on privileged parents seeking out prestigious academic environments for their children from a young age, whether in the form of selective public schools or programs, private options or an affluent suburban district. These choices have been tied to increasing school segregation across the country.

But in our , we found a racially diverse group of privileged parents seeking urban schools that prioritize their child’s happiness. We identified this group of “happiness-oriented parents” using a qualitative meta-analysis of seven studies we and several colleagues conducted over the last decade. Examining interviews with families conducted during that research helped us to draw out similarities, demonstrating this phenomenon across geographies, communities and time frames.

In those interviews, we found this group of parents prioritized factors outside of academic rigor, saying they were looking for schools that were “happy and comfortable,” “happy and grounded” or “not too academic,” and where “each child is known by a teacher.” Our findings over the last decade are aligned with a recent that found mental health was parents’ leading concern for their children in 2022. 

In contrast to research that emphasizes or test scores as indicators of a school’s desirability, happiness-oriented parents use a wider lens in describing what a “good school” looks like. Many are even willing to buck the trend in choosing a different type of school from their peers. What this happiness orientation looks like varies across families — some avoid schools perceived to be too academically competitive, while others prioritize racial/ethnic inclusivity, an alternative pedagogy, a special theme, outdoor time, arts, individualized attention, ease of commute or social-emotional learning. 

These parents often emphasized that they sought schools where their children could develop qualities beyond standard academic skills, like a love of learning, confidence, social interactions or an interest in the arts. Many parents told us test scores don’t tell the whole story about a school’s quality and that they believed rankings and perceived rigor mattered less than relationships, racial representation and school climate.

Taken together, happiness-oriented parents’ school choices could have a broader impact beyond their own children. In downplaying academically competitive criteria (which often align with schools that are disproportionately white and/or high-income), these families are in some cases willing to consider a wider and potentially more racially and socioeconomically diverse set of schools. This could aid in school integration efforts and . These parents could with students, educators and advocates for social justice and integration, or at least not actively oppose these efforts. More broadly, happiness-oriented parents prioritize a welcoming school environment, happy and content students, and loving teachers and school staff; if administrators and policymakers focused more on these aspects of schooling, it would improve the educational experiences of children across the board.

In terms of integration alone, however, happiness-oriented parents may not always be partners in these efforts, since for some, diversity was more of a by-product of their choice than a central factor in their decision-making. Moreover, because their focus is on their children’s individual happiness, even parents with a stated openness to choosing diverse settings may cause harm by existing families in a school or exercising the privilege of their choices by moving their kids when they are unhappy. 

As the mental health crisis among children comes into clearer focus, education policymakers and leaders should take happiness into greater account by supporting schools that prioritize equity, strong student relationships, creativity and social emotional well-being — criteria that are good for all students. This could create a path toward more welcoming, inclusive and racially integrated schools while addressing one of the biggest crises facing America’s young people today. 

Implementing programs that help students build social-emotional skills like communication, confidence and problem-solving requires commitments from the district level all the way to the individual classroom. But one major piece of the puzzle is often overlooked when schools think about how to implement SEL: family engagement.

that when families are involved in their children’s education, students attend school more regularly, stay in school longer and perform at higher levels. This is true for academics, when, for example, educators send home report cards, make phone calls with detailed academic updates and host curriculum nights to show what students are learning.

Engaging families in social-emotional learning is equally crucial to supporting children’s growth. SEL when it is reinforced , throughout the day, in different environments. So it is important for educators to prioritize the learning students are doing outside the classroom, and to consistently emphasize this priority to families, offering parents and caregivers the opportunity to help their kids build social-emotional skills outside of school. 

A recent Committee for Children concluded that 8 out of 10 parents support SEL in schools, and 3 in 4 agree that schools and families should work together to teach kids social-emotional skills. Still, many schools and districts are hearing skepticism and concerns about SEL. These findings should give educators the confidence to address misconceptions and clarify what SEL really is.

To do this, it is essential to create lines of open communication. Simply put, families want to know their voices are being heard in these conversations. It’s also important that educators frame SEL in language that families in the community understand and value, and that is free of obscure jargon. 

In some places, it might be more useful to refer to SEL in terms of life skills and emphasize their practical application in the workforce. Remind families that skills like social awareness and problem-solving are vital in every professional field, and that SEL can help build those practical abilities. Emphasizing the correlation between SEL and academic achievement or college acceptance can also be helpful.

Many families are rightly concerned about the learning loss that has happened as a result of the pandemic. It’s tempting to conclude that the only solution is to double down on core subject areas — math, science, reading and language arts — in order to mitigate those losses. But doubling down will go only so far, and families can benefit from understanding why. If kids don’t develop the fundamental skills that allow them to function not just in the classroom but in society, their academic gains may be harder to sustain in the long term. But when students can collaborate with peers, feel calm in emotional situations and think critically about things they’re experiencing in their classrooms, hallways, lunchrooms and sports fields, they’re better equipped to succeed both in and out of the classroom and far into the future.

Ongoing communication is critical to engaging families in this essential work. This goes beyond sending kids home with worksheets and asking for a parent’s signature. Instead, schools should try to create opportunities where families can participate in SEL with their children in meaningful ways. For example, teachers can provide some ideas for ways that families can practice social-emotional skills with their kids at home, or encouraging reminders to check in with their children about how they’re feeling at school, not just how they’re performing academically.

Connect with families regularly through social media or invite them to an online SEL forum. Distribute a newsletter in families’ home languages that focuses on SEL-related updates, activities, and school and community events. Provide a space for families to offer feedback (Google forms and surveys can be a great tool for this). Finally, keep communications brief but meaningful — the last thing families need is busy work.

A commitment to engaging families in SEL has to occur at every tier in the education system. If the responsibility falls on teachers alone, their efforts, valiant as they may be, will only go so far. If you’re an administrator, support your staff in this work. And if you’re a classroom educator, ask for buy-in from your leaders.

Helping kids build essential life skills, like confidence, decision-making and the ability to cope with difficult times, takes families and schools working together to teach kids what they need to thrive.

Ten years ago, I was the superintendent of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, which aims to improve student learning in the state’s 5% lowest academically performing schools. At the time, I believed that if we removed some constraints our schools were facing from their central offices, educators in those schools would have the flexibility to make instructional, structural and content decisions that better met the needs of students in their classrooms. I thought that school autonomy was the silver bullet for school improvement.

I was wrong — kind of.

We gave schools more autonomy, but that alone didn’t improve student outcomes. Our singular focus on governance failed to account for the support educators needed to translate autonomy into effective instruction.

The experience was humbling. I learned that a shift in governance doesn’t guarantee a shift in focus. It changed the way I think about what it takes for districts and charter management organizations to implement meaningful change.

Student learning is education’s real purpose

Systems of governance, those who lead them, and the context in which they operate are essential to improving student learning. However, it’s all too easy to find ourselves more preoccupied with the power of these systems than their purpose. It’s all too easy to focus on those who hold “the power” rather than what they’re doing with that power. And it’s all too easy to forget that education’s purpose is to empower students through learning, not adults through bureaucracy.

We know how to improve student learning. It’s all about fundamentals; there are no silver bullets or shortcuts. names three elements that contribute to learning: what is taught (the content), how it’s taught (teachers’ knowledge and approach), and how students engage (the ways students interact with the content, the teacher, and peers).

To quote Elmore and colleagues, “that’s it” — that’s it regardless of governance structure, regardless of geography, regardless of district size, even regardless of funding.

No matter the context, if we want to improve student learning, we need to ensure that decisions are centered on the three components of Elmore’s instructional core — particularly student engagement.

Content and pedagogy are critical, and each needs additional support; however, each already has momentum. We’ve seen school improvement work center increasingly on high-quality instructional materials. Professional learning and educator prep programs have long recognized that instructional practices can be optimized to benefit students’ learning. This work should continue.

Students want educators to challenge them

Student engagement has seen the least movement, perhaps because it’s the least understood. On a recent school visit, one student shared something that illuminates the confusion: “Mr. Smith (a pseudonym) does his ‘door work’ — says good morning, smiles and gives fist bumps to each of us when we walk into class — and as soon as he shuts the door and starts the lesson, he flips a switch and acts like he doesn’t know us. Like he has to play the role of teacher and we have to be the obedient students. It’s weird.”

Students want authentic engagement beyond upbeat greetings at the classroom door; they want to be engaged in everyday instruction. But it rarely happens.

Uplifting interactions between teachers and students in hallways, advisory groups and special events are fabulous ways to boost school culture. But — in and of themselves — they do not strengthen students’ ability to substantively engage with academic content.

I invite you to reflect on your own meaningful school experiences. When I reflect on mine, I remember that the teachers who made the biggest difference in my education and life, weren’t the ones who just uplifted me. They were the ones who challenged me academically — the ones who invited me to go deeper and farther, to figure out what I thought and communicate it, to apply my own problem-solving methods. That’s what affirming relationships do.

In her book, , Gholdy Muhammad defines affirming relationships as relationships in which each party recognizes and cultivates the unique value the other brings. To borrow a phrase from improv, if uplifting interactions are saying “yes” to students, affirming relationships are saying “yes, and….”

The “and” builds students’ agency. That is the key to engagement with content because it positions students as active contributors to and shapers of their own learning, rather than passive recipients of knowledge.

For example, a teacher could design a unit of instruction around recall of a text about how the water cycle works, or a teacher could design a unit of instruction that positions such a text as a source students use to obtain information in order to figure out what happened to a puddle on the sidewalk that they observed had disappeared.

Each scenario asks students to learn the same content. But, by allowing them opportunities to leverage their own experience and curiosity to drive learning, the latter affirms students.

Unfortunately, most classrooms default to the former.

We’ve been brought up to think of affirmations as accolades of “good job, I knew you could do it!” That’s how we have gotten used to communicating our confidence in students.

Praising and encouraging students undoubtedly builds overall social-emotional well-being, which is a necessary prerequisite for engagement in academic content. But these methods alone don’t provide adequate opportunities for students to contribute to their own learning.

In addition to instructional “attagirls,” we should affirm students by trusting and expecting them to bear the majority of the cognitive lift in their learning. That’s true even when it’s not easy for them and even when it requires adults to step back and cede some instructional control to student exploration.

Learning to cultivate affirming relationships with students through core content instruction will be new — and uncomfortable — for many of us. There are many habits to break and systems to redesign. However, supporting instructional leaders in promoting content-embedded affirming student engagement is essential.

Focus on what works in the classroom

In the coming year, as we continue to grapple with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the impending , I suspect that we’ll be told that many things are “essential” in education. Dedicated educators, parents  and community members will propose innumerable solutions that all purport to accelerate learning and have outsized gains on student outcomes.

We should not fall into the silver-bullet trap I did 10 years ago. We should not be distracted by trending debates or catchy headlines. Instead, we should be laser-focused on what we know makes a difference for real students in real classrooms.

For any school or district intervention, in any context across the country, we must be crystal clear about how it will bolster the instructional core — whether it’s building leaders’ capacity to model affirmation for their teachers or adopting a curriculum that makes space for student voice and choice. Every decision should serve education’s purpose: empowering students with the knowledge, skills, and confidence they need to be thoughtful, productive, engaged citizens.

Yes. And….

We should remember that it is also our purpose to foster students’ compassion, respect, and sense of responsibility — to show our students that exercising one’s own power need not and should not come at the expense of someone else’s ability to exercise theirs.

As a country, I can think of nothing more effective we could do toward those purposes than redesigning our education systems and classrooms to prioritize affirming relationships. Students then can have opportunities to engage authentically with the content they’re asked to master. They then can witness teachers live into their own expertise in a way that invites others’ thoughts and perspectives into the room. And they then can begin a life-long practice of “yes, and-ing” each other.

is a nonpartisan quarterly journal from The Bush Institute that operates from the belief that ideas matter. They shape public policies, spur action, and lead to results. Each issue presents compelling essays that address a central question or theme. Along with Bush Institute directors and fellows, The Catalyst convenes leading experts and writers, as well as new and rising voices, to address each topic.

Joy is a that causes the release of two types of neurotransmitters in the brain: dopamine and serotonin. These chemical messengers cause us to smile, laugh or even jump for joy. But the feeling is not limited to physical response. When children experience joy, information flows freely and of what they learned. Teaching and learning that induce joy and result in joyful classrooms are integral to helping students thrive and should . Research reveals that certain conditions lend to students feeling joy in the classroom. In one documenting the emotions of first and second graders, students responded most positively to student-centered learning that allowed them to “shine as experts” by making their own choices.

With so many children and adolescents having suffered adverse effects to their , and well-being due to the COVID-19 pandemic, infusing joy in learning feels more critical and valuable than ever. What produces joy may be personal, but there are many research-backed strategies that, when incorporated into classroom activities, can lead children to experience joy and begin to cultivate it within themselves. 

Discovery: Learning activities that help children engage in independent discovery make them feel joyful, whether it’s reading a new word, unearthing a solution to a complex problem or experiencing an “aha” moment when something clicks. Further, when students figure something out for themselves, they are more likely to and feel more pride and confidence in themselves.

Identity: Individuals with a more mature sense of identity . Participating in activities that allow students to explore and , and feel their identities are being recognized and appreciated by others, yields joy and an increased sense of belonging. 

Connection: Feeling connected to others and oneself generates joy.he health and academic  benefits of are well documented. Designing activities in which children collaborate to complete a task and solve problems with their peers on their own terms helps them form, enjoy and sustain connections with one another.

Movement: Movement and physical activity have a positive effect and , along with , including cognitive functioning, behavior in school and even grades. Programs such as integrate physical activity into various aspects of the curriculum to keep children moving throughout the school day and experiencing the effects of joy.

Play: Play has the potential to bring all of the above together. Dr. Stuart Brown of describes it as “a state of mind that one has when absorbed in an activity that provides enjoyment and a suspension of sense of time.” Play is built into humans’ neurobiology, . It is essential to make sure kids have time and space to play every day.  

Embedding activities in the school day that elicit joy, such as those that incorporate discovery, identity, connection, movement and play, is invaluable. But great value also lies in asking children and adolescents directly what makes them feel joyful. This helps students recognize joy in themselves so they can cultivate and integrate it more fully into their lives. As educators, we need to answer the call to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.

As part of the groundbreaking group Run-D.M.C. McDaniels racked up a formidable list of “firsts” in the hip-hop world, with multi-platinum albums, Grammy awards, rock’n’roll crossovers, sold out stadiums, a Rolling Stone cover, and hip hop’s first major apparel endorsement.  

But McDaniels, who had been creative and introspective since childhood, also battled depression and personal demons that threatened to steal the joy of his success. Now, he’s using his influence and ability to rap on command to reach kids with an important message: Your feelings matter. 

He takes this message to schools, and works with Nickelodeon’s educational arm, Noggin, on a literacy and social emotional learning television series “What’s the Word?” He also authored a children’s book, Darryl’s Dream, about a third grader who finds perseverance and confidence in the face of doubt. 

Ahead of a panel discussion hosted by Big Heart World, Sparkler, Noggin and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, McDaniels spoke with correspondent Bekah McNeel about his love of therapy and empowering words, and about the ways adults can validate the emotions of children while helping them through the tough parts of growing up. 

“A lot of the things we go through as adults start in childhood,” McDaniels said. Rather than pushing away anxiety, fear, and sadness—insisting that children be happy simply because they don’t carry the responsibilities of adulthood—he suggested teachers and parents, “Let them be engaged from the point where they’re at.” 

A lifelong fan of superhero comics, McDaniels reminds kids that when Spider-Man and the Hulk and others are not in their superhero form, their alter egos like Peter Parker and Bruce Banner have to deal with bullies, setbacks, and all the problems regular people face. Even Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker, McDaniels said, “He had parental issues.” 

Parents and teachers, the original heroes in kids’ lives, can also model vulnerability so that kids see how to handle tough emotions—it’s healthy to have negative feelings, because bad and sad things happen. At the same time, the feelings don’t have to stop you from reaching your goals. Being appropriately open and vulnerable with kids also strengthens that adult-child relationship, which will also contribute to the child’s success. People admire strength, he explained, but they connect to vulnerability. 

Those connections are a top priority for University of Michigan researcher and pediatrician Jenny Radesky, who joined Austin ISD educator Rebekah Ozuna and American Enterprise Institute policy analyst Rick Hess in a discussion following the McDaniels interview. The panelists discussed the state of social and emotional learning in their various fields—from insight gained during the pandemic to current political pushback, from social media to classroom management. 

While there may be ideological and political debate over whether topics like anti-racism and LGBTQ identity belong in social and emotional learning curricula or in schools at all, Ozuna said every classroom inherently has a “culture and climate” in addition to academic instruction. If the culture of the classroom doesn’t acknowledge the real struggles students face, she said, little else was going to break through. This became more clear than ever as students and teachers struggled through the pandemic. “Everything was greatly intertwined.”

Other educators have told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ similar stories in recent years. Here were some of our most discussed and shared articles about social and emotional learning in 2022: 

• COVID Recovery: How Social and Emotional Learning Became a Priority for Schools During the Pandemic
  
• Expert’s View: CASEL’s ‘Consensus Builder’ CEO Aaliyah Samuel on Getting the U.S. ‘Back to the Middle’ on Social-Emotional Learning
  
• Youth Trauma: Historic Rise in Child Bereavement as COVID, Drugs and Guns Claim Parents’ Lives
  
• Pandemic Isolation: Virtual Nightmare — One Student’s Journey Through the Pandemic
  
• Student Relationships: Remembering How to Be Friends — One School’s Efforts to Use Talking Circles to Help Kids Reconnect

It’s no surprise that students need more support, both in terms of diagnostic measures like screening and proven interventions like evidence-based clinical therapies. For the past several years, they’ve endured unprecedented stress from the pandemic, a rise in violence and social unrest.

School-based social workers, counselors and other mental health professionals play a major role in helping young people manage stress and anxiety by modeling everyday coping strategies.

Teachers, too, can help by building a less stressful classroom environment. Since anxiety is the most commonly diagnosed mental health concern for youth, and because teachers play such a central role in children’s lives, it makes good sense for educators to focus on incorporating everyday anxiety interventions into their classroom routines. 

While the root causes of anxiety can’t be solved without targeted interventions like clinical therapy, there are strategies any teacher can use to reduce some of the symptoms. Even better, these can benefit all children in a classroom, not just the ones with a formal diagnosis of anxiety.

Reducing environmental factors that exacerbate stress or anxiety is a good place for teachers to start. The less noise and disruptions students experience, the fewer potential triggers children are likely to encounter. Teachers don’t need a master’s degree in social work or counseling to provide this kind of intervention. 

Sticking with a consistent classroom daily routine — from how students line up to how they participate in discussions — can build a sense of security. So can a simple change of tone. Instead of yelling down the hall, for example, a teacher can walk up to a group of lingering students and use an “inside voice” to tell them to go to class. In situations like this, it’s as much about delivery as the message itself.

It’s also ok for a teacher to hit the “pause” button when feeling frustrated or stressed. In fact, this can model for the class what it means to take 30 seconds to reset with five deep breaths that fill the lungs. Afterward, notice how the tone of voice has changed — and maybe the sense of agency too. By modeling breathing strategies, teachers are giving students the space to tap into their emotions and respond to them in a healthy manner.

Another practical step teachers can take is helping students tap into their sensory systems of sight, smell and sound. Students can take those few deep breaths while picturing a beautiful sunny day, or while remembering the smell of a favorite meal and how it made them feel. These types of interventions are easy to incorporate in a daily classroom routine, and can reduce young people’s heart rates and allow them to shift to a calmer state. Less stress for students means more focus on learning and interacting constructively with their peers.  

Being in nature has a positive effect on reducing blood pressure and a racing heartbeat. Amazingly, so can just looking at a picture of nature. So why not take a field trip to a local park or even the school grounds? Or decorate the classroom with pictures of towering redwoods or shimmering mountain lakes? Or even repurpose a desk or bookshelf to display rows of potted houseplants? Knowing why the greenery is there can help both students and teachers feel calmer.

Will a row of snake plants or a gallery wall of nature photos prevent classroom panic attacks? Probably not. But for many students, it can reduce feelings of anxiety and stress and allow teachers to focus on getting more powerful interventions to students who really need extra support.

The academic damage inflicted by the pandemic is still being measured, but early indicators are ominous. Exam scores collected periodically by states, cities, and nationwide testing organizations show that a large number of K-12 students have either stagnated or lost ground in their studies during the COVID era. School closures and prolonged doses of virtual instruction are usually identified as the culprit.

But since classes first went online last spring, parents and educators have been equally anxious about the pandemic’s impact on children’s inner lives. And while those worries have often focused on the developmental opportunities denied to kindergarteners and elementary schoolers, older students have also suffered while isolated from friends and teachers.

by the American Educational Research Association provides concrete evidence of the setbacks experienced by adolescents in remote learning. In a two-part survey conducted both before the emergence of COVID-19 and during its peak, high schoolers learning online said they were worse-off socially, emotionally, and academically than their peers learning in physical classrooms. The “thriving gap” between the two groups was more pronounced among older participants, the authors note.

The study was conducted by a group of authors at Temple University, Mathematica Policy Research, and the University of Pennsylvania, including prominent psychologist Angela Duckworth, a MacArthur Fellow best known for her writings on non-cognitive traits like grit. In an interview, Duckworth said that the post-COVID distancing “seems to have a deleterious effect in every aspect of thriving, in every way we were measuring it.”

“What we wanted to underscore was that there’s a consistent signal across these three domains,” she said. “We are finding this across social, emotional, and academic learning.”

The survey was administered through , a nonprofit research consortium Duckworth co-founded in 2013. The group’s Student Thriving Index measures self-reported ratings of student well-being and school routines, which students complete at the direction of teachers during class time. A sample of roughly 6,500 students across Florida’s Orange County School District participated in the survey both in February 2020, just before the pandemic shuttered campuses, and October 2020, after they had been given the choice of whether to return to in-person instruction. About two-thirds of participants chose to stick with virtual classes.

Students were enrolled in grades eight through 11 in the spring, but all were attending high school during the questionnaire’s second round. In both iterations, they were asked to assess themselves by multiple test items related to social relationships (example: “In your school, do you feel like you fit in?”), emotional state (“How happy have you been feeling these days?”) and academic engagement (“Compared with other things you do, how interesting are your classes?”).

After grouping test items into composite scores, the research team found that students learning remotely reported lower scores across all three categories when compared with their peers who had returned to school. On a 100-point scale, remote students scored 2.4 points lower socially, 1.7 points lower emotionally, and 1.1 points lower academically.

The “thriving gap” detected in survey responses was driven overwhelmingly by students in grades 10-12, while differences in response for ninth-graders did not reach statistical significance. The authors offer a few possible explanations for the disparity, which may result from the fact that freshmen are already dealing with a crucial transition to the high school environment and may not be as disturbed by separation from peers or adults that they haven’t yet had the chance to meet in person.

Duckworth and her colleagues note that the effects, while substantial, should be viewed with caution. Given that students weren’t randomly assigned to participate either in-person or virtual instruction, the responses collected may not point to causation. The team controlled for a range of variables in the student population, including age, gender, race and ethnicity, eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch (a common proxy for poverty), English learner status, and GPA. The population of students who returned to school buildings were disproportionately male, white, ineligible for free lunch, higher in social well-being, and lower in GPA.

After spending large chunks of two academic years learning from home, many students are preparing to return to in-person instruction on a full-time basis this fall. As part of the push, President Biden has warned of the “” impact of social isolation on students’ mental health. Even so, some families of retaining a virtual learning option for their kids in the future.

Duckworth said that while most parents are justifiably concerned about the recent disruptions to the academic and social-emotional growth of young children, high schoolers should not be neglected when tallying the pandemic’s toll.

“Adolescence is the most social period of your life — you are programmed to want to be with people outside your family, and usually you find ways to do that. For a lot of students, school is a haven where they feel the most themselves. We wanted to quantify what it’s been like for this age group, and this trend we saw…was consistent with the idea that the more you are in adolescence, the more difficult it is for you to be holed up with your family and not seeing other people.”

Correspondent Bekah McNeel steered the conversation, featuring Public Prep CEO Janelle Bradshaw, pediatric psychologist and Columbia Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute scholar Dr. Dana Crawford and Dr. Ryan Padrez, a Stanford pediatrician and medical director at The Primary School. Watch the full replay:

The event coincided with the recent launch of the Big Heart World initiative, a platform developed by Sparkler Learning and Noggin, designed to help parents, caregivers and educators address young children’s pressing social and emotional needs.

In advance of the webcast, Sparkler Executive Director Julia Levy published a piece with more details about the platform: “The Big Heart World initiative aims to help parents and educators address the pressing social and emotional needs that America’s young children have right now during COVID-19 and to provide action-oriented tools and resources that help grown-ups support children’s healthy social and emotional development,” Levy wrote.

Collaborating with such non-profit partners as the National Head Start Association and the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, she said the initiative “is rolling out monthly content focused on the core areas of social and emotional learning: awareness of self; awareness of others; and relationships with others.”

Parents, educators and families can learn more on dedicated pages ; Levy also recapped a few key takeaways from the April 15 conversation in this breakdown.

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Here are some of our recent SEL headlines:

• Redefining SEL: Why one leading social-emotional learning organization is updating the most widely recognized definition of SEL (Read more)
• Student Survey: Most students have experienced mental health challenges during pandemic, survey reveals. But there are reasons for optimism (Read more)
• Crisis: Youth suicide — The other public health crisis (Read more)
• A Principal’s View: Social-emotional learning is more important than ever. Here’s how we do it virtually at my Denver school (Read more)
• Inclusion: Social-emotional learning or ‘white supremacy with a hug’? Yale official’s departure sparks a racial reckoning (Read more)

While it’s too soon to know the long-term effects of the pandemic on children’s academic and social development, experts in education, health, and child development say there are practical steps families can take to support children and help them cope with stress, uncertainty, and transition.

Janelle Bradshaw, CEO of Public Prep; Dr. Dana Crawford, a pediatric clinical psychologist and scholar in residence at Columbia Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute; and Dr. Ryan Padrez, a pediatrician at Stanford and Medical Director at The Primary School answered parents’ questions about social and emotional wellness as part of the launch of the initiative, a partnership between Sparkler Learning and Noggin focused on helping parents, caregivers, and educators boost children’s social and emotional skills and build resilience. Bekah McNeel, an education reporter at ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, moderated the discussion.

“All of these things … are really weighing on parents’ minds,” McNeel said.

The Big Heart World initiative aims to help parents and educators address the pressing social and emotional needs that America’s young children have right now during COVID-19 and to provide action-oriented tools and resources that help grown-ups support children’s healthy social and emotional development. In collaboration with non-profit partners — from the National Head Start Association to the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, Big Heart World is rolling out monthly content focused on the core areas of social and emotional learning: awareness of self; awareness of others; and relationships with others.

How Parents Can Foster Social and Emotional Growth Now

Bradshaw, Crawford, and Padrez said parents can foster social and emotional wellness by creating routines, having intentional conversations about topics like kindness, and using books to focus children’s attention on feelings, friendship, and other social themes.

“I think many of our families have learned the importance of setting routines,” Dr. Padrez said.

Bradshaw said her schools have added an extra 30 minutes each day for teachers and students to focus on students’ social and emotional wellness. They discuss: “Are you feeling energized and tired, anxious, excited? And is that a feeling that you want to keep or feeling that you want to change?”

Talking Openly About The “Different Pandemics”

Bradshaw, Crawford, and Padrez said the pandemic has affected communities differently, and that families have followed different rules.

Bradshaw saw that students and staff in her school community experienced different pandemics: Some had sick family members. Others had family members who were transit workers, security guards, or delivery people, who had to work through lockdowns. Others had reliable Internet and backyards to play in.

She said addressing these disparities with young children needs to be an “ongoing conversation.”

Crawford said it’s important for parents and caregivers to talk about their family’s beliefs and set clear rules.

“I think the issue becomes when families aren’t clear,” she said. “We all have cabin fever, and sometimes when different mandates change, folks interpret that as they can get more relaxed. I think when that happens, children get more confused. If adults aren’t clear, kids aren’t clear.”

Don’t Forget Parents’ Wellness

All of the panelists said parents and caregivers need to take care of themselves in order to support their children’s emotional wellness.

Bradshaw said she thinks of parenting self-care like the airplane safety rule of putting on your own oxygen mask before you help others.

“It’s a really important concept for families whose home and work lives have been merged as everyone’s working from home to really remember: how are you feeling as an adult? And how are you managing your emotions and trying not to…transfer that to your children who are feeling their own levels of stress?” she said.

Dr. Padrez said his medical training taught him the importance of self-care

“I think it comes from probably all the training and residency and through the long hours you’re working in recognizing that you’ve got to take care of yourself if you’re going to survive,” he said. “I feel like this year has been the year where everyone is put through that test of long hours, and really finding those new activities for self care, I think is really important.”

Preparing Families to Go Back to “Normal”

Before a big transition like the move back to in-person school, Crawford advised parents and children to “visualize” new routines and even rehearse the day in a playful way to alleviate anxiety.

“We did that when my two year old was about to start school,” she said. “We literally walked outside, we walked back inside, pretended…my husband was the teacher.”

She said older children can benefit from this sort of pretending, too.

Bradshaw has just reopened her schools this spring and her own elementary school-aged daughter has just returned to in-person school.

“Children learned very quickly how to wear their masks and follow all of the social distancing guidelines, including washing their hands more frequently,” she said. “The reason why they were so amenable is because they were so excited to be back in their community.”

She advised parents to talk to their child’s teacher and to their children to help them prepare. This might mean helping children learn to elbow bump rather than hug, or it might mean working as a family on being more flexible to prepare for the unexpected.

Padrez said he walks through the science and logic of in-person schools with his patients’ parents to reassure them that their children will be safe in school.

“There are some families out there that are still afraid to send their child back to school and so kids are going to pick up on that,” he said. “Be aware of that sort of emotion. Be okay to acknowledge that with your child. It’s a good trust-building experience, but to also have confidence as a parent that this is a safe place to go back to school for your child.

Building a Generation of Resilient Kids

Dr. Padrez said there’s a lot of concern about children’s social and emotional health during the pandemic, but that the hard circumstances of the last year might actually foster a “resilient generation of kids.”

“I like to remind our families that parents are always their children’s first teacher,” he said. “Social-emotional growth happens at home naturally. We just happened to get it in a bigger dose this last year.”

Julia Levy is executive director of Sparkler, an early childhood family engagement organization.

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, 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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ)

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ)

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.’”

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

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.”