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

Now, said the tutor, after the effects of the pandemic, not only is the risk a reality, but the gap is growing. 

“A lot of kids who were on the borderline before all the virtual stuff, they have fallen behind,” said Kapur, who can see just how wide the gulf has become for students who have spent two years in pandemic schooling because he begins tutoring at whatever level a child has mastered, not the level their age and grade suggest. 

The last time most second graders had the kind of instruction that lends itself to mastering reading skills, Kapur said, was the first half of kindergarten in 2019. 

It’s no secret that early academics across the country took a hit during the pandemic: Closures, masks, and distance learning changed the way students learned to read, and it often wasn’t as good as what they had in person. 

Now, experts say, for young students to fully recover will take more than picking up where they left off two years ago. They point to the social emotional and behavioral skills that cascade into reading, and warn against the temptation to rush things along.

Whether going back to fill in the gaps with a tutor like Kapur, or accelerating to keep kids on grade level, as most schools are doing, experts say kids will progress if the adults keep their social and emotional health and mind, and be patient.

In an ordinary year, young students would be honing their reading based on years of foundational literacy skills like listening, speaking, and following sentences along a page. 

And it’s more than just functional reading skills: By first grade they would also be old hands at raising their hands, veterans of circle time, practiced in the rhythms of the classroom.

It’s training a lot of early elementary school kids have not had. In addition to the challenges of pandemic schooling for students who were enrolled in school, national data show more parents opted to keep their young children out of pre-K and kindergarten during the pandemic, which means more children than usual are encountering classroom learning for the first time this year. 

Learning to read is more than letter and sound recognition, Kapur said. He has always worked with pre-K students on holding a pencil and focusing for longer than a couple of minutes at a time. These would usually be skills needed to be “kinder-ready” he said, but he’s seeing more kids at older ages needing help. 

“There has definitely been an uptick, especially the kids who were not at school,” he said.

Studies confirm that uptick in kids behind grade-level in reading. The University of Virginia that the number of 1st graders failing to meet grade-level was up by 18 percentage points. A nationwide showed losses in reading were concentrated predominantly in early grades, kindergarten through 2nd. These are usually critical years for literacy, as by 4th grade most students are expected to have learned to read, so they can start “reading to learn.” 

For those young readers, especially pre-K and kindergarten, Kapur said, virtual learning couldn’t give them everything they needed. They needed to be in classrooms. But even that wouldn’t be the silver bullet many hoped. 

Getting Back Into Classrooms Didn’t Solve Everything

Even as kids have gotten back into classrooms, something many predicted would help tremendously, teachers say the second year of the pandemic was still far from ideal. Intermittent closures or returns to virtual learning interrupted the school year, plus, it’s difficult to care about a sentence like “A rat has a hat,” when so many have been worried about the health of family members. It’s difficult to understand the difference between the “m” sound and the “n” sound when a teacher’s mouth is behind a mask.

Now that masks have begun coming off, and closures are fewer and further between, teachers are turning their attention to the cascade of skills students need to read fluently . 

say in children and adults, the pandemic had an effect on perseverance, attention, and other factors known in developmental science as “executive functions” that make learning possible. The solution, they say, is to prioritize what feel like “non-academic” skills right alongside reading and math.

“To get to the academics there’s more you need to know about your students,” said LaMonica Williams, director of early reading programs at Teaching Matters, a New York-based coaching and mentorship nonprofit for teachers in low-income schools.

It’s not as simple as just doing more flashcards or sending home more books. “A different level of engagement is required as we’re bringing students back,” Williams said. Teachers need to know what happened to students during the pandemic, and how they are feeling about being back in the classroom. What’s still worrying them? Where do they feel frustrated?

Less-Than-Ideal Environments

In California’s Palo Alto Unified School District, educators are seeing a familiar divide between children whose parents could afford private, in-person programs while schools were closed, and those who rely exclusively on public schools.

Disparities have always existed between the relatively small number of low income Black and Latino students in Palo Alto, and white and Asian students who historically saw better outcomes. That data prompted Palo Alto to develop the Every Student Reads Initiative before the pandemic. 

Because the initiative was built with differentiation and acceleration in mind, Palo Alto administrators expect it to be relevant in addressing the gaps exacerbated by the pandemic, when the best practice will be keeping kids with their grade level peers and reinforcing missing skills at an accelerated rate, rather than putting kids in remedial classes. 

More students might need the support, but the district plans to rally resources accordingly. For instance, summer programming—usually an enrichment program for low-income kids—offered direct reading instruction for any student behind their grade level in reading. The more time with teachers, the better, said Anne Brown, Palo Alto assistant superintendent of elementary education.

In a classroom, students have the predictability of schedules, rules, and rituals to help settle them into a learning-ready frame of mind. Time spent away has had a domino effect on other areas of learning. 

Cascades 

Teachers and parents can expect to see academics like reading develop hand in hand with social and emotional maturity, said Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. “Any given skill is the outcome of many many things coming together.”

In Steinhardt’s Play and Language Lab, Tamis-LeMonda studies the phenomenon of “developmental cascades”—skills that spill over into each other in early childhood. For instance, children develop social and emotional skills while learning new words to express their feelings.

The pandemic affected many of these cascades as students were isolated and anxious, she explained, but there’s good news: Those skills might have fallen down like dominoes but they can develop concurrently as well.

 â€œPractice…will make you a master at any given skill,” she said. 

Sitting still is an area for gradual, age-appropriate, pandemic-adjusted development, just like reading, Tamis-LaMonda said, and she encourages parents who want to help, to build the skill like you would any other: patiently. For instance, if a kid doesn’t want to sit longer than five minutes to look at sight words, she recommends trying to build up to ten high-quality minutes instead of forcing a miserable hour.