Why Social & Emotional Learning Matters

What is social and emotional learning?

Social and emotional learning, also known as SEL , is the integration of cognitive and affective domains in children so they are able to gain and apply the knowledge and skills they need to manage their emotions, set socially acceptable goals and to feel and express empathy for other people. This helps students to develop and manage positive relationships.

Some educators will tell you that SEL is a new program their school is using to satisfy the auditors who evaluate their school for accreditation. But, SEL is about much more than compliance, and it is not new. Good teachers have been teaching SEL for decades, explicitly and by example. Teaching and learning does not happen without SEL. It involves developing an ethic of care in schools and classrooms. The stated goal of SEL programming is frequently to prepare students to become responsible, caring members of society, and that makes sense, but those goals aside (Who doesn’t believe in developing responsible ad caring people?) SEL is a inseparable from academic instruction and cognitive development, which is why teachers have been using SEL as a means just as much as an end for over fifty plus years.

Why does SEL matter?

SEL helps adolescents recognize and understand their own feelings which is a necessary precondition for the appropriate expression of those emotions, and for having empathy toward others and for building relationships. Adolescents’ mental health, social skills, and academic achievement all depend on SEL. The benefits students experience from SEL last for months and even years. Academic outcomes, student well-being are increased and SEL decreases negative outcomes like emotional distress, drug abuse, and sexually transmitted diseases among adolescents.

The Research Shows that with conscious SEL implementation:

· student achievement is improved

· student mental, physical and emotional health and wellness is improved

· classroom behavior is improved

· problem behaviors are reduced

· academic outcomes are improved

· students manage stress better

· student depression & anxiety is reduced

· self-efficacy is improved

· students learn decision-making skills

· students build relationship skills

· conflicts are reduced among students

· students become more self-aware

· students learn self-management strategies

· students become more socially aware and sympathetic

· students develop self-regulation behaviors

What is the best way to include SEL in your classroom?

The most powerful way that we can integrate SEL into our classrooms is to see our classes, as communities, and see our students as people. When we build supportive and safe learning environments in our classrooms, we make it possible for our students to grow as people. Nobody grows cognitively without growing emotionally, socially and psychologically. These aspects are not distinct. They are twisted together in the most profound and complex patterns and designs. Building community requires leadership in its purest form. If we create a sense of belonging for all our students, we will satisfy their needs for social acceptance and for validation, both of which are prerequisites for sustainable education. This requires us to set explicit boundaries for student behavior, so that students will be able to predict that their participation will be honored not belittled. All students must feel emotionally safe before they can learn. When I was a high school English teacher, my approach to setting boundaries became more collaborative with each passing year. I worked with my students to develop our class expectations. They created expectations for me, for themselves and for each other.

I would begin this process at the beginning of each school year with each class — not the first day, but during the first week. I would ask my students, most of whom were new to me, and I to them, what they should expect of me? Often, I would use an ungraded quickwrite at the start of class to get us started. Five minutes later, I would ask for volunteers to read what they wrote, and I would listen carefully, sometimes writing their responses on the board or on the data projector. Other times I would have them write them on post-its and stick them on the board. I would never compel students to read their responses. To force them is a violation of everything that SEL stands for, and force is not a practical approach to use in the classroom anyhow.

More often than not, they would write that they expect me to be fair, responsible, not to play favorites, not to be mean, and to be sensitive and reasonable. They wouldn’t say so directly, but they wanted me to trust them.

Trusting teenagers who I didn’t even know did not come easy to me at first, but after a few years I realized, I had more to lose by not trusting all of them, than I did by placing my trust with them and having one or two students take advantage of that trust. I did not lone any of them my car or give them the password to my email, but I found that it was easier for me to trust them than for them to trust me. So, I had to go first. And, the more I trusted them, the more they trusted me. I also found that when we had some level of trust, which, of course, was different for each student, I had to protect that trust, as sacred, and they, in turn, tried not to violate the trust I placed in them. Sometimes when a student thought that they may have lost my trust, he or she would be visibly disappointed in his or herself. That’s how much they valued my trust, but it started with me. Trust is about safety, and students can’t learn without feeling safe.

Working together with students on the norms (expectations) we would live by that school year, provided us the opportunity to practice cooperation and for me to prove my egalitarianism. We would together build the learning community they needed. The more honest I was, the more honest they were. The more patient I was, the more patient my students were. Teachers are powerful models. Our students may not immediately display the behaviors that they learn from our example, but we nearly always find that they do so eventually. And, when they do not, if we reflect on our own behavior, we will often find that we have sent them a mixed message somewhere along the way. We are not perfect. We do our best. As I often tell the college students I have now, who want to be teachers, whatever they see you do, they will do too, so be careful what you do.

Despite adult culture’s attempt to demonize them, adolescents are not bad people, not lazy and not stupid either. They are doing the best they can, during the most volatile years of their lives. They are not perfect either. So, together we would make our class expectations into a guiding document, and I found that if we met monthly, sometimes weekly as needed, to check on the status of our evolving relationship as a community, we could change, adjust and reinforce that document to reflect the needs of the community, if we needed to.

Maslow

Most of the ideas that I grounded my ethic of care over my years teaching, came from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Abraham Maslow, once a professor at Columbia University, Brooklyn College and The New School for Social Research in New York City, is known for his theories of motivation and performance, and he popularized the concept of self-actualization. In 1951, after studying under noted German psychologist Alfred Adler at Columbia, Maslow explained self-actualization as a person’s overwhelming desire for fulfillment, identifying their human potentiality and then achieving it. This can be thought of as a desire to become everything that we are capable of being. Maslow’s idea is that once a person reaches this level, he or she becomes self-motivated and self-disciplined, and believes in an internal locus-of-control. When we think of a person who is driven, who enjoys the hard work that goes into making him or her successful, making him or her a master of something, that is self-actualization. Think Tom Brady, Serena Williams, Misty Copeland, Barack Obama, Sting, Robin Williams, Oprah. By extension, Maslow’s work led him to develop a hierarchy of needs that explain what is required for a person to reach this optimal state.

Self-Actualized people:

•see reality as it is. •accept their flaws and the flaws of others.

•are independent and spontaneous •are resourceful

•feel gratitude for simple things in life •have deep loving bonds with others

•value solitude •laugh at themselves •are compassionate

•are interested community and humanity •are not easily shamed

•have a few close friends rather than many acquaintances

•sometimes feel at one with the universe

Maslow’s Hierarch of Needs

Often portrayed as a pyramid with the most fundamental needs at the bottom and the need for identity and fulfillment at the top, this theory holds that people’s most basic needs must be met before they become motivated enough to set and achieve goals unrelated to their survival.

The four basic layers of the pyramid are what Abraham Maslow called the “deficiency needs.” They are esteem, belonging and acceptance, safety and physical needs like air, food and rest. If the deficiency needs are not met, the person feels anxious and tense. Imagine that you have not had breakfast, and then you go to do a Crossfit workout. You won’t have the fuel you need. Or, you got three hours of sleep last night, and then you take a test for your teacher’s license. Your mind will be deprived of the essential rest it needs. Maslow believed that the most basic levels of needs must be met before the individual can even want the higher level needs. Therefore, if our students are not completing assigned work, not following directions, not following rules, if they are not trying — not fulfilling their potential, this does not mean that they are bad students or that we are bad teachers.

More likely, a student who does not try, believes there is no point in wasting his or her energy to achieve something or get somewhere, when it’s not possible. Often, that student’s self-efficacy is low — or his or her need for rest, safety, belonging or esteem have not been met.

Motivation is complex, and various aspects of one person can be operating on multiple levels of Maslow’s hierarchy simultaneously. As teachers it is very difficult to know what our students need when, which is why trust is so important. If they trust us, they can communicate their needs. But, if we are hyper-focused on academic content and skills, on testing and compliance, trust can be lost, unintentionally.

A staple of curriculum and teaching academic subjects has for decades been another pyramid, but in the past 15 years, this other pyramid has been rolled out anew by edugurus, curriculum consultants, academics and school leaders. This other pyramid is called Bloom’s Taxonomy. The problem is, children cannot access the skills on Bloom’s hierarchy until they have their needs on Maslow’s met first.

Bloom

In 1956 an educational psychologist at The University of Chicago, named Benjamin Bloom lead the development of a classification system for educational objectives. This was part of his strategy for teaching the mastery of various academic subjects. At the heart of this classification system was a scheme that taxonomized different domains in a person, but the one domain that describes types of thinking, the cognitive domain, like remembering, applying skills and analyzing concepts has come to eclipse the other two domains. Those other two domains are the affective domain and the psychomotor domain. Eventually, the skills in the cognitive domain were shaped into a pyramid like Maslow’s. Today Bloom’s Taxonomy (minus the affective and psychomotor domains) is ubiquitous in K-12 curriculum work.

The affective domain is related to the individual’s emotions. This is the basis for SEL. The psychomotor domain concerns itself with the relationship between cognitive behavior and physical activity. Although the goal of taxonomies is to separate the domains from one another so we can understand human behavior through analytical thought, especially those aspects that affect learning, they are NOT inherently separate. Quite the opposite, actually. They are fully integrated within each of us. And, we must not take them as distinct from one another in our understanding of our students.

It is precisely the denial of the affective and psychomotor domains in service of academic outcomes, through our hyper-attention on the cognitive domain over the past few decades that has led educators more recently to see the need for SEL and advocate for it, even on a political level.

Outcome-obsessed policymakers, politicians, captains of industry, academics and school administrators have finally begun to accept that without taking care of our students’ affective and psychomotor domains as well, without taking care of our students’ most basic needs, academic outcomes plateau and the consequences for denying their deficiency needs, is often destructive.

What exactly is Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Bloom’s taxonomy is a hierarchical epistemology that classifies human thinking so that educational objectives can be considered carefully and categorized. Of the three taxonomies: cognitive, affective and psychomotor, the cognitive domain’s paradigm has gotten the most attention from traditional educators, and it is frequently used in curriculum work to outline learning objectives, assessments and activities.

The deeper education policy has focused on academic outcomes (i.e. standards based curriculum, high-stakes-testing and system evaluation, based on test scores) the farther away we as teachers have strayed from the other two domains and from Maslow’s theory about what brings students’ attention to accomplishing those objectives in the first place. A recent and significant increase in mental illness, emotional disorders, addiction and antisocial behavior among adolescents may or may not be directly related to education systems’ moving away from students’ emotional needs, but SEL activists, like SEL4US, argue that it is likely a contributing factor, and they advocate for a return to teaching SEL, and policies are quickly being developed, legislation is being passed and investments are being made toward this end, but the injection of new SEL standards is not the teaching of SEL. Time and space need to be made for SEL, but policymakers have not yet allocated this time and this space, because they resist any compromise of the high standards they set for school achievement and for high levels of performance on high stakes test scores.

There is no indication that policymakers will give ground to teaching SEL at the expense of academic standards. So, instead they heap the SEL standards atop all the other initiatives they push on schools, cheapening them all the while.

Why Maslow’s Hierarch of Needs must be considered BEFORE Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Popular culture has now latched onto the idea of MASLOW over BLOOM, and that is not wrong.

Afterall, people (remember children are people) do not do anything unless they think that:

A. It’s worth their investment of time. Theories of motivation.

B. They have a reasonable chance of being successful. Self-Efficacy Theory.

C. Their needs for survival are met first. The Theory of Needs.

D. They want whatever doing it brings them. Self-interest.

Perhaps some children, even adults, will perform tasks to comply with force, but compliance is not a sustainable model for teaching and learning.

Some Examples

If a child is hungry, tired or cold, he or she will not be able to perform even the easiest academic tasks. If he or she is scared (of being physically or emotionally harmed) learning how to read, do math or to organize ideas and thoughts will be nearly impossible. The part of the brain that dominates all of us during a moment when we perceive threat is the amygdala. This is often called the survival brain. It’s one of the oldest parts of the brain. The amygdala controls our ability to detect and assess threat, to fight, to run away, escape and to hide from danger.

This is not the part of the brain that remembers ideas, conceptualizes theories and understands nuance. The amygdala doesn’t reflect. It reacts. This is why a sense of safety is critical to a child’s ability to learn.

If one of your students feels like an outsider, like he or she does not belong in your class, does not feel visible, acknowledged or feel important to you and the other students, his or her needs for respect are not being met, and he or she will not likely be able to comprehend complex text, apply ideas or skills, analyze data or create theses, hypotheses or theories. Thus, Maslow must come first. Otherwise, planning, teaching and assessing based on objectives from Bloom’s Taxonomy will not only be wasted, but will frustrate both you and your students.

How do we put Maslow first?

Start by building community, get to know your students’ names, their personalities and their lives and foster trust. This may require you to become vulnerable, to admit to your students that you are not perfect, and to care about them, care for them — all while maintaining boundaries that keep you and your students safe from yourselves, one another and the outside world. Greet each student at the door at the beginning of class, every day. Ask them about themselves. Listen to what they tell you. Be curious about them, and expect them to be virtuous, brilliant and hard-working, even when they seem like they may never be any of those things. See your students. And let the be seen.

A Final Thought

Think of the most creative and productive person you know. Does that person have a strong self-esteem? Probably. Does he or she feel a sense of belonging? Most likely. Does that person live in fear? I doubt it.

If we want our students to reach the top of Bloom’s mountain, we have to climb Mt. Maslow with them, first. Otherwise the trek up Bloom’s is not only a waste of time and energy but a sisyphean task.