Social Emotional Learning, Leadership and Academics
Educators are overwhelmed, as are public schools in general. Schools are increasingly asked to serve in the role of in loco parentis. From monitoring inoculations, to pre and post school care, to nutrition, sex education, cyber bullying, homelessness; the list grows longer every year. The classroom educators’ tenure is becoming increasingly linked to student performance and standardized testing, even though the assessments are not designed to measure instructional effectiveness. Yet classroom standardized testing results are still linked to teacher performance. There are more observations often with poor inter-rater reliability and student growth objectives to attend to. So it is no wonder that when asked to “teach” social emotional learning there is overt and covert resistance.
But what if teaching personal responsibility, empathy, and compassion for others added demonstrable value to academic achievement? What if equipping students to take responsibility for self-regulation and for each other reduced distracting and off task behavior? What if students were better equipped to set academic goals and define a path to genuine achievement? What if the data demonstrated that teaching students to understand and regulate their affective lives and to give voice to their concerns accelerated progress in content areas? What if this was also true for the development of more effective abstract reasoning skills?
The short answer is that social-emotional learning and the Full Value process supports all of these areas when implemented with fidelity and systemically. Contrary to the stereotypical beliefs that social-emotional learning is just another time waster in an already oversubscribed day, in fact it is foundational to increasing the capacity to more effectively learn. Let’s look at why.
A brain that can’t feel can’t make up its mind
In an article entitled “Feeling our Way to Decision” (Jonah Leher, 2009) we learn about Elliot. Elliot was high functioning man with a complicated job and a family. He was successful by every measure until surgery in the pre-frontal area of the brain compromised his ability to experience affect. His lack of emotional responsiveness was confirmed by exposing Elliot to stimulating images that should have produced sweat from glands in the palms. No response was noted. Elliot’s IQ remained in the top 3 percent but now he was unable to deploy it. As an outcome of this disconnect Elliot lost his job, divorced, and moved in with his parents. As the author notes:
This was an unexpected discovery. At the time, neuroscience assumed that human emotions were irrational. A person without emotions should therefore make better decisions. His cognition should be uncorrupted. The charioteer should have complete control. To Damasio, Elliot's pathology suggested emotions are a crucial part of decision-making. Cut off from our feelings, the most banal decisions become impossible. A brain that can't feel can't make up its mind.
The seat of this emotional control seems to reside in the orbital-frontal cortex. Damage to this area prevents emotions from filtering a flood of excessive cognitions that would otherwise paralyze decision-making. The author indicates:
The crucial importance of our emotions - the fact that we can't make decisions without them - contradicts the conventional view of human nature, with its ancient philosophical roots. For most of the 20th century, the ideal of rationality was supported by scientific descriptions of human anatomy.
We Feel – Therefore We Learn
In a paper titled “We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education”* (Immordino-Yang, M.L. & Damasio, A.) the authors posit that “emotion-related processes are required for skills and knowledge to be transferred from the structured school environment to real-world decision making because they provide anemotional rudderto guide judgment and action.”
The authors nest their hypotheses in brain based research via the examination of the responses of brain injured subjects in the pre-frontal area and how that causesdisconnect between what is learned and how the learning is used. Damage to the pre-frontal area, while not compromising hard skills(such as the ability to calculate, reason, and read), cause people to begin to make decisions antithetical to the purposes of their work.
These patients’ ability to make advantageous decisions became compromised in ways that it had not been before. In fact, there was a complete separation between the period that anteceded the onset of the lesion, when these patients had been upstanding, reliable, and foresightful citizens, and the period thereafter, when they would make decisions that were often disadvantageous to themselves and their families. They would not perform adequately in their jobs, in spite of having the required skills; they would make poor business deals in spite of knowing the risks involved; they would lose their savings and choose the wrong partners in all sorts of relationships.
The more traditional explanation would be that those affected have lost the capacity for logical-rational thought. Butassessment indicated that there was no loss of IQ and patients could convey the appropriate rules of behavior associated with their work but were incapable of behaving appropriately or responding to or learning from the emotional feedback in their environment. As noted, their “emotional rudder” was compromised.
These findings have significant implications for the importance of social-emotional learning that extends well beyond the importance of creating and maintaining a safe and civil society. The essential point is that with the absence of affect, cognitive functioning becomes compromised; that affect is fundamental to the decision-making and problem solving process in the cognitive domains. The author’s provide a terrific visual image when describing the importance of emotions to cognition:
…emotions are not just messy toddlers in a china shop, running around breaking and obscuring delicate cognitive glassware. Instead, they are more like the shelves underlying the glassware; without them cognition has less support.
However we know that affect that is unregulated can be destructive. The fight/flight response is an example of the primitive displays of affect that in times past may have protected us from Saber Tooth Tigers but now serve to compromise relationships between people. Un-modulated affect works at cross-purposes to the implementation of ideas, which requires compromise, openness, and empathy. Unregulated primitive affect manifests in behaviors that can be emotionally and physically dangerous.
It has long been accepted that there are different components of intelligence that transcend the traditionally measured areas of the Intelligence Quotient (IQ). These assessments focus on Verbal subscales that assess for verbal comprehension and working memory and Performance Scales that assess for perceptual organization and process speed. IQ is typically used as a predictor of academic success.
Interestingly while not outlined in the manual a vast body of work has been focused on using these same IQ scales as a projective tool in order to assess for the emotions that are embedded in responses. There can be clearly pathological responses that questions can elicit. For example, when asked what to do with a stamped and addressed letter found on the street a normal response would be to mail it. A more sociopathic response would be to open the letter, read it, then throw it in the trash. When asked what to do when smelling smoke or seeing fire in a movie theatre an affectively healthy response would be to quietly tell the manager, more pathological would be to stand up and yell “fire”, then run for the exit.
Given the purely cerebral structure of the test it is interesting that there is such a tremendous body of work and focus on the affective components of the assessment.
Daniel Goleman’s (Goleman,1995) contribution of emotional intelligence (EQ) has broadened the view of intelligence as it applies to human capacities. Goleman postulates five areas that encompass EQ including self-awareness of your emotions, managing your own emotions, self-motivation, awareness and understanding of the emotions of people around you, and managing relationships.
He points to an emerging body of rigorous evidence that supports the strong connection between embedding SEL programs in schools and the concomitant rise in academic performance. Goleman debunks the antiquated notion that academic learning has nothing to do with the social and emotional environment surrounding students. He cites current research in the neurosciences.
The emotional centers of the brain are intricately interwoven with the neurocortical areas involved in cognitive learning. When a child trying to learn is caught up in a distressing emotion, the centers for learning are temporarily hampered. The child’s attention becomes preoccupied with whatever may be the source of the trouble. Because attention is itself a limited capacity, the child has that much less ability to hear, understand, or remember what a teacher or a book is saying. In short, there is a direct link between emotions and learning
He also points to the crucial importance of weaving SEL into the fabric of the school culture and climate:
As a William T. Grant Foundation study has revealed, the active ingredients in the programs that worked were largely the same, no matter their ostensible target problem. The best SEL programs were implemented throughout each year of schooling. They shaped the entire school climate, and they used developmentally appropriate lessons. They also taught children specific social-emotional skills like self-awareness, self-management, empathy, perspective taking, and cooperation. In short, they were lessons in emotional intelligence.
The two summative points to be made is that (1) affective regulation can and must be taught in order to effectively use it in the service of cognition and behavior and that (2) without access to modulated affective functioning, thinking and acting can become significantly compromised.
The Affect-Behavior-Cognition (ABC Triangle) captures the essence of this conclusion. In the experiential learning process it is the affect that undergirds and integrates the outcomes of thought and behavior.
As Full Value work is experiential. Students do things together to provoke affect and associated thoughts and behavior. This sets it apart from other social-emotional learning SEL programs,which reside almost solely in the cognitive domain. It isalso critical important to note that emotions are embodied in our system. Doing thinks together might be the day-to-day work of learning in the classroom. Depending on their developmental age students work in groups, take turns, present information either individually or as teams, have snack time, line up and go to recess, eat lunch together, etc. These events can all be viewed through the lens of “activities” which have emotions and associated cognitions and behaviors affiliated with them. Full Value uses these activities as opportunities for social-emotional learning. Doing things together, as noted in this text, can also involve proscribed activities that teach elements of Full Value. And finally, doing things together (also noted in this text) can mean participating in activity-based lessons focused on a particular content area.
In cognitive programs studentsmaywatch videos with interactional scenarios and then are asked to describe what is happening (e.g. bullying, put downs, marginalization) and then provide alternate behavioral solutions for the video actors. Other programmatic strategies promote student engagement in guided discussions, attendance at inspirational assemblies, or utilizing a more didactic instructional approach. This, for example, could include observing a behavior (such as put downs), then offered a teacher definition, asked to add their own descriptors, view media to identify examples, then prompted to volunteer some of their own feelings and rate them on a scale of emotional severity.
This type of approach keeps students at an emotional arms length from experiencing the impact of put downs while in the same instance asked to expose vulnerabilities when there is no group process in place to create an emotionally safe and caring environment within which to self disclose.
There may also be a goal setting process in place to reduce incidents of put downs or other anti social behaviors. Progress may be charted and discussed. While the goalsmay be worthy, how is the goal setting operationalized for success? Where is the connection to the emotions that drive the behavior? What tools are students provided to replace anti social with pro social behaviors? How are students taught to not only self regulate but to hold others accountable for their behavior.
While many of these programs evidence some measurable change in how students treat each other, it is our belief that the Full Value experiential model provides a much more powerful and sustainable integration of the core social-emotional competences that are common to many character education programs.
The intention of Full Value, as illustrated in the ABC Triangle, is to connect affective experience to cognitions and to discuss associated behaviors. There is always the circling back to the feelings that were evoked by the experience. Via this process new learning becomes more thoroughly integrated as the line drawn from affect, to behavior, to cognition, solidifies connections.
Living within the guidelines of behavioral norms means dealing with the complex areas of relationships and feelings. It is a highly conceptual process. The question then becomes aside from the benefits of teaching, modeling, and living a process that engages students in learning about self-regulation and empathy, compassion and kindness, are there other benefits that might accrue? As noted, an emerging body of literature would suggest that emotional awareness and intelligence are intrinsically linked to enhanced mastery of academic content areas, and more effective functioning in family, work, and community settings.
The more we can create and sustain a culture and climate that encourages the development of affective sophistication, the more likely there will be an effective transference to how we think and behave, and, further, to how we apply this understanding to all content areas from social science, to literature, to the applied sciences, and to the living of our lives.
The Full Value Process and Abstract Metaphorical Reasoning
We have provided an overview of the essential role that affect serves in energizing the cognitive process. Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy, we know that the cognitive process is scaffolded, ranging from simple recall of facts to the analysis and synthesis of complex systems. The activity based methodology that is at the core of teaching, practicing and implementing Full Value draws upon a number of methods that require students to engage in highly conceptual tasks in order to grow, maintain, and strengthen their Full Value Communities.
For example, the co-creation of behavioral norms in the form of a Full Value Agreement requires significant conceptual reasoning. Students must first understand (as their developmental level allows) the six core behavioral norms and how they can be set into motion. A kindergarten student might identify the behaviors of sitting quietly while a peer speaks, or listening to directions in the lunchroom as “Be Here” behaviors. A high school student might list such behaviors as coming to class prepared, participating in discussions, taking notes during a lecture, or being attentive to a friend’s needs as “Be Here” behaviors. The process of understanding the core behavioral norms and associated behaviors is a cognitive process (that as noted is rooted in adaptive emotional functioning) not relegated to understanding facts.
A second grade class in the Kinnelon Public Schools agreed upon the following behavioral norms to aspire to for their Full Value agreement in the Be Here area: Listen, try hard, share supplies, keep friends company, learn. Beyond determining what each Full Value behavior norm looks like when practiced, students must also agree on what distractors were operating in their lives that might compromise their effectiveness. The same secondgrade class came up with the following distractors: being negative, shouting out, name calling, lying, talking over the speaker, bragging, running, pushing, stealing, making annoying noises. It is critical to stress that these were not teacher imposed behavioral characteristics. They came from students and, further, the group negotiated the behavioral norms and distractors that were also included in the classroom Full Value agreement. Some items were close to being duplicates and others were not deemed important via a consensus building process facilitated by the teacher as part of the creation of the document.
In co-creating this agreement students needed to first identify a representation for their work that would reflect the goals of the classroom. In this instance students decided upon a road symbolizinga forward moving journey. Distractors where reframed as litter along the side ofthe road that needed to be picked up and attended to. Students then needed to identify behavioral norms of importance to them as individuals. They thennegotiated a consensus with 22 classmates as to which norms would be included on their road. This winnowing process was complex. Students then identified specific behaviors (the litter) that would compromise their practicing of these norms. All of this falls under the category of metaphorical abstract reasoning.
For the purposes of our use of the term “metaphor”we identify this as “Metaphorical Activity Structures.” We believe that many significant experiences are metaphorical or representative in our lives either through natural inferences that students find for themselves through just living, and/or through connections that a teacher makes in framing theexperience. We have found that there are metaphorical activity structures unique to experiential learning. For example, “Calling Group” always takes place in a circle. Circles put everyone on an equal footing. There is no place to hide, eye contact can be made with everyone, and there is the potential for all to be heard. The structure naturalistically eliminates the hierarchy found in rows of student facing the white board with the teacher at the helm.
Individualizing is another important metaphorical activity structure. Individuals are both part of a group and also singular contributors. In the classroom they set goals for themselves and participate in the larger landscape of group goals. The group is also an experiential archetype. The group may be representative of family, community, or a team (Exploring Islands of Healing, pgs. 30, 174, 148).
The second graders’choice of a highway with Full Value cars on a journey passing by detritus on the side of the road is rich in abstract metaphorical thinking. The students’ agreement helps them to make linguistic, visual, and experiential connections. As noted, there is a journeying element to their representation that supports the construct that the class will be moving forward together, carrying their aspirations and distractors along for the ride. The association of trash along the side of the road (which we have all experienced) offers a powerful reminder of the behaviors needing to be attended to, examined, processed, and cleaned up.