Social-Emotional Learning Starts with Adults

“Out of control” , by Erik Pevernagie, oil on canvas

A whole-school approach to [Social-Emotional Learning] means that all the adults in the building — not just teachers and principals, but lunchroom monitors, bus drivers, librarians, and specialists — have to be invested and on the same page with SEL. In their own interactions, as well as in their work with students, adults should model the type of behavior they want their students to exhibit . . .

So while regular professional development can teach adults the nuts and bolts of integrating SEL into the school day, one more step is crucial to a successful program: Ensuring that adults develop their own social-emotional capacities. “Our approach has shifted towards supporting the adults’ own social emotional needs, addressing the stressors they may be experiencing as professionals in education.

—Rebecca Bailey, as reported by Leah Shafer, “What makes SEL work?” on Usable Knowledge

More on the need for adults to have the capacity for modeling self-control: Learning and Teaching Self-Control

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Provide Scaffolding, Not Lowered Expectations, for Students with Disabilities

What can be done from a child’s earliest educational experience, either at home or at school, to promote what’s possible for all children?

One is people not assuming that disability means inability to access education. We see this in national studies, that people are very, very quick to modify curriculum for kids and not as quick to provide accommodations. It should be the other way around. It should be accommodate first, and modification should only be done if the child is not intellectually able to handle the content due to an intellectual disability. And, even with many kids with intellectual disabilities, modification is not necessarily required, depending upon the course. Modification of curriculum should be a suspect practice, but it starts with attitude. It starts with the notion that, from the beginning, many people look at kids like Daniel and they assume he’s incapable because he’s got so much neurological stuff going on, because that’s the nature of cerebral palsy. He couldn’t speak for many years. He speaks quite well now because he’s been given good speech therapy. In Daniel’s case, he was very fortunate as a preschooler to have a teacher who recognized his intellectual capability, even though he couldn’t speak. He also had supportive parents. Daniel’s case is one where there were many adults in his life that made a big difference.

—Interview with Harvard Professor Thomas Hehir on Usable Knowledge

Our Choices are Constrained by Context

“A lot of education policy is focused on what we can do to get people to make better choices — how we can spur them to be more gritty, or how we can incentivize them. But all the choices people make — even if they’re properly incentivized, even if they’re extra gritty — are constrained in some way by context. It turns out that when you look at differences across individuals, what best explains the variation is context. People in one context tend to think and do things a certain way, and very differently than people in another context.”

—Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell, as quoted in an article by Bari Walsh, “Principals and Problem-Solving: How Context and Interpretation Shape Decisions for Educational Leaders” on Usable Knowledge