The EQ Intervention

Shaping a Self-Aware Generation Through Social and Emotional Learning

Adam Saenz

• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781626346789
• eBook ISBN:
  9781626346796
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Emotional intelligence in the classroom matters more now than ever.

Raising the bar for EQ in education. Written by Dr. Adam Saenz, a licensed psychologist with years of experience working within school districts, The EQ Intervention is an accessible, deep-dive exploration into the critical value of practicing Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) skills in your role as an educator, including stopping violence in schools before it ever starts.

Better mental health on campus. Designed as a practical guide for educators and administrators, The EQ Intervention includes a research-backed tool called the Educator Assessment of Social and Emotional Learning (EASEL). Using this assessment, measure your own SEL skills or those of your faculty to identify where you can adjust conflict resolution practices in the classroom for a healthier, safer, more self-aware campus.

The lessons and tools in this book can help educators tothoughtfully address points of conflict among students, between students and teachers, and between teachers and school administration. The EQ Intervention includes careful analysis of common issues facing educators in the classroom, such as:

* Students disrupting class

* Students facing turbulence or instability at home

* Intervening in personal conflicts between students

* Discussing potential learning disabilities or behavioral issues with parents

* Faculty and administrators with difficult or uncooperative working styles

CHAPTER 1

Why Social and
Emotional Learning?

Success in school admits of things other than intelligence;
to succeed in his studies, one must have qualities which
depend on attention, will, and character.

—Alfred Binet, creator of the first IQ test

Emotional intelligence could save your life. Literally. Consider the case of former United States Army General James Lee Dozier, who graduated from West Point Academy in 1956. Following his tour of duty in Vietnam, General Dozier was serving as the Chief of Staff at a NATO land force headquarters in Verona, Italy, in 1981.

At approximately 6 p.m. on December 17, four men posing as plumbers entered his apartment in Verona and overpowered him. He initially resisted, but then opted for compliance the moment he saw his wife being held at gunpoint. His captors left his wife handcuffed to a table in the apartment, but they covered his head with a pillowcase, stuffed him into a cardboard refrigerator box, and proceeded to disorient him while in transport to the designated holding-place, an apartment ninety kilometers away in Padua.

What followed were forty-two days of torture—a controlled, sustained explosion of traumatic stress. General Dozier was confined to a windowless room, where he was chained to a steel cot that was under the constant glare of an electric light bulb. He was forced to listen to a continuous stream of loud music through headphones that were taped to his head. He experienced temporal loss of time, grossly disrupted circadian sleep rhythms, and permanent hearing damage.

His captors, he would soon learn, were members of the Red Brigades, a left-wing terrorist organization who had grown angry at the good diplomatic relations between the United States and Italy. They targeted General Dozier because of his high-profile military standing in the country and his association with NATO. While the Red Brigades issued international communications acknowledging that General Dozier was in their captivity, they never established terms for his release. Instead, their communication consisted of the disgruntled rants of a terrorist organization expressing its dissatisfaction with the political state of world affairs. Given the absence of terms for General Dozier’s release, most involved presumed that the Red Brigades had no intention of releasing him; they were simply holding him hostage to gain international attention and would kill him when that attention waned.

Let’s analyze the details of General Dozier’s case through the lens of emotional intelligence (or, social and emotional learning—SEL—as we like to refer to it in schools), as his case offers a textbook illustration of the value of well-implemented SEL. First, the instant General Dozier saw his wife’s life at risk, he knew he would have to manage his thoughts and feelings for both of their safety. That behavioral protocol—identifying and managing his intense emotions—continued through his captivity. These are components one and two of SEL: self-awareness and self-regulation.

Having shown the capacity to identify and regulate his emotions, General Dozier knew that he would first have to understand his captors if there was any chance he could influence them. He listened to their nuanced use of language, their references to the media, and he looked for patterns in their behavior as they interacted with him and each other. One guard seemed more inclined to discuss soccer. Two leaders always ate with their guns on the table. Their collective mood elevated when they saw that they were referenced in national media, and they became irritable when they were not mentioned for time periods greater than four days. This is component three of SEL: social awareness, or empathy.

Finally, General Dozier kept an extremely consistent daily routine within the confines of his captivity to ease his captors’ anxiety; his schedule made him very predictable (and, therefore, safer) to his captors. He always made a point to speak calmly and respectfully, without antagonizing his captors in any way. He talked about non-political topics, and he regularly expressed concern about his wife, whom they had left bound and chained in their apartment. He knew he was making progress building a relational connection when they honored his request to lower the music’s volume in his headphones and agreed to play classical rather than rock music. This is component four of SEL: relationship skills.

In the end, because he was self-aware and self-regulated his emotions, and because he was socially aware and used effective relational skills, General Dozier was able to act adaptively when his rescuers arrived. Even though a gun was pointed to his head when Italian police entered the apartment, not a single shot was fired by anyone. General Dozier knew to remain calm and to stay low during the ninety seconds of chaos in which his captors were overwhelmed by the rescue force. This is component five of SEL: responsible decision-making.

“It’s just like combat,” he would later say. “You do the best you can in the moment rather than worrying about what might happen.”

Ultimately, it was not General Dozier’s command of the many troops under his leadership that saved his life, but his command of himself. Dozier would go on to complete a successful military career, being awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star, and the Purple Heart, among other highly prestigious decorations.

Maybe the case of General Dozier seems too far removed from your day-to-day role as an educator for your buy-in. You might be wondering, “Great. But what does this discussion have to do with the lesson plans I haven’t yet prepared for tomorrow and the ever-increasing scope of what’s being asked of me as an educator?” Fair enough. I would invite you, then, to consider this second and final case involving the educator Jason Seaman. While the details of Jason Seaman’s case are different than General Dozier’s (the sustained length of the trauma, in particular), both cases illustrate the relationship between stress and emotional intelligence.

Mr. Seaman, a twenty-nine-year-old science teacher at Indiana’s West Noblesville Middle School and former defensive lineman for Southern Illinois University, entered his classroom on May 25, 2018, starting his day off like any other. His students would take what would be their final science test of the school year.

I can’t say for sure, but I’m willing to bet that Mr. Seaman had engaged his students or colleagues in discussion about the shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, that left thirteen dead and ten injured just a week before. I know that 130 miles to the northeast of Santa Fe, we in Bryan/College Station, Texas, were still processing the event and at various stages of grieving.

As Mr. Seaman’s students took their test that morning, one student asked to be excused from class. He probably just requested a restroom break, but the details aren’t clear. What we do know is that moments later, that student returned to the classroom armed with .22 and .45 caliber handguns and immediately opened fire.

“Mr. Seaman started running at him,” a student witness reported. “He tackled him to the ground. We were all hiding in the back of the classroom behind some desks, and then Mr. Seaman was yelling to call 911, to get out of the building as fast as we could, so we ran out.”

Mr. Seaman’s actions were immediate and decisive, but the damage was done. Before Mr. Seaman could even reach the shooter, seven rounds struck a female student in the face, neck, hands, and chest. As he rushed the student, Mr. Seaman was shot three times, once in the abdomen, once in the hip, and once in the forearm. He was able to disarm and detain the student until the school resource officer arrived to assist only moments after the initial shots were fired. Mr. Seaman was taken by ambulance to the Indiana University Hospital, where he made a full recovery. The wounded female student was also hospitalized in critical condition, yet she was expected to recover after having sustained collapsed lungs, a broken jaw, and significant nerve damage.

As we did with General Dozier’s case, let’s study the details of Mr. Seaman’s case in the context of SEL. It’s important for us to remember, though, that while General Dozier had forty-two days to fine-tune his SEL skill set as his traumatic stress evolved, Mr. Seaman’s experience was an acute, immediate blast of terror in which he had just a handful of seconds to act. With Mr. Seaman’s case, we’ll start at the end of the trauma and work our way back toward the beginning to find the SEL lesson.

We know that Mr. Seaman demonstrated responsible decision-making (SEL component five), as evidenced by the fact that he subdued and contained the shooter. Protecting children’s lives and maintaining safety always represents sound and responsible decision-making. But given the moment’s urgency, it’s highly unlikely that Mr. Seaman’s navigation through the first four SEL components was a conscious process: “Because I feel angry and afraid that a student is shooting (self-awareness), I’ll control that emotion with two deep, strong breaths (self-regulation); meanwhile, it is likely that the shooter feels anger, given the weapons in his hands (social awareness/empathy), and since I don’t have the liberty of talking to him about his anger, I will intervene physically (responsible decision-making).”

Nope, not likely. Rather, the heart of our SEL lesson from Mr. Seaman is found in his words during a subsequent television interview: “I care deeply about my students and their well-being,” he noted to the reporter. “That’s why I did what I did that day.”

My goodness. That is powerful.

What we learn from Mr. Seaman is that when we don’t have the luxury of time to consciously engage our SEL skills, our core-level beliefs—our deepest values, fears, biases, and prejudices—drive our behavior automatically. Fortunately for the students in Mr. Seaman’s classroom that day, his core-level belief was that his students mattered above all, and it was that foundational belief that resulted in his automatic action to risk his life to save his students’ lives.

So, there you have it, without hyperbole: The case of General Dozier illustrates that well-developed SEL could save your life, and the case of Mr. Seaman illustrates that our actions are driven by deeply embedded value systems and/or biases. SEL is relevant whether you are a United States General on an overseas deployment or a seventh-grade middle school teacher administering a final exam.

The Broad Application of SEL:
Life Givers Versus Life Suckers

While General Dozier and Mr. Seaman displayed a life-saving understanding and implementation of SEL, you might be wondering what role SEL plays in your professional, as well as your personal life. Let us not embrace the false assumption that SEL is only about being prepared for crises such as those just presented. Far from it. We’ll explore the relationship between aggression, violence, and SEL in Chapter 7, but this book is not centrally about preparing ourselves to deal with active school shooters.

That kind of preparation, sadly, is more urgent now than it has ever been, but SEL has so much more to offer us. SEL is essential to our capacity to live adaptively in our daily lives—days that don’t involve hostage situations or active shooters. The classroom teacher dealing with postpartum depression as she returns to work from maternity leave? Exercise in SEL. The angry parent who uses social media to air his misinformed conclusions of you? Exercise in SEL. Your passive-aggressive neighbor who still leaves his garbage cans on your driveway even after you’ve politely asked twice that he not do so? Exercise in SEL. Your spouse, who twenty-three years later still doesn’t know the correct direction to mount the toilet paper roll? Exercise in SEL.

The list could go on, even down to each moment-to-moment interaction we have with any other human being who, in whatever way and for whatever reason, evokes within us a potentially conflict-producing emotion. In every case, the successful return to mental well-being is dependent on our ability to know and regulate ourselves, and to understand and interact with others.

“The successful return to mental well-being is dependent on our ability to know and regulate ourselves, and to understand and interact with others.”

I was in my early thirties when I finished my doctoral degree and started working as a school psychologist. It was the early 2000s, and I was jumping into the world of education eager to make a difference but also feeling overwhelmed by my lack of experience in school systems. Stress, I was learning, is not only a feeling our bodies produce when we wonder whether we can deal effectively with a new situation, but also an energy that mobilizes us to respond. To cope with my stress, I searched for mentorship from professionals in the district who had a long history of service in the schools. I hoped they could speak from their years of experience to give me guidance, shortcuts, or anything else that offered me hope that I might grow older well and live to tell about it. I never would have predicted what that search revealed: two groups of near-retirees, distributed neatly into two categories. Group One: Life Givers, and Group Two: Life Suckers.

Fortunately, the Life Givers were by far the bigger group. They were approaching their retirement with mixed degrees of sadness and excitement, but also with a deep sense of having run the race well. Some had plans for significant life changes, and others said they would like to stick around in any capacity possible since they couldn’t imagine a life apart from students. As seasoned veterans, they were filled with joy about the immeasurable investment they had made in countless individuals, young and not-so-young, over the course of their careers. They often reminisced, with a smile and distant look in their eye, as they shared with me (ever so generously) the lessons they had learned along the way.

In contrast, the Life Suckers were the much smaller group. Unlike the Life Givers, the Life Suckers were bitter and cynical, and they seemed to be approaching their retirement as a get-out-of-jail-free c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1: Why Social and Emotional Learning?
• CHAPTER 2: How Can We Know Ourselves?
• CHAPTER 3: How Can We Regulate Ourselves?
• CHAPTER 4: How Can We Know Others?
• CHAPTER 5: How Can We Engage With Others?
• CHAPTER 6: What Is the EQ-uipped Classroom?
• CHAPTER 7: Conclusion: If It Is to Be, It Is Up to Me
• Appendix: The EASEL Sample Report
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author