Nurturing Students' Character

Everyday Teaching Activities for Social-Emotional Learning

Jeffrey S. Kress, Maurice J. Elias

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429576232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Nurturing Students' Character is an easy-to-use guide to incorporating social-emotional and character development (SECD) into your teaching practice. The links are clear—elementary and middle school students have better odds of academic success if you nurture their social and emotional skills. Drawing on broad field experience and the latest research, this book offers intuitive techniques for infusing your everyday teaching and classroom management with SECD opportunities. With topics ranging from self-regulation and problem solving to peer communication and empathy, these concrete strategies, practical worksheets, and self-reflective activities will help you foster a positive classroom culture.

Chapter 1

Introduction

What textbook will I use for science?

I don’t think the science textbook the school uses does a good job explaining some of the topics … what supplemental resources will I use, and how often will I use them?

What tone do I set at the start of my class? Do I really not smile until Thanksgiving?

What do I wear on the day my principal is observing my class?

A teacher’s day is full of choices. Sometimes these choices are empowering, allowing a teacher to shape her work as she desires. Some choices, however, can have the opposite effect. The classic “approach-approach conflict,” for example, leaves us with a sense that in deciding among two worthy options we are forced to give up something we really want. This ice cream tastes great … but maybe I should have ordered the chocolate cake. In these situations, we are occasionally pleasantly surprised to hear that we are actually facing a false choice; what we saw as an either-or situation is really “both-and.” Chocolate cake with a scoop of ice cream on top, anyone!?!?

In our decades working in schools of all types, we have met many educators who share their concerns about a choice much weightier than that of ice-cream flavors: Given the limits of time and resources, should I focus on addressing academic content or on boosting students’ social, emotional, and character development (SECD)? These educators recognize the need to scaffold students’ growth in the intra- and inter-personal realms and acknowledge the impact they can have on how students interact with others, understand and manage their emotional experiences, solve problems and make healthy decisions that contribute to a caring community. At the same time, a persistent question inhibits their full engagement with this element of their work: Will I need to choose between focusing on academics and addressing issues of caring, community and character? And often, given this choice, educators choose academics.

We are not critiquing that choice—we know that there is a lot riding on academic achievement, for students and teachers alike.

Our solution does not involve cloning educators so they can get more done at once (though there are times that we would appreciate this ourselves!). Rather, existing curriculum content, instructional methods, and classroom management approaches provide ample opportunity for promoting social, emotional, and character growth. So, “yes” to doing two things simultaneously, but “no” to cloning (sorry!).

•The literature students read contains rich descriptions of relationships.

•The sentences and stories students write include descriptions of emotional states.

•The experimentation done in science involves planning and problem solving.

•The group work students do in math class requires collaboration and communication.

•The historical events students learn about involve conflicts and their consequences affecting many individuals and groups of people.

Educators have the raw material they need to simultaneously address academic content and SECD. Success, however, depends on shaping these materials into a cohesive whole—being proactive and persistent in using curricular content and instructional and class management approaches to promote positive development. Not only is this a matter of efficiency, it also is consistent with best practice in promoting social, emotional, and character growth. This book describes field-tested, teacher-and-school-validated approaches to creating classrooms and schools in which there is no need to choose between academics and SECD.

An Evolving Idea

We use the term SECD broadly, to encompass an array of approaches or movements, such as Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), character and moral education, whole child education, and positive youth development, as well as more targeted approaches like bully/violence prevention and conflict resolution. These approaches, and others, embrace the notion of education as a vehicle for growth in our relationships with others, how we understand and manage our emotions, and how we express our emotions to others. Since the time of Plato, and certainly encompassing Dewey, education has been viewed as influencing the kind of person one will become, not simply what one knows. Both Plato and Dewey emphasized the concept of education for citizenship and learning virtues, “the good,” and other attitudes that “may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned” (Dewey, 1938, p. 48).

James Comer (1980) pioneered a developmental and psychosocial perspective to thinking about students and learning, incorporating how school and community context also served as powerful influences. Comer’s School Development Project was a catalyst for many current approaches, spurred on by positive outcomes demonstrated. Daniel Goleman’s (1995) international best-selling Emotional Intelligence provided a strong impetus for this work, with the founding of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, www.CASEL.org) and the Character Education Partnership (www.character.org), representing the two main approaches to fostering inter- and intra-personal development in schools, following closely thereafter (“Social and Emotional Learning: A short history,” 2011).

SEL’s particular evolution can be traced from a social learning and cognitive-behavioral orientation (Elias, Kranzler, Parker, Kash, & Weissberg, 2014), focusing on developing skills (e.g., self-awareness, social-awareness, self-management, relationship skills, and responsible decision making). Character education emphasized the development of values or building a supportive school climate. Now, an “inexorable and long overdue” (Elias et al., 2014, p. 250) convergence of these two approaches is taking shape as an “SEL 2.0,” sometimes also referred to as Social-Emotional and Character Development (SECD). Social and emotional skills “as a set of basic interpersonal competencies, can be used for good or ill; but to be used for good, they must be mastered well—Responsibility, Respect, Honesty, and other desirable aspects of character all require sound [social and emotional learning] competencies” (Elias et al., 2014, p. 261). Recommended practices associated with these two approaches also are converging (Novick, Kress, & Elias, 2002).

Noteworthy is the support of current neuroscience research about the centrality and inextricable connections of emotions and cognition. Neuroimaging of meditative practice (e.g., Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, & Davidson, 2008) fueled the popularity of mindfulness, an approach that is clearly identified as a social and emotional learning practice (Jennings, 2015).

The neurology of SECD is understood as deeply connected to the social context of development—particularly in terms of poverty and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) being increasingly recognized for their implications for SECD. In a longitudinal study, poverty, home disorganization, and violence in the home were each found to contribute to decreased ability to regulate negative emotions in young children (Raver, Blair, & Garrett-Peters, 2015). This is of particular concern given the prevalence of ACEs—estimated at over half of students having experienced 1 ACE and 19% experiencing 3 or more (Balistreri & Alvira-Hammond, 2016)—and the number of youth living in poverty in the United States—estimated as between 21% and 43% by the National Center for Child Poverty. Racial, economic, and housing policies—the “ghosts” of which echo to this day (Lamy, 2013, p. 12)—leave issues of race and poverty deeply intertwined. Schools in high-poverty areas face high teacher turnover rates due to challenging working conditions (such as the degree of administrative support received).

Poverty is not an acute condition, but a seemingly endless series of hurdles. These hurdles can and have been overcome, but many students also grow weary of leaping through these hurdles and drop out of the race before the end. The energy spent on leaping prevents many students from getting as far as those who need only run.

(Elias, Zins, & Graczyk, 2003, p. 308)

Our approach does not mitigate the need to fight for the societal changes needed to address structural hurdles such as poverty and racism. Rather, we recognize the need to provide immediate and vital support for all students—both the hurdlers and the runners.

Is This the Parents’ Role?

Why schools? Isn’t it the job of the parents to instill these sorts of values and behaviors? We frequently hear this question, generally from exasperated teachers who believe that they need to make yet another choice about how to allocate their already scarce instructional time. The question reflects the assumed bifurcation of, and false choice between, the academic and social-emotional realms and the assumption that attending to the social and emotional needs of students detracts and distracts from the main work of schools—teaching subject matter.

We certainly agree that parents should take responsibility for the social and emotional development of their children. And, in the vast majority of cases, they do. It would be mistake, however, to assign parents sole responsibility, in the same way that it would be a mistake to put the onus entirely on teachers and schools. In the best cases, positive development is supported by an array of institutions—families, schools, community centers, faith-based organizations. This powerful developmental network can set norms for behavior that may not be readily evident in the glimpses of the wider world available to youth. A positive developmental network can promote self-awareness rather than self-doubt; dialogue, not defensiveness, around differences; valuing meaning and purpose, and not the pursuit of an all-but-unattainable level of celebrity and wealth.

But still, the question lingers: Why schools? Don’t schools—and especially teachers—have enough responsibilities and tasks to deal with? Yes. However, within the parameters of the school day and school year as currently conceptualized, time can be used in different ways. School is a major ecological context in the life of youth; time spent with a teacher may eclipse that spent with a parent. Schools are social contexts for students, bringing them into contact with a diverse community of peers, teachers, and staff. Students face emotional situations related to friendships, grades, and time management. Social and emotional issues are facts of everyday school life that interact strongly with academics, as we’ll see in the next chapter. The question is not whether educators should address these issues, but rather whether they will address them proactively or reactively. Will schools function as a laboratory for living in community, or will they attempt to regulate behavior and seek to suppress social and emotional responses to reduce infractions (Osher, Kendziora, Spier, & Garibaldi, 2014).

Taking into account what Urie Bronfenbrenner would have referred to as the ecological context of the development of SECD in schools involves considering the multiple organizational levels that impact the experience of the child. These include the elements of the school in which the student is a direct participant, such as interactions with peers and teachers, as well as those with an indirect impact, such as the nature of staff meetings and professional development, as well as district and state/regional and national considerations.

Thinking comprehensively about a caring community supportive of SECD calls for consideration of multiple ecological elements. In our experience, this is another claim about which there is broad agreement among educators and, at the same time, consternation. There is no denying the complexity of the system in which youth are embedded; the social, emotional and character development of our students has a wide array of influences which may complement and augment the work of educators or which may stand in opposition. What are my efforts worth, a teacher may wonder, when student behavior is so strongly shaped by the chaos of the Internet, when screaming is the new discussing, and when discerning the truth and the perspective of sources can be challenging? We are sympathetic to this concern and recognize that teachers can’t be the only answer. However, we are also moved by the Talmudic maxim: “You are not required to complete the task, nor are you free to desist from it.” Let’s not underestimate the power of educators and schools!

Of course, at the same time that teachers are “not desisting” from promoting SECD, they must also not desist from addressing academic outcomes. This persistent pursuit of growth of the whole student—social, emotional, character and academic—is our focus. Teachers should not need to choose which among these is most important—they are interdependent.

Education Through an SECD Lens

Photographers use filtered lenses to accentuate some colors while de-emphasizing others. The complex hues of the subject still exist; the photographer chooses to look at some and not others. What would education look like if viewed through a SECD lens? Such a lens would allow us to look at the social and emotional elements already present in an ordinary classroom. We would see these social and emotional elements most clearly through the content of what is taught; the pedagogy used to teach it; and the class (and school) context in which the teaching takes place.

Content. The cliché about schools focusing on “facts and figures” does not describe the sort of learning called for by contemporary curriculum standards. Learning about a topic area is not sufficient; educators are called upon to help students learn how to think about a topic. The analysis done by UCLA’s National Center for History in the Schools’ Historical Thinking Standards, which align with Common Core Standards, provides a telling case in point. Far from being the dry memorization of facts and figures that some of us might remember from our own social studies classes, history should be presented in a way that emphasizes the emotions and decisions of people facing particular circumstances, their “motives, beliefs, interests, hopes, and fears,”¹ the consequences of their decisions, and the possible outcomes of decisions not taken. Social studies shifts from being a study of historical events to being a study of people in context. Not only is such an approach likely to motivate students but it also opens the door for applying social studies to understanding one’s own life in context. Our lens will focus on manifestations of SECD throughout the curriculum, from understanding characters’ emotions in literature to problem solving in math and science.

Pedagogy. Many administrators have told us they get concerned when they consistently hear silence while walking by a classroom. Though a teacher might welcome quiet moments—and we recognize the importance of infusing class time with occasional quiet moments—the administrators’ concerns come from a fundamental belief in pedagogy as a social process. Our SECD lens would reve...