Emotionally Intelligent School Counseling

John Pellitteri, Robin Stern, Claudia Shelton, Barbara Muller-Ackerman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780805850345
• eBook ISBN: 9781135610838
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The concept of emotional intelligence (EI), which has steadily gained acceptance in psychology, seems particularly well suited to the work of school counselors and school psychologists who must constantly deal with troubled and underperforming students. To date, however, no book has systematically explained the theoretical and scientific foundations of emotional intelligence and integrated this information into the roles and functions of school counselors and other school personnel. In addition to illustrating how social emotional learning is important to both individual students and to school climate, the book also shows school counselors how to expand their own emotional awareness and resiliency.

Key features of this outstanding new book include:
*ASCA Guidelines. The book integrates the latest findings from the field of social emotional learning with the new ASCA guidelines for school counselors.
*Real-life Cases. The book moves quickly from an overview of basic definitions, theories, and guidelines to stories of real counselors, administrators, teachers, and parents.
*Author Expertise. John Pellitteri is Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in School Counseling Queens College (CUNY). A former school counselor, he is a leading researcher in the area of emotional intelligence. Barbara Ackerman is a K-5 school counselor and retiring Vice President of the American School Counseling Association (ASCA) Elementary School Division. Claudia Shelton has been a school counselor in grades 6-12 and currently heads a firm specializing in professional development for schools. Robin Stern is an adjunct associate professor and researcher at Columbia Teachers College and a specialist in social emotional learning for the New York City Board of Education.

This book is appropriate as a supplementary text in school counseling courses and as a professional reference work for practicing school counselors, counselor educators, counseling psychologists, school psychologists, and school administrators.

VI
SUCCESS STORIES

As school counselors traditionally include perspectives that range from local to global, the final section of this book focuses on success stories that capture SEL implementation in one school campus, within a district, and at a state level. In Chapter 15, we highlight Bartle School, a 3rd through 6th grade building set in suburban New Jersey that has adopted the SDM/PS program throughout its building to increase social-emotional competence. Chapter 16 describes the grant-funded Project EXSEL in District 2 in the New York City Public School System and shares the successes and challenges of a districtwide commitment to infuse SEL into its elementary school literacy programs. The last chapter 17, presents a state model in Illinois for ensuring that all of the students have social-emotional competencies integrated into its kindergarten through 12th grade schools. These stories are presented to inspire the reader to replicate the models showcased. It is our hope that in reading this book, you will want to begin the process of applying emotional intelligence and SEL at various levels of the education system.

15
Social and Emotional Learning Through Comprehensive School Counseling: A Case Study

Linda Bruene Butler
The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey University Behavioral Health Care

Victoria A. Poedubicky
Highland Park Public Schools

Joseph Sperlazza
Fairleigh Dickenson University

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through the experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved.

—Helen Keller

“I’m stupid! Everybody knows it! Kids make fun of me!” Keisha, Grade 4, classified with a specific learning disability

“A kid in the cafeteria started poking me and I got so angry I pushed him. Then I ran out and cried in the hall. That happens to me a lot.… I can’t control my temper.” Andrew, Grade 4, classified as emotionally disturbed

“I don’t know why I get in trouble all the time. Other people do the same thing I do and they never get caught.”

—Carlos, Grade 6, recently diagnosed with ADHD

These students (who were introduced in chap. 9) are describing but a few of the many emotionally laden social situations that special needs students encounter, sometimes on a daily basis. In counseling students with a wide variety of classifications and needs, the most common denominator is their difficulty in navigating and managing social and emotional situations. SEL goals are often at the heart of effective intervention plans for the vast majority of classified students.

In the following pages we examine how in one school, Bartle School in New Jersey, counseling students such as Carlos, Andrew, and Keisha is embedded within a comprehensive, research-based SEL program. A research-based program serves as an organizing framework and provides a consistency of language and instructional methods that can enhance learning for special education students. We describe how all students receive multiyear exposure to systematic skill-building methods and extensive and varied practice of social-emotional skills through a programmatic approach. In this context, classified students have a greater probability of internalizing and generalizing the abilities they need to manage difficult emotions and social situations.

SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING (SEL)

SEL is an approach to character education that is often considered the missing link (Elias, 1997; Elias, Lantieri, Patti, Walberg, & Zins, 1999) that students need to perform to their highest academic potential (Welsh, Parke, Widaman, & O’Neil, 2001).

The concept of SEL refers to “a process that strengthens a person’s ability to understand, manage and express the social and emotional aspects of life” (Elias & Norris, 2003, p. 3). SEL has emerged as an outgrowth of work in emotional intelligence, defined as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions” (Salovey & Mayer, 1990, p. 189). These abilities or skills are distinct from nonability aspects of one’s personality or temperament (Mayer, Salovey,& Caruso, 2000). School-based efforts to promote emotional intelligence are referred to as social and emotional learning to emphasize that these are abilities and, that as abilities, they can be learned and developed through education and training.

During the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in our knowledge regarding effective strategies for promoting social and emotional abilities through systematic, consistent, and developmental programming in schools (CASEL, 2003; U.S. Department of Education, 2001). Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, schools are required to implement programs that are grounded in scientifically based research and proven to be effective. Increasingly, the need for program-level efforts to promote SEL as an integral part of education for all students has been recognized. (Elias et al., 1997; CASEL, 2003).

COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL COUNSELING

School counselors are ideally positioned to play a central role in coordinating SEL programming for the general population while fortifying and tailoring these efforts to meet special needs. This emphasis on program—as opposed to relatively random, individual counselor efforts—is consistent with the National Model for School Counseling Programs of the ASCA (2003). The National Model emphasizes system change and provides a framework for designing, coordinating, implementing, managing, and evaluating programs to support measurable student success. This updated National Model shifts the role of the school counselor from seeing only students in crisis, test coordination, and other random duties to being program centered, focused on assisting every student, and demonstrating program-generated student outcomes within the academic, career, and personal-social domains. In short, the model positions school counselors to play a clear, significant, program-based role in helping students learn, learn how to earn, and learn how to live.

This trend toward unification and coordination is also consistent with inclusion efforts that unite general education and special education staff to provide coordinated services for special education students within general education settings. These trends have all helped to set the stage for developing schoolwide SEL programs.

RESEARCH-BASED SEL FRAMEWORK FOR PROGRAMMING

Our case example, Bartle School in New Jersey, is used to illustrate how school staff can use a research-based model for SEL as an organizing framework to link the school’s guidance program coherently to a school’s other offerings. The model used in this study is SDM/PS, which is an empirically based and research-validated program (Bruene Butler, Hampson, Elias, Clabby, & Schuyler, 1997; CASEL, 2003; Elias, 2004; Elias, Gara, Schuyler, Branden-Muller, & Sayette, 1991; Elias, Gara, Ubriaco, Rothbaum, & Clabby, 1986). This model provides a curriculum-based approach to systematically build students’ social-emotional skills and teach children to be aware of emotions in themselves and others, to manage these emotions, and to use emotions to fuel problem-solving action. The targeted skills and systematic skill-building methods used by this model provide the foundation and shared language that underlies individual and group counseling sessions, specialized groups such as the school’s Anger Management group, as well as the counselor’s delivery of social skills development lessons in classrooms. Shared skill-building methods strengthen collaborations between the school counselor and teachers, fortify school and classroom discipline policies, and assist teachers’ delivery of curriculum content that can infuse the application of social decision-making skills that relate to academic content. School staff work together to teach SDM/PS skills and help students apply those skills in the real world. For example, in a third-grade classroom, the counselor uses a giant fictitious report card and first models how to identify problem areas and then has all of the students identify a personal problem and develop a plan to improve their work in that subject. The model establishes and supports the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that individuals need to regulate emotions, think clearly, and negotiate with others in an emotionally intelligent and socially competent way across situations and over time (Bruene Butler et al., 1997; Elias & Tobias, 1996). The goal is to provide all students with concrete skills to help them think rationally in stressful situations.

The SDM/PS model targets a repertoire of skills that helps students be more self-aware and socially aware and prepares them to be good decision makers. A self-control unit, for example, focuses on skills for regulating emotions in self and in others and helps students learn to recognize physical cues and situations that put them at risk of fight-or-flight reactivity that can result in negative consequences and poor decisions. Students learn specific strategies, such as a Keep Calm strategy, to maintain emotional control. The strategy includes self-talk and breath control that helps calms the autonomic nervous system while dealing with emotionally charged situations. Another strategy, BEST, helps students learn to self-monitor their body language, eye contact, speech or use of words, and tone of voice, communication variables that affect the feelings and reactions of others (see chaps. 9 and 14, this volume, for a more detailed description).

Because emotional reactivity is natural, the objective in teaching these strategies is to help students become aware of their own emotions and to rec-ognize feelings as cues to use skills such as Keep Calm and BEST. Students learn to self-monitor, self-regulate emotional reactivity, and communicate effectively. Skill-building lessons establish a shared language, prompts and cues that can be used by staff and students to call forth the skills when needed. Skill prompts are also shared with others such as parents, paraprofessionals, sports coaches, and bus drivers to promote the transfer and generalization of skills to real-life situations.

Another central component of the SDM/PS model teaches students an eight-step FIG TESPN problem-solving framework (see also Poedubicky, Bruene Butler, & Sperlazza, chap. 9, this volume; Elias, Friedlander, & Tobias, chap. 14, this volume).

The most important component of the SDM/PS model is providing students with multiple, varied, and structured opportunities to practice the cognitive and behavioral skills learned within the academic content areas and transfer them to real-life problems and decisions.

THE IMPORTANCE OF “OVERLEARNING” FOR STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

Gresham (2000) found that efforts to teach students with special needs social skills are often not effective because the training occurs in restricted settings without adequately programming for transfer, generalization, and maintenance of skills.

If there is any aspect of SEL that is not understood by the general public, it is what it takes to build a skill to a level that it is accessible under stress. Such learning goes beyond the mere acquisition of knowledge. The learning curve for skill development is more gradual and develops over time through many cycles of practice coupled with performance feedback. The only way individuals can integrate a skill into their personal repertoire is through an ongoing series of practice and feedback trials (Gagne, 1965).

A skill is only accessible under stress if it is overlearned (Elias & Bruene Butler, 1999). Overlearn...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FOREWORD
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• I: INTRODUCTION
• II: FOUNDATIONS
• III: APPLICATIONS IN SCHOOL SETTINGS
• IV: APPLICATIONS WITH SPECIFIC GROUPS
• V: APPLICATIONS WITH SPECIALMODALITIES
• VI: SUCCESS STORIES