Young Children's Social Emotional Learning

The COPE-Resilience Program

Erica Frydenberg, Janice Deans, Rachel Liang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367895884
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000295795
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Young Children's Social Emotional Learning: The COPE-Resilience Program is a manual that is designed to support early childhood educators in the delivery of the COPE Resilience (COPE-R) program, an evidence-based program designed to teach empathy, resilience and prosocial skills to children.

Grounded in extensive research and experience in psychology and early childhood, the program is built on a series of activities that help children develop their capacity for emotional understanding, caring for others, open communication, polite and respectful behaviours, and empathic sharing. The manual includes:

• Theoretical concepts underpinning COPE-R such as self-regulation, emotional intelligence, positive psychology, coping, resilience, and wellbeing in early childhood education.
• A "How-To" section to guide readers in the implementation of COPE-R.
• Over 40 activities templates (including examples of teacher's adaptations) with easy to navigate icon legends.
• Facilitator notes and considerations for working with younger children and children of diverse backgrounds.
• Teaching tips for each of the topic areas and a feature piece on the insights from an early childhood teacher who is experienced in implementing COPE-R.
• Supplementary materials, including a set of situation and coping images.

Each activity includes directions for children as well as guidelines for educators, and is designed to be used flexibly in various early learning contexts, enabling educators to select activities that best suit their setting.

1 Foundations of COPE-R

Theoretical concepts underpinning COPE-R

The COPE-Resilience program is grounded in the knowledge and belief that children’s development is a dynamic and complex process which is best understood in context. Among the myriad of theories that help to explore and explain different aspects of child development, this book draws on three prominent theories which still have an important influence on our contemporary understanding of how children grow, learn, and change. We will first introduce the earlier works of Jean Piaget (1952) on cognitive development and of Lev Vygotsky (1962) on the social and cultural origins of development. Then we will revisit the work of Uri Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Ecological Systems Theory, which has been widely adopted and adapted since the 1970s to explain development in context. An integration of these three theories is illustrated in Figure 1 to assist with understanding how children are influenced by their social-cultural contexts as they progress flexibly through the developmental stages.

Figure 1 An integration of cognitive, ecological system and socio-cultural theories of development.

Theory of Cognitive Development

Piaget (1952) viewed children as active learners, a view in which their development and knowledge are based on their experiences and interactions with the world. The child actively constructs their understanding of their world through exploring and interacting with the environment. These understandings form a set of mental representations of the world, which he called schema, that the child uses both to understand and to respond to situations. In addition to perceiving children as active learners, he proposed four discrete stages of child development, with each stage explaining the processes and mechanisms employed to assist the development of the child’s cognitive skills by building more numerous and elaborate schemas.

These four stages of cognitive development, with an indication of the age at which the average child would reach each stage, include:

• Sensorimotor (birth–2 years old): The infant learns about the environment through responding to sensory stimuli through motor actions. The child acquires knowledge and understanding through physically interacting with the object (e.g., looking, touching, grabbing).
• Pre-Operational (2–7 years old): Children begin to understand symbolic meaning as opposed to the physical and concrete observations made in the previous stage. During this stage, children begin to use symbols in a more organised and logical manner.
• Concrete Operational (7–11 years old): Children’s thinking becomes more flexible and logical. While children’s learning mainly stems from actions, their ability to think in more abstract ways increases. This stage marks the understanding that quantities remain the same even if they change in shape or are different in appearance.
• Formal Operations (11–15 years old): The child/adolescent gains the ability to think hypothetically and uses abstract ideas, resulting in a more effective manner of thinking. Adolescents begin to have conversations about abstract topics in a meaningful manner.

According to Piaget (1952), each child goes through the stages in the same order through processes of assimilation (i.e., modifying new information to fit existing schema), accommodation (i.e., restructuring schemas so that the new information can fit in better), and (dis)equilibration (i.e., a state of mental (im)balance). Children’s ability to learn is determined by biological maturation, which allows adults to interact with children in an appropriate manner related to their cognitive developmental ability. The key implication of Piaget’s theory of education and learning is that teachers should create an environment that facilitates active exploration and learning by discovery for the children rather than direct tuition.

However, Piaget’s theory underestimated young children’s ability in some areas and his theory did not take into account the role that culture and education play in promoting cognitive development. Other theorists see a more flexible progression by children through their developmental stages that is linked to socio-cultural context, where children’s higher order of thinking can be promoted through modelling and observation as well as through first-hand experience.

Socio-Cultural Theory of Development

Vygotsky (1962) laid the groundwork for the “Socio-Cultural Theory of Development”, which emphasises the social and cultural origins of development. Vygotsky considered social process such as interacting with parents, caregivers, peers and the culture forms the basis for children’s learning. The essential role of social interactions in learning means cognitive and linguistic development can differ between cultures. Vygotsky believed in the powerful role of language acquisition in shaping children’s thoughts and growing cognitive capabilities. He suggested children’s first utterances with peers or adults are for the purpose of communication. These utterances then become private speech, i.e., how children talk to themselves while carrying out a difficult cognitive task, and once mastered children develop internalised “inner speech” as they become more capable of working on their own without help from a caregiver or parent. It is theorised that inner speech allows the development of more advanced cognitive abilities such as executive functioning.¹

Additionally, the concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) places emphasis on social interactions such as adult guidance and peer collaboration to support children to “stretch” their level of skills and knowledge development in accomplishing tasks that they cannot yet understand or perform on their own. The adult’s and the child’s interactions through scaffolding (targeted assistance) have also been shown to have significant influences on the child’s learning by progressively extending the ZPD. The key implication of this theory for parents and educators is that, by providing children with experiences which are in their ZPD, they can encourage and advance children’s learning and understanding of the world and the community in which they are embedded.

Ecological Systems Theory

Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Bronfenbrenner (1979) proposed the model “Ecological Systems Theory”, which views human development as an interaction between the individual and their environment. The model arose due to a lack of focus around the role of context on development in theories of human development up until that time.

The five ecological systems for child development described by Bronfenbrenner include:

1. Microsystem: The small, immediate environment within which the child lives and interacts, such as family, caregivers, their school and day care centre.
2. Mesosystem: The interactions between different parts of a child’s microsystem, e.g., between parents and the school; between parents and peers.
3. Exosystem: The people and organisations that indirectly affect the child, e.g., parents’ workplace arrangements, the neighbourhood, etc.
4. Macrosystem: The largest and the outermost layer of the context within which a child is embedded, but which still has a great impact on a child’s development. This includes the economy, societal beliefs, cultural values, governance of laws, and freedom.
5. Chronosystem: How a person and his/her environment changes over the life course, as well as socio-historical circumstances, such as growing economic equalities.

In the mid-1980s, in response to research starting to over-emphasise context and ignore development, Bronfenbrenner (1994) presented his “Bioecological Systems Theory”.

This theory is based on the Process-Person-Context-Time (PPCT) model:

• Process: Proximal processes or the interaction between a person and their environment as the primary mechanism for development.
• Person: The role that the individual and their personal characteristics (e.g., age, sex, gender, physical or mental health) plays on social interactions with their environment and consequently their proximal processes.
• Context: The five ecological systems (as above) that serve as the context for an individual’s development.
• Time: The influence that micro-time (events during the proximal processes), meso-time (extent of the processes, e.g., a few days or weeks or years) and macro-time (the chronosystem) have on a child’s development.

The bioecological systems model adds to our understanding of human development by highlighting how both the person and the environment influence one another bidirectionally, and the implications for early years research, practice, and polices.

1 Executive functioning is a group of the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and manage multiple tasks at the same time (Center on the Developing Child, 2020).

Other theoretical concepts

Attachment theory

Attachment theory reflects the deep bonds that connect persons to one another across time and place. The early proponent of attachment theory, Bowlby (1969), emphasised the importance of the relation between infants and their caregivers, particularly parents. Bowlby focused on the relationship between infants and their mothers in terms of social emotional and cognitive development. In recent times, attachment theory has encompassed the relationships developed throughout the lifespan, often expressed in terms of belonging (Frydenberg, Deans & O’Brien, 2012). The critical period for developing attachments is 0–5 years. Hence the pre-school years provide an important opportunity to build on those early relationships and prepare children for the school years. The skills of attachment and belonging include communication and language skills, which underscore the COPE-R program. Programs such as COPE-R have emotion knowledge and practices and include self-regulatory processes. By exploring empathy and sharing and caring, children learn to relate to others, including peers. While attachment is determined by a host of temperamental factors, including having an engaging predisposition, the interactions in the pre-school setting provide opportunities for life-skill development.

Self-regulation

Marc Brackett, the author of Permission to Feel (Brackett, 2019) and the RULER program (Brackett, Rivers, Reyes & Salovey, 2012), devotes his theory to the development of emotions and how we recognise, understand, label, express, and regulate them. Emotions are at the core of our being and influence all our actions and reactions. In infancy it is about the need for comfort and release from discomfort, but beyond that it is about how emotions influence our relationships with others and our perceptions of the world. While control or regulation of emotions is the most challenging of the RULER skills it is teachable, but it is dependent on the four previously learnt skills. In COPE-R we emphasise the recognition, understanding, labelling, and expression of emotions in age-appropriate ways, from which the development of self-regulation follows. Adults, such as parents and teachers, are core influencers, along with peers, hence the way each of us regulates our emotions to be the best calm selves that will influence young children. Brackett encourages us to use the meta-moment, to stop and draw breath before responding, while other programs describe it as “stop, think and do” (Petersen & Adderley, 2002).

Emotional intelligence

The concept of emotional intelligence or EI has been popularised since the mid-1990s by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence (2005), first published in 1995. Some years earlier Salovey and Mayer described EI as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one’s thinking and actions” (Salovey & Mayer, 1990, p.189). That is, emotions can be both recognised in oneself and in others, using cues that are both verbal and nonverbal. Being able to regulate or manage emotions has been an important feature of EI and is closely linked to wellbeing (Mayer, Roberts & Barsade, 2008; Mayer & Salovey, 1993). Another aspect of EI is the ability to interact well with others, utilising emotional understandings and putting this information to work in daily interactions and communications. This is commonly referred as social intelligence, which is highly linked to success in relationships and life in general. Social skills can be nurtured and improved from the pre-school years, which contribute to early school success (Denham, Bassett & Miller, 2017). As with general intelligence some people are inherently more intelligent than others and the same is the case with EI. The important difference is that EI can be developed, the earlier the better. While much of the popular writing has been in the adult domain it is readily acknowledged that the teaching of EI and the associated skills provides a significant opportunity in the early years, a time when cognition and language development occur at such a rapid pace.

EI has often been considered to be anything that is not IQ. However, there is real science behind EI and “there is intelligence behind emotions” according to Brackett and his colleagues (Brackett ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note from the authors
• PART 1: Foundations of COPE-R
• PART 2: Implementation of COPE-R
• Program background references
• Appendix 1: Mindfulness and relaxation
• Appendix 2: Situation and coping images for personal use
• Index