Want them to learn? Teach them to get along

If i had a class of 50 kids that wanted to learn I could be succesful but if I had a class of 5 who didn't, I would have no chance. -anonymous

From Education Week

by Sarah D. Sparks

From role-playing games for students to parent seminars, teaching social and emotional learning requires a lot of moving parts, but when all the pieces come together such instruction can rival the effectiveness of purely academic interventions to boost student achievement, according to the largest analysis of such programs to date.

In the report published today in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development, researchers led by Joseph A. Durlak, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Chicago, found that students who took part in social and emotional learning, or SEL, programs improved in grades and standardized-test scores by 11 percentile points compared with nonparticipating students. That difference, the authors say, was significant—equivalent to moving a student in the middle of the class academically to the top 40 percent of students during the course of the intervention. Such improvement fell within the range of effectiveness for recent analyses of interventions focused on academics.

Compared with their peers, participating students also significantly improved on five key nonacademic measures: They demonstrated greater social skills, less emotional stress and better attitudes, fewer conduct problems such as bullying and suspensions, and more-frequent positive behaviors, such as cooperation and help for other students. Also, the effects continued at least six months after the programs ended.

“We learned this is very practical for schools and doable in schools,” Mr. Durlak said. “There can be a payoff academically for these kids that compares to a lot of straightforward academic interventions, which is really sort of amazing.”

Social and emotional education seeks to provide a foundation for academic instruction by teaching students skills in self-awareness and management, getting along with others and decision-making. Programs vary from afterschool courses taught by outside providers to schoolwide efforts incorporating curriculum, teacher professional development, school activities and parent training.

For this study, researchers distinguished SEL programs intended to teach social skills broadly from programs focused on fixing specific behaviors, such as bullying.

The research team identified individual practices in 213 school-based studies, covering 270,034 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. About half the studies used randomized controlled trials. The team informally announced preliminary findings in 2007 that suggested SEL programs increased academic achievement. ("Social-Skills Programs Found to Yield Gains In Academic Subjects," December 19, 2007.) For the final report, the researchers narrowed the focus to include only programs that had no academic component, and were provided during the school day as universal programs, rather than those targeted to specific students with behavior problems.

The researchers found the SEL programs most likely to be effective followed what Mr. Durlak called the SAFE model: “sequenced,” step-by-step instruction; “active” learning, such as role-playing; with sufficient time “focused” on each lesson; and “explicit” learning goals. The most effective programs used all four practices together.

Lost Teaching Time
Corinne Gregory, the president and founder of the Seattle-based schoolwide SEL program SocialSmarts, suggested the improvement in those soft skills likely caused the rise in academic achievement, in part because educators could teach more efficiently with calmer, more cooperative students. A 2003 brief by the policy-research group Public Agenda found teachers reported losing as much as 30 percent of instructional time to deal with behavior problems in class, and Ms. Gregory said some of the schools participating in the SocialSmarts program reported increasing students’ time on task by more than 40 percent.

“We focus all of our efforts on that nasty end point of the social-emotional continuum, bullying, rather than preventing all the other problems that lead up to that,” such as disrespect in the classroom or cheating, Ms. Gregory said. “By then, it’s almost too late in the game.”

Yet one finding ran counter to both the researchers’ expectations and prior research: Simple teacher-led programs vastly outperformed multifaceted programs involving schoolwide activities and parent involvement. While classroom-based programs showed significant improvements across all five social measures and academics, comprehensive programs showed no significant effect on students’ social-emotional skills or positive social behavior, and were less effective at improving academic performance.

The finding bears echoes of an Institute of Education Sciences study released last fall, which found that seven of the nation’s most common character education programs failed to yield significant social or academic improvements.

Prior studies have suggested students respond better to programs that reinforce social learning throughout the school and at home, but this study found that programs with more components were less likely to follow any—not to mention all—of the best practices of sequenced, active lessons based on explicit goals and focus on each goal for enough time.

“The more-comprehensive and broader programs tended to have more implementation problems,” Mr. Durlak said. “Trying to do more in the schools tends to be harder, takes more coordination, involves more people—they’re a lot harder to pull off.

SocialSmarts is such a comprehensive program, and while Ms. Gregory said it has shown positive academic and social effects, she acknowledged that implementation “has been a challenge.”

“Everyone from the janitor to the principal has to be responsible for this,” Ms. Gregory said. “We’ve had schools that said we can’t send this [parent activity] home; the parents won’t read it. I say, well, you can be sure they’ll never read it if you don’t send it home.”

To offset the implementation issues, SocialSmarts requires schools to purchase a license for the program, rather than buying a curriculum. It also provides a newsletter, training for teachers and parents, and online platforms where teachers share practices.

Mr. Durlak said the researchers would continue to add to the research database, which now includes studies only as recent as 2007, and hopes to dig into the best practices of effective programs in more depth.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/02/04/20sel.h30.html?tkn=PXQFihDVI3TOrrIR1y5BISuEyRKqZZYDPKYL&cmp=clp-edweek

Bullying problems

From the Sun Sentinel.com

by Stephen Feller

Jodee Blanco was bullied as a kid, and dealing with the combination of cruelty and being shut out of social groups motivated her to want to help children avoid both bullying and being a victim. She brought her anti-bullying program to North Broward Prep this month.

In the past eight years, Blanco has become a best-selling author and brought her anti-bullying message to more than a half-million children and adults across the country.

Educating people that bullying is not just about being mean, but that also not showing compassion is almost the same thing as actively bullying, can make a very big difference for people who will carry that through life.

"I would rather have school be a place of compassion and tolerance than just a place where you can learn to go to war," Blanco said. "The whole idea is to [compel] the students [to have compassion] and teach that bullying isn't just joking around – it damages you for life."

Were you bullied in school?

From fifth grade through high school. I was the kid that nobody wanted to hang out with - I struggled through that like many students. Most bullied students are old souls. They typically are intelligent and of a sensitivity that is far beyond their years, and struggle to fit in. What the adult community rarely understands is that while that bullied child is mature for their age, they struggle to fit in.

In the last several years, there has been a lot of talk about actually stopping bullying, which wasn't the case not too long ago.

Bullying is not new. Abuse has always existed. After Columbine, America started waking up to see that it's not just kids being kids…I think now since there's been so many school shootings and bullying related suicides people are thinking about it.

Is bullying worse now than it ever is?

No, it's not. The impulse to bully is the same. The only difference is that it's easier to cut a wider swath. Thirty years ago, somebody could pass a note through math class. Now, it could be posted on Facebook or YouTube, or texted to the world…30 or 35 years ago, when I was being bullied, when I got home I could escape the assault. Maybe not the loneliness, but the assault. Now, kids can't escape it because of the Internet.

What do you think about people who say it is a big mean world and kids need to be prepared for it, or at least that bullying is just a part of growing up?

No, that theory doesn't apply because it's counter-intuitive. Kids aren't cruel or mean on purpose, bullying is about the desperate need to fit in – the bully and victim are opposite sides of the same coin. Saying kids have to prepare for mean people and school is the best place to live through it is ridiculous. Kids have to live up to their higher selves. They need to find out the best they can be and live up to it. Kids have to be taught compassion, and tolerance, and acceptance.

What is the question you hear most from parents?

The things I hear most are: How do I deal with the school? How do I deal with the parents of the bullies? Part of what I do is teach basic communications skills. Most of the time, it's not the kids, it's the adults that are the problems. The adults usually represent the biggest obstacles.

How about parents whose kids are the bully?

When I do a student presentation, I'll normally get 10 percent of the audience who come up to me and want an intervention. Half of them are kids who are the victims. But half of them are the mean kids who didn't realize that not letting somebody sit with them at lunch or on the bus was mean. After they hear my talk, they want to make amends to their victims.

Some of these ideas have been around for a while. Why do you think schools haven't formally included this with their regular lessons?

Many schools do. When I go and work with the schools, I give them specific curricula that allows them to integrate these things into their plans. New Jersey just specifically started to require it, for example, so a lot of the schools are making the effort.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/health/fl-mcf-bully-0120-20110119,0,6876411.story