When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be … a “Good Person?”
By .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on June 17, 2009
In this recent article based in the UK, the basic question is voiced: who do you want your children to grow into? Roger Weissberg, professor of Psychology and Education at the University of Illinois and President of the Collaborative for Academic and Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), posed this question to panels of UK legislators, policy makers, and practitioners and found the answer to be situated on top of a solid foundation: that of social and emotional well-being.
The impact of social and emotional stability is staggeringly vital. Completed by Weissberg and Joseph Durlak last year, their meta-analysis examined 700 experimental studies and discovered significant findings. Both the percentage of conduct and emotional disorders dropped with the children in these studies. Furthermore, academic performances improved.
Additionally, as Dr. Jonathan Cohen, President of CSEE, mentioned as the keynote speaker at Fordham University last Wednesday afternoon, high-level coping mechanisms attained through social abilities (in contrast to low-level coping mechanisms, such as denial and repression), are considered to be the single most important marker in overall life satisfaction, according to a 68-year longitudinal study (the Grant Study).
In sum, children are happier and performing better in school, due to social and emotional education. A clear relationship exists between what educators are currently teaching their children (math, reading, etc.) and what many are still hesitant to teach (social and emotional awareness).
Born as “blank slates,” (if you agree with the philosopher, John Locke), I believe teachers need to be concerned with more than just academic progress for their students. Children may be acquiring the skills necessary for proper writing and mathematical computations, and as important as these skills are, they might be worthless if children do not acquire the relationship skills to become socially responsible adults, or one may even say, “good people.”
How much time, though, is being devoted to teaching children to be “good people” in schools? Some may argue that educators have the responsibility to teach academics, while it is the parents’ responsibility to teach proper values and character development. To this point, I would like to reference Cohen’s statement about infants’ transition from crawling to walking: although physical maturation plays an important role in this transition, so too does the support and encouragement received from outside sources like their guardians, family members, etc. Like infants during that important phase, today’s youth still need extra support, both from parents and their schools. We cannot expect them to learn it all on their own.
This can be taught at schools, but many of these imperative life lessons are glossed over or not handled correctly in schools. Cohen mentions at the Fordham lecture: “An eight-session program in Health class is not enough.” Weissberg, similarly, thinks many schools need to “pull the weeds before planting the flowers.” Some schools do implement programs with social and emotional focus, but the programs don’t take off and the schools never really stop to consider why or what modifications can be made. (The perfect way to pull the weeds or “examine the landscape” is through school climate measurement. The most comprehensive and empirically-validated of these tools is the Comprehensive School Climate Inventory (CSCI), which has been used across extensive schools and districts to effectively gauge total school climate.)
Like Cohen, I agree that there needs to be a change in the school system. It is clear that issues outside of not understanding the academic material affect a child’s grades. At the lecture, Cohen specifically referred to the issue of bullying and how when teachers become frustrated and angry, even they can sometimes inadvertently bully students and impede their learning. Certainly, things like this need to be addressed immediately, through collaboration among educators, parents, and students.
Despite the continuous rush to teach our students the necessary curriculum before the end of the school and to prepare them for statewide and national exams, we need to stop and think if they have the skills necessary to perform well on the social and emotional exams they will face throughout their entire lives.
