their teacher to receive the highest possible “Distinguished” ranking. In her rationale, Danielson writes:
As important as a teacher's treatment of students is, how students are treated by their classmates is arguably even more important to students. At its worst, poor treatment causes students to feel rejected by their peers. At its best, positive interactions among students are mutually supportive and create an emotionally healthy school environment. Teachers not only model and teach students how to engage in respectful interactions with one another but also acknowledge such interaction. (Danielson, 2011)
With salaries and even continued employment now depending on one-time evaluations like these, teachers better have an interactive community humming when the principal comes around to score them.
Bottom line: the world is asking teachers to run their classrooms in new ways, but it hasn't yet provided the practical tools they need to make such large and sometimes uncomfortable changes.
Emerging Research: Social-Emotional Skills Can Be Taught
There is a robust and growing body of research that validates the explicit teaching of social-academic skills. Earlier, we cited the Durlak meta-analysis, which showed remarkable academic gains for kids who had been taught key social skills. The Chicago-based Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning www.casel.org.
A variety of researchers have looked closely at the relationship between school climate and student achievement. Evidence consistently ties poor socioemotional climates to low achievement and test scores. In its School Climate Research Summary, the National School Climate Center summarizes recent findings:
School climate matters. Positive and sustained school climate is associated with and/or predictive of positive child and youth development, effective risk prevention and health promotion efforts, student learning and academic achievement, increased student graduation rates, and teacher retention. (Thapa et al., 2012)
One related line of inquiry comes out of the Consortium for Chicago Schools Research at the University of Chicago. Over a series of studies, Anthony Bryk and colleagues have shown that “relational trust is the ‘glue’ or the essential element” that potentiates all the other factors leading to school improvement (Bryk et al., 2010; Bryk & Schneider, 2002). In other words, in schools that cultivate friendliness and mutual support, kids learn better.
It is important to note that in addition to general studies of social-emotional learning, investigations in separate academic disciplines cross-validate these findings. For example, the pioneering literacy researcher Richard Allington has shown that when students regularly discuss their reading with peers, gains are seen in engagement, in comprehension, and on high-stakes reading tests (2012). In the mathematics world, similar connections have been found between social-emotional skills and academic achievement. In several studies, researchers at the Yale Child Study Center found strong links between social competencies and academic achievement. As the investigators reported, “the strengths of the relationships between students' knowledge of themselves and others and their achievement in math was found to be strong” (Haynes et al., 2003).
My Kids, Right Now
There's one more reason why we need to teach social skills in our classrooms: this is our life. We are in real classrooms today, each of us with a group of kids (or five groups of kids), in some kind of relationship, for nine months. For everyone's morale, sense of safely, hunger for belonging, and need to take risks and grow, we must create a friendly, supportive place to be. We want everyone to walk through that classroom door with smiles on their faces this morning, acknowledging and savoring our differences, feeling our solidarity, and feeding off one another's energy.
We are complicated and separate people, and we'll bring some junk through that door too, but if we address our interaction forthrightly and practice sociable behavior together, we can dial down the static, put aside our baggage, and grow with our friends' support. Instead of cutting each other down, we can all stand on each other's shoulders. In the game of school, we can enjoy Home Court Advantage every day. And we would prefer this to happen right now.
How to Address These Problems and Seize the Opportunities
In this resource, we offer thirty-five classroom-ready lessons that address this whole array of problems and opportunities. These lessons
• Are all directly correlated with the Common Core standards for Speaking and Listening
• Engage students in experiences that systematically build a sense of belonging and personal significance
• Make kids feel safer and more connected, so they are less likely to put down or bully others
• Enable highly interactive, student-driven best practice instruction to succeed in your classroom
• Help you feel comfortable and ready to tackle this new teaching task—and enjoy the challenge
• Get you ready to be assessed in your own classroom, by showcasing students who work together fluidly flexibly, and with focus
• Ground you with a strong research and knowledge base in the emerging field of social-emotional learning, as well as related and longer-established fields of inquiry
• Help you grow or mend your classroom climate now, to solve management and morale problems, and develop long-term spirit and solidarity
• Make sure all your students acquire the social-academic skills they need for their future education, and in their lives as workers, community members, and citizens
All Social Skills Programs Are Not Alike
In today's crowded school marketplace, there are countless programs promising to teach social, or emotional, or behavior, or collaboration, or interpersonal skills. We deeply respect a number of them; Responsive Classroom, Facing History, the Child Development Center, Restorative Justice, and others do wonderful, pro-social work. Some other SEL programs are based on adult-dictated rules, warnings, contingent rewards, and swift punishments. Not to put too fine a point on it, obedience-driven discipline is still very much in the driver's seat in this market segment.
One of the most widely adopted SEL programs, Second Step, comes with a teacher kit of highly scripted lessons. Second Step's parent organization, the Committee for Children, identifies the core skill of its program as “self-regulation":
In a nutshell, self-regulation is the ability to monitor and manage emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. It's what helps students focus their attention on a lesson when they may be distracted by noisy classmates, a problem they had at recess, or excitement about an upcoming birthday party. (Committee for Children, 2011)
God forbid that a child should have an outburst of delight over a birthday!
