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!
We're not disputing the reality that in this culture, the habit of self-control and the mind-set of delayed gratification contribute to certain kinds of success. But many of the SEL programs we've studied stifle children's genuine emotions, swapping immediate gratification for immediate obedience. This movement cannot be called an innovation if social-emotional learning becomes a backdoor route to old-school discipline: shut the kids up, sit them down, and maintain an emotionally flat tone in school, day in and day out.
Other SEL programs trade the iron fist of self-regulation for the velvet glove of psychobabble. A long and balanced piece on the SEL movement in the New York Times reports from one kindergarten classroom (Kahn, 2013). The teacher invites kids to tell about problems with their parents. When one boy admits that his mother yelled at him, the teacher imitates a screaming parent and encourages the child to think up an answer to his angry mother. Finally, the kid manages, “Mommy, I don't like it when you scream at me."The teacher approvingly predicts, “And maybe your Mommy will say, 'I'm sorry.'” But then again, maybe Mommy won't appreciate such backtalk, and things at home could escalate.
Education Week ran another generally admiring piece on social-emotional learning (Heitlin, 2013). In one lesson, fifth graders are asked to use markers and paper to draw pictures of their own faces. Then, the teacher reads aloud a story full of anger and put-downs. At each negative turn in the story, she instructs kids to tear off a part of their own face from the pictures they have created. Before the story is done, much of the class is in tears.
We mention these worrisome examples not to condemn the whole SEL movement, of which we are a part, but to caution against uncritical adoption of programs with foreseeably damaging consequences. And also to say: this is not what we do. Though we are definitely psychological in our outlook, we do not promote (or condone) classroom group therapy, behavior modification, psychodrama, or emotional blackmail.
What is vanishingly rare today is a program that actually shows kids what good behavior looks like, explicitly teaches it, and provides closely guided practice so that young people can actually acquire new ways of acting and interacting. That's what this resource aims to do.
We are living in a world of standards. So let us propose one: every student in your classroom works with every other kid, regularly, cheerfully, and supportively, all year long. No one says, “I won't work with her."That's a standard we want to help you meet.
Our Theory of Action
So what is our own theoretical background, what are our assumptions and our research base? The next short chapter gives you that information in more detail.
Here's a preview: We come out of the worlds of social psychology, group dynamics, and collaborative learning. We grow kids' social-academic skills not by limiting, coercing, or controlling them, but by offering them more responsibility, control, and choice. We treat them like the people they want to become. We take it as our responsibility to model the behaviors that we want kids to practice. We provide explicit demonstrations, guided practice, close coaching, feedback, and systematic reflection. Our theory of action is this: acquaintance leads to friendship, which in turn leads to supportive behavior. In the classroom community that you can create, kids predictably acquire individual and collaborative social strategies that become automatic, that serve them today in school and onward through their lives.
And one other thing: these lessons are fun. Kids love them.
Chapter 2
Theory and Research on Social-Academic Skills Training
What kind of teaching nightmares scare you in the middle of night? Nancy wakes up in a cold sweat attempting to escape the class from hell: kids who won't stay in their seats, ignore her stimulating lesson plans, swear when asked to put their phones away, and storm out of the room whenever they feel like it. Smokey quakes at the very real memory of John Ross, who jumped out of his second-story classroom window after being rebuked for misbehavior by his rookie teacher. (It turned out to be a well-planned prank, no injuries.) So, when it comes to teaching, we've seen (or dreamed) it all.
Teaching is hard, hard work, and often the kids are predictable in their unpredictability. And what seems like a best practice lesson to us can be rewarded with loud yawns, blank stares, and an intense and exclusive conversation with the friend in the next row. Once in a while we try groups, and those same kids who disrupted class before are now merrily leading whole groups of kids off course, off task, off lesson. In response, we retreat to whole-class instruction because it just seems safer. But now this whole Social and Emotional Learning movement is breathing down our necks. Like it isn't tough enough just to teach our content without now having the responsibility of teaching the kids how to be civil, thoughtful human beings as well!
Though programs and practices in the SEL movement range from exemplary to dubious (see pages 12-14), the conditions warranting SEL are inarguable:
• The Common Core State Standards define College and Career Readiness in both academic and social terms. While all students must be able to defend their arguments with supporting text details, they've also got to be able to listen carefully, add to ideas, show respect, and disagree civilly (CCSS,2010).
• More and more states are adopting SEL standards, which typically include three skill elements: Self-Awareness and Self-Management, Social and Interpersonal Awareness, and Decision-Making and Responsible Behaviors (Performance Descriptors, 2003).
• While schools place great importance on academic skills, employers place equal emphasis on communication, collaboration, critical and creative thinking, ingenuity,