Social and Emotional Learning

When I talk to children and their parents about all the good things that come from reading, the most important is the opportunity for an avid reader to enter the consciousness of many, many characters and experience many different viewpoints. By identifying with a character who is lonely or sad, or connecting with a character who is funny and smart, a child internalizes how it feels to be someone else. A child who reads widely gradually becomes aware of the complexity of reality; becomes suspicious of dogmatic statements; and becomes less apt to buy into closed systems of thinking. Learning to see the world from the perspective of another person has profound implications for prejudice, aggression and empathy. It may help children have the courage to stand up for victims and confront injustice, and it can help them build an inner reservoir to weather the bad things that life can dish up.

Linda Lantieri's talk at Paideia on Tuesday evening, and her talk to faculty on Wednesday afternoon, eloquently illustrated the benefits of social and emotional learning. By helping children learn techniques to still their minds, through a focus on breathing, meditation, or other explicitly taught activities, they learn how to control and direct their own attention. By being still and calm as a regular practice for a few minutes each day, they can learn to regulate their emotions and look at their own distress more clearly. And by practicing mindful attention to others, they can grow in compassion. We all know people, both children and adults, who seem to be naturally resilient and bounce back readily from difficult events. A key point of the vision of social and emotional learning is that we can actually inculcate resilience, even for those for whom it is not automatic. (For more information, visit CASEL and Lantieri's own page. Or borrow the book from our library.)

In many ways, the ideas of Lantieri seem like simple common sense. Children learn better when they are not anxious, angry or sad; if they are stewing about a playground dispute, they are not receptive to new learning. I know I can't achieve a flow in reading if I'm agitated about something. If someone hurts a child's feelings, her brain is flooded with stress hormones. Humans evolved with a fight or flight response, and even though name-calling is hardly an attack by a saber-tooth tiger, the neural response is similar. By helping children develop these tools, they can achieve a state of mind that is calm, curious, attentive, and open to learning. They work better individually and in groups. (For more on the neuroscience, look at The Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and the work of neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin. See also a short video with Davidson.)

Universities and schools abroad are looking into many of these techniques; recent pieces on NPR discuss how rote learning in Syria, China and other countries is being abandoned in favor of collaborative projects in which students understand multiple points of view. In a piece called "Collaboration Beats Smarts in Problem-Solving," researchers at Carnegie Mellon demonstrate the value of group problem-solving and group I.Q. The implications for entrepreneurship and creativity in the business world are also enormous.

As with any innovation, there are skeptics who dismiss social and emotional learning as another trendy time-waster that preempts classroom content. (For example, see a recent column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.) In fact, however, Lantieri has reams of examples, from hundreds of children in many school districts, showing the positive effect that it has on learning.

Reading aloud to a child presents myriad opportunities to talk about mindfulness, for us as adults to model that we can observe our own thinking and feeling:

“I notice when I’m reading something this exciting that I start to breathe faster and my heart starts beating faster."

“Sometimes I feel like this character: I get so mad that I don’t stop and breathe before lashing out.”

“I was a lot like this boy when I was young: I worried so much about what was coming up that I didn’t notice all the good things around me.”

“The three girls in the this story are always making judgments about their friends: clothes, behavior, motivations. I notice that when I make lots of judgments about people, I start to feel unhappy with everyone, including myself.”

“I feel so sorry for her.”

Today I read a story to five and six year olds about a toy bear who longs for a home. Right at the earliest part of the story, a little girl sighed, "Oh, poor him" and was echoed sincerely by several sympathetic classmates. May we all build on that compassionate impulse.