Emily Price and I would like to convey to you some of the findings of research and practice that have informed the SEL field in the last 15 years. Here, we focused on some overarching findings, pre-K through high school. As well as some one specific to the elementary years. I'll summarize three reports. One summary is taken from a seminal early SEL text entitled Promoting Social And Emotional Learning. Another, from a recent meta analysis from numerous empirical research studies, and a third from a chapter in the recently published handbook of social and emotional learning. You can find copies of these articles or chapters in our list of optional readings for this module. In 1997 the milestone texts entitled Promoting Social And Emotional Learning, Guidelines for Educators, was a collaborative effort among nine different individuals, many of whom are now illustrious figures in the field. The authors include, Maurice Elias, Joseph Zins, Roger Weissberg, Karen Fray, Mark Greenberg, Norris Haynes, Rachel Kessler, Mary Schwab-Stone, and Timothy Shriver. According to these authors, the guidelines and suggestions offered are based on three things. One, recent scientific studies. Two, what they call the best theories. And three, and this is a strength of theirs, the successful effort of educators across the nation to provide guidelines to help school administrators, teachers, and pupil services personnel design, implement, and evaluate programs to enhance the social and emotional development of children from preschool through high school. Today our focus is going to be in this book. And it's on chapter three, entitled, How Does Social and Emotional Education Fit in Schools? The authors note that two assumptions, two assumptions guide this chapter. The first assumption is that there needs to be a connection or a bridge between students emotions and student learning. As teachers we need to create pathways to allow students to personalize and internalize their learning. A second assumption is that as teachers we want students to achieve social and academic success as well as a personal sense of well-being. In effect we want our students and our children to become knowledgeable, responsible, caring, and emotionally resilient adults. The authors provide four guidelines to help facilitate the social and emotional education of our students. Here is the first guideline. Educators at all levels need explicit plans to help students become knowledgeable, responsible and caring. And to help students become knowledgeable, responsible and caring, efforts are needed to build and reinforce the skills in four major SEL domains. Those domains are these, life skills and social competencies. Health promotion and problem prevention skills. Coping skills and social support for transitioning crises. And positive contributory service. The second guideline is this. Successful effort to build social and emotional skills are linked to developmental milestones, as well as the need to help students cope with ongoing life events and social circumstances. Successful accomplishment is premised on the assumption that learning tasks need to be developmentally appropriate. The third guideline is this, SEL programs emphasize the promotion of pro-social attitudes and values about self, others, and work. This guideline presumes that healthy self-esteem, healthy self-esteem, develops when children are offered what they call the four C's. Confidence, I mean confidence in themselves, competencies, chances to try these things out, and caring. And finally, the fourth guideline. It is most beneficial to provide a developmentally appropriate combination of formal curriculum-based instruction with ongoing informal and infused opportunities to develop social and emotional skills from preschool through high school. As I noted earlier, this book's guidelines were published in 1997. Now 14 years later a group of researchers looked at the growing body of empirical evidence documenting the impact of SEL school-based programs on students. And this review is entitled, and here's a copy of it, The Impact of Enhancing Students’ Social and Emotional Learning, A Meta-Analysis of School-Based Universal Interventions. The authors include Joseph Duralak of Loyola University, Chicago, Roger Weissberg of Casel. Allison Dominic and Rebecca Taylor of the University of Illinois at Chicago. And Kriston Schellinger of Loyola University, Chicago. These authors examined research on 213 programs involving over 270,000 kindergarten through high school students. And, in a nutshell, this is what they found. Compared to controls, that is students not receiving the SEL intervention, SEL participants demonstrated significantly improved social and emotional skills, Attitudes, and behavior. In the realm of academic performance the authors found that there was an 11 percentile point gain in achievement. They also found that school teaching staff successfully conducted SEL programs. And in fact, they maintained the findings of their meta-analysis add to the growing empirical evidence regarding the positive impact of SEL programs. For those so inclined to examine the details of this meta-analysis, we encourage you to look further at the Durlak AL meta-analysis. It certainly has given the SEL field a boost of confidence. And finally we want to summarize with a bit more detail a review of SEL research in elementary school settings. And a review chapter that appeared in this book, the handbook of Social And Emotional Learning, entitled SEL in Elementary School Settings, Identifying Mechanisms that Matter". The authors, Sara Rimm-Kaufman and Chris Hulleman, examine and identify five interventions that work, as well as five promising elementary SEL interventions. First, before offering their appraisal, I'll briefly summarize the conceptual framework that these two authors use to delineate and appraise these programs. In effect, when they want to claim that when SEL programs work, the effective use of SEL intervention core components leads to improve what they call proximal or immediate outcomes. And additionally, this intervention enhances the classroom social environment and student skills in the classroom. Secondly they want to say that SEL intervention core components are designed to improve student's SEL skills which include emotional, interpersonal, and cognitive skills, as well as understandings. And finally, that enhanced classroom's social environments. And student's improved skills interact to improved distal, or what we would call long-term outcomes and social and academic performance, both inside and outside of the school. Rimm-Kaufman and Hulleman found that research on five programs with three or more studies on each program demonstrated intervention efficacy. In short, they identified five elementary programs that work. These programs are the Caring School Community, Promoting Alternative THinking Strategies. Positive Action, Responsive Classroom Approach, and Second Step. With each program, I'll summarize the program goals and tools, as well as the research that backs their claims for program efficacy. First, the Caring School Community. The Caring School Community is a design to create caring classrooms and school communities, places where students feel connected. The core components of the program include class meetings. Cross-age buddy activities, homeside activities. And school-wide community building activities, all matched to students' development levels. Class meetings provide opportunities for teachers and students to discuss and establish classroom norms. Engage in problem solving, especially around relationships with others. Work in teams, and reflect on the classroom and a sense of community. Cross-age buddy activities connect older and younger students in pairs to work on meaningful academic tasks. Homeside activities involve starting an that activity at school, and then taking that activity at home to discuss and talk about. And finally, school-wide community building activities create collaboration among students, families, and out-of-school community. Now several study provide evidence for the efficacy of Caring School Community. Findings from one study indicate a Caring School's Community's efficacy for increasing students' sense of connection to school and engagement in learning, as well as improved interpersonal skills. Findings from another study indicate that the Caring School Community program enhances self-skills, that is feeling of autonomy and classroom supportiveness. And a third study indicates that students in Caring School community showed improved achievement and behavioral outcomes. A second effective program is Promoting Alternative THinking Strategies, or sometimes called PATHS. PATHS is a curriculum-based intervention program, designed to enhance students' self-regulation, understanding of emotions. Self-esteem, social relationships, and social problem solving. The core components of the program include explicit instruction in SEL skills and SEL classroom practices, and the application of those practices. And this includes age-appropriate units that teach students, among other things, to recognize and label emotional cues. To differentiate between feelings and behaviors. And to build friendships as well as deal with challenging friendship issues. The research. A number of research inquiries found links between PATHS and improved emotional, interpersonal, and cognitive skills. The implementation of PATHS improves student's emotional skills, including emotion recognition and emotional coping. Enhanced interpersonal skills, such as problem solving, and positive peer interactions, have also been documented, as well as increased. Excuse me, decreased [LAUGHS], not increased, decreased aggression. Enhanced cognitive skills, including cognitive concentration, inhibitory control, and verbal fluency have been found with the use of PATHS. Some evidence has also been found for improved social performance. Now let's go to the third effective program that they highlight. It is called Positive Action. Positive Action's design is based on the following central premise, student self-concept plays a critical role in students' behavior. Core components of Positive Action include explicit instruction in SEL skills on topics such as self-concept. Management of social interactions. Emotional responses in relationships, and honesty. The program entails school, community, and family engagement efforts to support the classroom element. According to Rimm-Kaufman and Hulleman, numerous quasi-experimental and experimental studies show a consistent pattern of positive results. Studies of fifth grade students who experience PA earlier in elementary school showed less substance use and sexual activity. Less violence and bullying behavior. And improved reading and math achievement. A fourth program is a Responsive Classroom. Responsive Classroom focuses on improving the classroom environment by creating a caring community. Developing proactive approaches to classroom management. And supporting student's engagement in learning. The Responsive Classroom tries to accomplish this by using ten teaching practices that focuses on improving students' interpersonal, cognitive and self-skills. For example, teachers use a daily morning meeting with all the kids to integrate SEL and academics. To build a sense of community, engage in social skills. And enliven academic and social learning. Teachers also employ academic choice as a way to create choice and autonomy in academic learning. And they use interactive modeling as a way to teach self and regulatory skills. Research suggests that the Responsive Classroom approach, that their teaching practices foster students' assertiveness and social skills. Contribute to students favorable views of their classroom. Teachers implementing more Responsive Classroom practices. So higher quality teacher-child interactions. And two studies indicating gains in students math and reading achievement after two to three years of exposure to Responsive Classroom practices. And the fifth program is Second Step. Utilizing a set curriculum, Second Step is designed to improve students' emotional, interpersonal, and cognitive skills. Lessons are designed to help students learn and practice a broad range of SEL skills. In Second Step the core components entail explicit instruction in SEL skills. Teachers utilize prepared scripts and lessons. Stories with discussion. Practice activities to reinforce new skills. All organized around a weekly single topic. Topics include solving social problems, for example, staying calm and following a set of problem-solving steps. And skills for learning, for example, use of self-talk to manage one's attention. Second Step also includes a home-based component. Studies of Second Step have indicated that students increase their interpersonal skills. And girls, but not boys, improved in cooperation. Additional research suggests that students improved their social confidence and decreased outwardly directed negative behavior. Well, that does it for today's talk. For module five, I'll outline what works in the promising programs for both middle and high school students, thanks.
