I'm Mark Greenberg. I'm the Bennett Endowed Chair in Prevention Science at Penn State University. I was a young scientist and clinician, and I was really interested in the problem of why so many children have mental health problems. Why so many children have aggression, anxiety and depression? Why the rates are so high? And there's the old story about the guy at the bottom of the waterfall with an ambulance. And every time someone goes over the waterfall, he picks them up and takes them to the hospital, puts them in the ambulance and takes them to the hospital, and someone says why don't you put a fence at the top of the waterfall. So that was like a light bulb went off for me at that point. How can we think about preventing problems rather than just treating them? So I started in treatment. So I decided to devote my career to how you could prevent problems in kids. And when I did that I began to see that children's emotion regulation; their ability to regulate their emotions was the key to having them be healthy and having an effective life, in which they were able to reach their potential. When we taught children a lot of different emotions they would still just use happy, sad, fine, tired and excited. What we call the big five. So we designed a new way to do this which was that teach this in the early grades, in kindergarten, the first and second grade by using what we call feeling faces. And these are little cards, and the card has a picture of the face and they're color coded. So comfortable feelings are yellow and uncomfortable feelings are blue. And when a child, as we go through a path as children learn these emotions, these feelings, both the teacher and they get a ring full of cards. So let's say that you came in from recess and you're very upset about something one of your friends said to you, if I was a teacher I might say, well the first thing we need to do is maybe just calm down, do you want to take a deep breath with me? And then I would ask you to go get your feeling faces and find which feeling you're feeling right now, or which feelings you're feeling right now, if you're a bit older. So when you do that, when you start looking through these cards and looking at the feelings, of course, what happens as you begin to calm down more and you begin to engage your thinking skills. So we have these feeling faces on posters in the room. In some schools, children carry them around on a lanyard on their neck or they keep them in their desk or the cubby. And the idea is that your mind has all these possibilities inside and identifying how you feel is a good thing to do. Right? And this is new for many people even for adults because a lot of people feel that if they have uncomfortable feelings they should suppress them. If I'm angry, well, then that's there's something wrong with me. Right? And that's because they often fuse together the behaviors they've done when they felt angry with the feeling itself. So for example, children when they get angry often hurt others. So they begin to feel oftentimes that feeling angry actually is itself a bad thing, because it's going to lead to hurting others. So we have to help them to diffuse that, to understand that feeling angry is normal, it's natural, it's an emotion we all have, it's instinctual and it helps us to survive. But what we do about it is something different. So we want them to be able to really recognize and talk about the feeling, but then to decide to make a good choice about what kind of behavior they do, right? So you can be angry at someone and still be kind to them, your behavior can be kind or compassionate. We do a lot of role playing. So we might, for example, if we're working on the problem of peer relations of how to make a new friend or what happens when a new child comes to school, we'll do a role play of that situation or how to make up when a friend is mean to you and you feel really hurt, or what you can do when you're getting ready for taking a test, right? And what kinds of things you can say to yourself, how you can prepare ahead of time. All those kinds of things that are new skills that children are learning, it's critical that we do Role play with them so they get practice and they can see how to do the behavior. Just didactically talking about these or telling stories about these problems is not sufficient for children to be able to enact the behavior well and feel confident about it. So it's always teaching the skill, opportunities to use the skills, starting in role playing and then recognizing and supporting kids in real situations, and then giving them feedback on how they're doing. I think we're in a very difficult time in education and it has this dialectic that it swings back and forth. And, what many people call the No Child Left Behind Act, I call the whole Child Left Behind Act because what we've done is we've focused almost completely on academic subjects and yet it hasn't led to improvements and outcomes. And that's because we've lost the sense that there's a whole child here, and that children's ability to regulate themselves, get along with others, feel bonded to their teachers and schools, is what helps them actually to learn effectively. Children that feel confident, they feel they are been cared for are more likely to be able to relax and focus their attention on learning. And that's why we have been able to show in PATHS and other SEL programs that when these are done well, it not only improves children's behavior but it improves the learning outcomes. And you're probably all familiar with the studies that have shown 11% increase in achievement testing as a result of SEL programs. And that's because social emotional learning programs are not just about teaching children how to behave or how to be nice, they're also helping them to use their cognitive and attentional skills more effectively. They are optimizing human experience.
