The importance of social emotional learning has become a recent trend in educational literature. In order to effectively look at how it can be incorporated into both the classroom and school-wide community through explicit teaching, a review of prior, peer reviewed literature is essential.
Social emotional learning (SEL) stems from Abraham Maslow’s 1943 Need Hierarchy theory from his study A Theory of Human Motivation. This theory looks at how humans are motivated, stating that physical needs (food, water, shelter) need to be met first before a person can feel safe and that they belong. Ultimately Maslow concluded that “that the most proponent goal will monopolize consciousness and will tend of itself to organize the recruitment of the various capacities of the organism” (1943, n.p) This hierarchy is an essential building block in the development of Social Emotional Learning. In his theory, Maslow suggests that people cannot reach their full potential (in relation to education academic success) without achieving social belonging and positive esteem.
Authors Heath, Smith and Young investigate the importance of supporting students’ mental health needs in the article Using Children's Literature to Strengthen Social and Emotional Learning. The authors claim that teachers need to be supplied with basic mental health care tools to in order to help students. In their secondary source, peer reviewed article, contains two major arguments; teachers, administrators and any educational support staff should be given tools that are easy to implement and access and children need to have greater access to mental health professionals in school. As part of their research, the authors looked at the statistics of mental health need in school age children and teenagers. According the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in a 2013 study and the World Health Organization (WHO) in a 2016 study “20% of children in the USA and 10 to 20% of youth worldwide struggle with a mental disorder which significantly impacts their daily functioning.” (Heath, Smith and Young 2017, 542) These children too often do not receive adequate medical care. This stems from a number of reasons, including limited resources for families and students in need of mental health care services, a larger focus on pediatric physical health rather than mental health, most programs are not preventative for mental health crisis. Another major reason why students may not receive traditional counseling may be due to denial or familial stigma about mental health needs, instead families may turn to self-help book, sports and other activities in lieu of traditional counseling. These reasons all contribute to the need for widespread teaching of Psychological First Aid for adults who work with children. Psychological First Aide is teaching parents and teachers basic mental health skills to use with students, to help them when they may need additional mental health care. This idea has helped to contribute to the argument that the need for universal social emotional learning in the curriculum is growing.
Mark Greenberg, Celene Domitrovich, Roger Weissberg, and Joseph Durlak also view SEL as a way to “improve the general population’s wellbeing” not only through physical needs but also “nurturing positive outcomes that improve quality of life.” (2017, p. 13-14) In this peer reviewed secondary source, the authors have three major reasons why teaching SEL at school is important in schools first students spend a majority of their time in schools, second SEL programs can improve academic achievement and decrease future emotional and or behavior problems and third, when SEL is taught to all students it could potentially improve general public welfare. One question presented by the authors is “what do children need from their education that will prepare them to deal with the inevitable challenges of everyday life and attain later success?” (Greenberg, Domitrovich, Weissberg and Durlak, 2017, p. 16) This is why widespread SEL is crucial within the educational system. SEL programs help students to prepare for the social nuisances and character traits that are needed to be successful in the larger word, such as social relationships and perseverance. The authors also note that there has been a recent shift in the teaching of SEL. It has developed from skills for only students who were determined to have deficiencies to the entire school population.
As education moved to include more Social Emotional Learning onto the curriculum, ideologies such as bibliotherapy, Growth Mindset and Mindfulness have begun to make way into school districts. Both of these ideologies are focused on a person’s inner wellbeing supporting the CASEL foundational competencies of Self-awareness, Self-management and Responsible decision-making. Growth mindset is the belief that your intelligence and ability can develop as you grow your skills, whereas in contrast a fixed mindset belief is that you are born with a specific amount of intelligence and your ability will never grow. Growth mindset can also be referred to as “incremental theory of intelligence or malleable mindset” (Bostwick, Collie, Martin, and Durksen,, 2017, p. 108). Mindfulness “is the practice of being consciously aware of the present moment” through this practice students are taught to clear their minds and focus on what is around them through breathing activities (Burke and Hawkins, 2012, p. 37) It can also be thought of as a technique to reduce stress and according to this secondary source, “helps students lead a fulfilling life in which they choose to cultivate peace and compassion rather than confrontation and competition” (Burke and Hawkins, 2012, p. 37). These ideologies can be used with students of any age, including adults, but it is important to note, in order to implement these programs successfully they must be reinforced on a consistent basis.
One resource that Heath, Smith and Young suggest is using bibliotherapy, or books written to promote SEL through “expand[ing] an individual’s level of self-understanding and to expand the understanding of others’ perceptions.” (Heath, Smith and Young 2017, 550). Students with mental health needs often struggle with social skills, using bibliotherapy within the classroom can help students understand these unwritten rules and internalize them. The authors recommend that teachers and school psychologists share story books to help students with their social emotional learning. Heath, Smith and Young claim that bibliotherapy is a tool that can be used by anyone, not just professionals, to help students of any age with social and emotional mental health needs. Bibliotherapy is broken down into two categories, developmental bibliotherapy and clinical bibliotherapy. Developmental bibliotherapy focuses on helping primary students with natural adjustment problems, such as sharing, making friends or lying while clinical bibliotherapy is designed to help children of any age when they have been involved in a traumatic event such as abuse, violence or suicide. The authors continue with their article to look at the research that has been conducted in the success of using bibliotherapy to help children with mental health. The research they included, both nationally and internationally, supported the use of bibliotherapy to help children with mental health needs.
In their study, authors Keiko Bostwick, Rebecca Collie, Andrew Martin, and Tracy Durksen of Australia explore how Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset positively impacts student engagement and achievement in mathematics. The reason for their study was twofold, firstly they believed that most research focuses on general achievement not content area specifics and secondly that literature regarding student attitude towards math was lacking information including growth mindset. The student focused on students in grades 7 to 9 from 19 schools in 3 states in Australia, including urban and suburban school systems, including non-public schools. This vast sample size is considered to be reflective by the authors of Australia’s population which helps to support the study’s potential reliability.
The authors focus on “specific growth constructs – growth mindset, self-based growth goals, and task-based growth goals – that are hypothesized to reflect students’ growth orientation” and compare these to student engagement and achievement (Bostwick, Collie, Martin and Durksen, 2017, p. 110). They measure student growth orientation through a single online test through a series of statements in which students responded by marking their answers on a scale from 1 = Disagree Strongly to 7 = Agree Strongly. Students who scored high across the questions were determined to have a growth mindset. Ultimately the study concluded that “it is thus evident that when students are oriented toward growth, they are more likely to be engaged and achieve higher results (given they are striving for growth).” (Bostwick, Collie, Martin and Durksen, 2017, p. 114) While this may be a good initial indicator of students who exhibit the qualities of a growth mindset; using a solitary instrument does not strengthen their reasoning for qualifying students.
In the given test, questions were adapted from the Implicit Theories of Intelligence Scale (Dweck, 2000), Personal Best Scale (Martin, 2006) and the mastery-approach scale from the Achievement Goals Questionnaire (Elliot & McGregor, 2001) all of which have “demonstrated previous validity and reliability” (Bostwick, Collie, Martin and Durksen, 2017, p. 110). There was only one indicator used for each area they were examining, which may have limited the number of students who were indicated as being growth oriented, which weakens the validity of the study. While the study coule be repeated with other students with the same results that students who are growth oriented participate more in class and have higher achievement levels, it ultimately is not valid or reliable. The only data collected was self-assessments which can alter the results, regardless of how large the sample size is.
One note that the authors had was that male students who exhibited growth mindset were more likely to be engaged than their female counterparts, but overall male students were less likely to believe in growth mindset than female students. Another note the authors made was that they believe their findings about age related growth differs from previous findings, their results concluded that as student grow they need more encouragement towards thinking that their skills in mathematics can develop with hard work.
According to Amy Burke and Kevin Hawkins using “Mindfulness [as] an educational tool is the most sound practice that we have encountered to encourage students not only to increase their academic achievement, but also their own social and emotional learning (SEL).” (Burke and Hawkins, 2012, p. 36). In education, Mindfulness can be channeled to help students explore their own mental health through self-reflection. Dedicated time for this self-reflection either as a class or a school can have positive benefits on student learning because it explicitly teaches the students to take a moment to reflect or to compose themselves in times of stress. It also creates happier students because they can reflect on their own thoughts and feeling rather than basing their self-view on “external standards” that our education system’s “predominantly completive culture only exacerbates.” (Burke and Hawkins, 2012, p. 38)
In contrast to these theories, peer reviewed “School Readiness and Later Achievement” by Gary Duncan et al., social emotional skills are studied along with reading, math and attention skills and problems. In the meta-analytic study, the authors used mother reports, teacher reports and grade retention to gather information comparisons to scores at school entry age to age then compared them throughout their elementary careers. This study’s methods were not reliable nor were they valid. Student ability was first determined at school readiness age by parent and teacher observations, this is a very subjunctive data collection. One teacher could rate the students more strictly than other teachers involved in the study and parents may inflate the student’s ability. The survey asked about student attention and aggression as part of the survey but the exact questions were not included in the article. This lack of survey questions, makes this study unreliable for it to be duplicated by other researchers. Ultimately, they determined that there was a significant association between reading and math success and school preparedness and a slight correlation with attention. In opposition, “socioemotional behaviors—externalizing and internalizing behavior problems and social skills—rarely pass the threshold of statistical significance.” (Duncan et al., 2017, p. 1437). The authors determined that there was no correlation to socioemotional behaviors and school readiness. The authors concluded that socioemotional behaviors have no impact on a child’s later academic success, yet mathematic and reading school readiness is a key factor. Which is a contrast to other literature, which looks at SEL as a way to build school and classroom culture and to support the mental health of students which is just as important as teaching foundational academic skills to increase later success.
While schools have many programs to choose from when implementing a social emotional curriculum, there are still questions about the long-term effects of both universal and targeted intervention SEL. Rebecca Taylor, Joseph Durlak, Eva Oberle and Roger Weissberg conducted a “meta-analysis of the follow-up effects of school-based universal SEL interventions.” (Taylor., Oberle., Durlak, and Weissberg, 2017, p. 1156 ) They felt that there was not enough long term analysis of the effects of explicit universal SEL teaching. They chose 86 school-based universal SEL instruction in which they studied students in kindergarten through grade 12 and followed up with these students at least sixth months later.
The students were split into a control group received no SEL instruction and an experimental group did receive some sort of classroom SEL instruction. This decision automatically put the experimental group at an advantage to be able to implement SEL practices in their life, making this student invalid. Students changes were reported in through categorized outcomes. Those were 7 categories were social and emotional skills; attitudes toward self, others, and school; positive social behaviors; academic performance, conduct problems, emotional distress and substance use. As a result of their study “SEL program participants benefiting significantly more than controls across all of the social and emotional assets and positive and negative indicators of well-being”. (Taylor., Oberle., Durlak, and Weissberg, 2017, p. 1162) The study also broke up the results by race and economic classes; the authors believed that previous studies had not focused on the difference between White and students of color, different income classes. Their study concluded that there was no discrepancy between the subgroups. Age was another factor that Taylor, Durlak, Oberle and Weissberg considered when looking at long term effects; they determined that students who were exposed to SEL programs at a younger ages (age 5 to 10) presented larger effects in the 7 categories than those who received instruction at adolescence. While the results of the study confirm the author’s thesis, it is not valid nor reliable This decision automatically put the experimental group at an advantage to be able to implement SEL practices in their life, making this student invalid. Throughout their study Taylor, Durlak, Oberle and Weissberg refer to the importance of high-quality instruction and the impact that teachers have on students receiving SEL services.
Kimberly Schonert-Reicht’s literature suggests that the best way to ensure teachers can effectively teach SEL is first by including it in teacher preparation program. As part of her research, Schonert-Reicht examines how teacher preparation programs promote and prepare teachers to implement social emotional learning into their classroom, unfortunately her results were disheartening. When doing initial research into the topic of teacher preparation, it was found that many colleges did not include social emotional learning practices within their preparation programs. She mentions that many programs, such as intensive ones, that have little room to include these without cutting other necessary courses. She also describes programs that successfully include SEL into their preparation, such as University of British Columbia, which has created a special cohort in which student courses emphasize SEL in their pre-practicum work and implement social emotional learning in their practicum.
Badiyyah Waajid, Pamela Garner and Julie Owen also sees SEL preparation as being neglected by teacher education preparation programs learning. The study followed 15 African American undergraduate students, 3 men and 12 women, enrolled in the same curriculum and instruction course. The participants were assigned to three groups with 1 man and 4 women per group. In order to gather data regarding the students’ growth in using SEL, “course was organized into modules for which there were four phases: 1) preparation, 2) application, 3) presentation, and 4) assessment.” (Waajid, Garner and Owen, 2013, p. 35) Students prepared by researching the concept and creating a literature review of SEL, they applied this knowledge by creating working in their small groups to create lesson plans on Emotion Understanding and Emotion Regulation for preschoolers and Bullying and Victimization for elementary school students and presented them to actual students. The group was then assessed by their instructor based on a number of standards including but not limited to participation, completion of tasks and course assessments. Students were also required to reflect on the course and their lessons, the results of these papers “revealed that a curriculum and instruction course infused with SEL can impact prospective teachers’ views on the overall role of emotions in the classroom for children’s classroom learning and behaviors.” (Waajid, Garner and Owen, 2013, p. 4) One highlight from both Schonert-Reicht’s article and Waajid, Garner and Owen’s study is that the teacher’s social and emotional competencies impact the instruction and understanding of the student’s social emotional. Waajid, Garner and Owen’s qualities study suggests that SEL courses can effectively be included into teacher preparation programs and that this would lead to positive impact in teacher’s views towards including social emotional learning. The sample size is too limited to be considered reliable; there is a small number of participants (15) all with the same level of education and ethnicity. This study is valid, because through the program created, the participants where able to understand and implement SEL and teacher understanding into their core academic lessons throughout the program. The long-term impact of this program has not be examined which does limit the study’s findings.
All of these studies have added to the growing evidence of the importance of including universal SEL teaching. But there is still a need to look at how using a variety of programs throughout the classroom can help students develop strong social emotional skills through explicit instruction. The following section will include the methodologies used to further explore this topic of explicit teaching in hopes to add to the growing research, including the use of social emotional lessons to Special Education 6th grade students from two academic teams. The goal of the lessons will be to increase their social awareness, relationship skills, empathy for others and an understanding of their own emotions can help lead to.