NY Times [...] Wade’s approach — used schoolwide at Garfield
Elementary, in Oakland, Calif. — is part of a strategy known as
social-emotional learning, which is based on the idea that emotional
skills are crucial to academic performance.
“Something we now know, from doing dozens of studies, is that emotions
can either enhance or hinder your ability to learn,” Marc Brackett, a
senior research scientist in psychology at Yale University, told a crowd
of educators at a conference last June. “They affect our attention and
our memory. If you’re very anxious about something, or agitated, how
well can you focus on what’s being taught?”
Once a small corner of education theory, S.E.L. has gained traction in
recent years, driven in part by concerns over school violence, bullying
and teen suicide. But while prevention programs tend to focus on a
single problem, the goal of social-emotional learning is grander: to
instill a deep psychological intelligence that will help children
regulate their emotions.
For children, Brackett notes, school is an emotional caldron: a constant
stream of academic and social challenges that can generate feelings
ranging from loneliness to euphoria. Educators and parents have long
assumed that a child’s ability to cope with such stresses is either
innate — a matter of temperament — or else acquired “along the way,” in
the rough and tumble of ordinary interaction. But in practice, Brackett
says, many children never develop those crucial skills. “It’s like
saying that a child doesn’t need to study English because she talks with
her parents at home,” Brackett told me last spring. “Emotional skills
are the same. A teacher might say, ‘Calm down!’ — but how exactly do you
calm down when you’re feeling anxious? Where do you learn the skills to
manage those feelings?”
A growing number of educators and psychologists now believe that the
answer to that question is in school. George Lucas’s Edutopia foundation
has lobbied for the teaching of social and emotional skills for the
past decade; the State of Illinois passed a bill in 2003 making “social
and emotional learning” a part of school curriculums. Thousands of
schools now use one of the several dozen programs, including Brackett’s
own, that have been approved as “evidence-based” by the Collaborative
for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, a Chicago-based nonprofit.
All told, there are now tens of thousands of emotional-literacy programs
running in cities nationwide.
The theory that kids need to learn to manage their emotions in order to
reach their potential grew out of the research of a pair of psychology
professors — John Mayer, at the University of New Hampshire, and Peter
Salovey, at Yale. In the 1980s, Mayer and Salovey became curious about
the ways in which emotions communicate information, and why some people
seem more able to take advantage of those messages than others. While
outlining the set of skills that defined this “emotional intelligence,”
Salovey realized that it might be even more influential than he had
originally suspected, affecting everything from problem solving to job
satisfaction: “It was like, this is predictive!”
In the years since, a number of studies have supported this view.
So-called noncognitive skills — attributes like self-restraint,
persistence and self-awareness — might actually be better predictors of a
person’s life trajectory than standard academic measures. A 2011 study
using data collected on 17,000 British infants followed over 50 years
found that a child’s level of mental well-being correlated strongly with
future success. Similar studies have found that kids who develop these
skills are not only more likely to do well at work but also to have
longer marriages and to suffer less from depression and anxiety. Some
evidence even shows that they will be physically healthier.
