By LAURA HAMMACK, guest columnist
I hold a monthly community conversation where I attempt to inform and engage participants about various aspects of our school corporation. Last week I addressed the topic of student support services. Within the presentation, I scratched the surface on the programming that Brown County Schools provides to students in preschool through Grade 12 to address comprehensive needs that fall under the umbrella of social-emotional learning.
Social-emotional learning is receiving increased attention as neuroscience and scientifically based educational research has unlocked a deeper insight into how students learn. Specifically, this work focuses on understanding the impact that traumatic experiences and untreated mental health conditions have on the ability for students to be successful in their educational environment.
Defining the work is challenging, but I am particularly fond of the following definition offered by one of the premier researcher groups, the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). They offer: “Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.”
One of the fundamental understandings that advanced neuroscience has taught us is that the brain does not stop developing at birth. To that end, as the brain develops in infants and young children, the brain will actually arrest in development when required developmental milestones are missed or are exaggerated in a way the brain can’t regulate.
To illustrate, if a developing brain is robbed of nutrition or touch, the missed developmental milestones that are achieved at that time will need to be experienced later in life, or else the child will present with deficits in the regulation of behavior. We have learned that the developing brain needs to realize every developmental milestone in order to transition to the next step. Social-emotional learning strategies work to repair a milestone that may have been missed so that emotional regulation is realized.
The Indiana Department of Education recently released a set of preschool-Grade 12 social-emotional learning competencies. Building from a neurodevelopmental, culturally responsive framework, these competencies support the understanding that we need to be just as intentional with teaching social-emotional learning skills to students as we do with skills to support the mastery of reading and mathematics.
A study reviewing three decades of research conducted by Durlak et al, 2011, titled, “The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions,” drew strong conclusions to support the academic impact of social-emotional learning strategies. The study found that student academic performance increased by 11 percentile points when compared with students who did not receive the same types of interventions.
The Indiana social-emotional competencies are as follows:
Sensory-motor integration: The ability to have body awareness and recognize sensations in the body. Gaining sensory-motor integration is an important skill for managing transitions, changing routines, increasing alertness for learning, and improving regulation.
Insight: The ability to know your emotions and how they affect your thoughts and actions. Gaining insight is an important skill for building self-confidence, self-esteem, and empathy for others. Insight helps students recognize their own strengths and areas of growth.
Regulation: The ability to recognize and manage one’s emotions. Regulation skills build positive self-control, positive self-discipline and impulse control.
Collaboration: The ability to work well with others, including in the group and teamwork environment. Collaboration works to build positive communication and conflict management skills.
Connection: The ability to have strong social awareness, giving students the ability to take the perspectives of others and empathize with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures.
Critical thinking: The ability to make constructive choices and understand metacognitive strategies to enhance learning. Critical thinking skills build responsible decision-making, analytical and critical inquiry skills which are necessary to approach learning from an innovative, creative, multicultural and ethical lens.
Mindset: The ability to demonstrate cognitive flexibility and a willingness to learn. Developing mindset is a critical learning skill for building perseverance, adaptability, self-discovery, resilience, and the ability to receive and give constructive feedback.
Our school district has been working very hard to learn more about the positive impact of social-emotional learning interventions in the classroom.
In my next column, I will share the ways in which we are deploying SEL strategies through curriculum, deploying community mental health resources during the school day, creating student/adult mentorships to ensure persistence through graduation, and more.
Laura Hammack is superintendent of Brown County schools. She can be reached at 812-988-6601 or [email protected].
