Rising up: Social and Emotional Learning

2022 | Written by Faith Schantz, Report Editor

Concerns about students’ well-being in recent years have led to a national focus on social and emotional learning (SEL), a set of skills and competencies that reflect students’ awareness of themselves and others as learners. It’s common sense—and research shows—that students learn more when they believe they can learn, they have strategies for learning new things, and they know how to participate in a learning community. By extension, schools that commit to SEL must attend to every aspect of school culture.

While the district has purchased SEL lessons and activities from the ed-tech company RethinkEd, the goal is for teachers to infuse the development of these skills within the teaching of all academic content.

Christine Cray, director of Student Services Reforms, offers an example as a former science teacher. When students struggle with a problem, the teacher can say, “Man, this is really tough. We tried these three and they were easy, but this one is really a stumper. Let’s pause, let’s take a deep breath.” Along with modeling a strategy—pausing and naming a feeling—the teacher is creating “a space where struggle and failure is part of the norm and part of the learning process,” she says. Talking about safety in the lab taps into elements of self-management and responsible decision-making, which are SEL competencies. In an English class, a teacher who points to what a character is thinking and asks if students have had similar thoughts is helping them develop self-awareness, Cray says. Of course, she notes, many teachers are already doing these things. Her department is working with the Office of Curriculum and Instruction to “elevate these practices and make them routine across our classrooms.”

Beyond these specific practices, it’s the teacher’s job to set up a learning community that students want to belong to and participate in. While students are responsible for learning and practicing social skills, such as listening to and considering the views of others, the adults determine whether a school or a classroom has a learning culture. SEL is intertwined with classroom culture, including students’ sense of safety and belonging, whether they feel seen and heard as individuals, and whether they feel ownership of norms for classroom behavior. In turn, these aspects of culture are intertwined with academic learning. (See “Superintendent Walters on how teachers can best support students” for more on how teachers foster a learning culture.)

One tool for both promoting and monitoring SEL is the “Panorama Social-Emotional Learning: Student Competency & Well-being Survey” from Panorama Education, given to students in grades 3-12 twice a year. The survey asks questions such as How sure are you that you can do the hardest work that is assigned in your class? How often did you get your work done right away, instead of waiting until the last minute? How often are you able to pull yourself out of a bad mood? Before the survey is administered, parents receive a letter describing the survey, noting that it’s optional for students, and telling them how to opt out, if they choose to. Students who take the survey receive a summary of their responses, along with targeted “Try this!” suggestions, such as When you have a hard task to do, think about another time that you did a great job on something that was hard, or Write a homework plan. Parents can view the report in the Home Access Center.

Student Support Services staff use trends in the responses to plan lessons and activities, and Cray discusses them with the Superintendent’s Student Advisory Council, whose members share information with their schools. Teachers can see demographic trends for their classrooms, such as differences in responses by race, as well as their students’ individual reports. Cray’s office provides resources to help teachers talk students through the report. “It’s very much a questioning stance,” she says. “Let’s look at our report. What do you see that surprised you? What did you see that aligned to what you thought you would see? What area do you think you want to work on? If you worked on this area, what help would you need from school? What help would you need from home?” Rather than an end point, the report offers a way to open up a conversation, she says.

The extent to which such conversations are happening depends on the school. In schools that have “advisory” periods, “absolutely it’s happening,” Cray says. Some schools have also begun to use Panorama data to inform their school improvement plans. In others, the response rate is too low for the data to be meaningful.

The survey has offered the district a way to gauge how students have weathered the disruptions of the past two years. Last year, Cray worried about one question in particular. “I was really nervous that we would see kids who said, ‘I don’t have an adult at home or at school or a peer at home or at school that I can be myself around or that I can go to.’ And that was not the case,” she says. More students also said that they had strategies to help them learn new things, possibly because they had to manage more of their own learning while school buildings were closed. Perhaps counterintuitively, the number of respondents who felt they could do a good job on their school work declined, especially for older students. In follow-up conversations, Cray says, they explained that when schools were closed, “teachers were assigning a whole bunch of stuff and they were feeling really overwhelmed.”

On the national level, the concept and practices of SEL have been attacked, on the one hand, for appearing to suggest that children can rise above poverty and institutionalized racism if they have enough resilience and “grit,” and on the other hand, for appearing to push particular adult values on students. Cray is clear that the responsibility for SEL lies with adults. She calls the idea that if students only had enough resilience, adults wouldn’t have to change systems or practices a “fantasy.” As for imposing values, she notes that their work with students is intentionally open-ended, so “students know different strategies and skills and can choose what’s best and right for them,” rather than what the adult thinks they should do.

Overall, she believes the SEL competencies reflect broadly held goals. “When you ask educators or any adult to think about what we want students to know and be able to do when they leave our system,” she says, “the things that we hear the most are not knowing the quadratic equation or being able to write a five-paragraph essay or be conversationally fluent in Spanish. It’s [the] skills that we know are going to be necessary for success.”

A+ Schools staff can coach parents/guardians through conversations with school staff about a child’s academic progress, a disciplinary action, a Student Assistance Program referral, a special education referral, and other issues. Contact us by emailing info@aplusschools.org or calling the PLC Family Hotline at 412-256-8536 if you need help supporting your child.