Executive Director Commentary

Robert Rader Executive Director, CABE

What Do You Know About SEL?

Last November, Dr. Marc Brackett was the Friday morning keynote speaker at the CABE/CAPSS Convention. Despite a piece of the ceiling nearly clocking him in the head, he delivered a thoughtful, humorous discussion on the importance of providing social-emotional learning (SEL) to school staffs and students. Why is SEL important? Dr. Brackett responds that we are in the “worst place we’ve ever been in mental health” among students. Too many suffer from anxiety and depression.

Our teachers are also stressed. Surveys show that too many are frustrated and overwhelmed.

Certainly, those feelings are not a recipe for good school climates and happiness for our children or for educators.

After the keynote, we continued to work with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, where Dr. Brackett is the Founding Director of the Center and professor in the Child Study Center. CABE (Patrice McCarthy, Lisa Steimer and I) and CAPSS Executive Director Fran Rabinowitz worked with Dr. Brackett and others from the Center for EI on surveys that went out to board members and superintendents. We soon will be providing the results and suggestions for follow-up.

We thank all who took the time to complete the surveys.

Seedlings Institute

In mid-July, I was honored to be invited to the Seedlings Institute for School Leaders, held over three days at Yale University. More than 100 people participated and The Seedlings Foundation sponsored it. While I was the only representative of boards of education, it was beneficial to be in the company of New York City superintendents and their staffs, superintendents from Connecticut and other school leaders from across the country.

The three days were jam-packed with teaching, group exercises and opportunities to better understand how to infuse SEL throughout the school curriculum but, also supply

its principles for staff and others in school districts. “RULER”, the Center’s “evidence-based, systemic approach to SEL... that has been adopted by over 2,000 preschool to high schools across the United States and in other countries” was a major focus of the Institute.

According to a website supported by the Center “‘RULER’ is an acronym that stands for the five skills of emotional intelligence: recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing and regulating emotions. RULER also is the name of the approach to social and emotional learning created by the Yale Center… that supports positive emotional climates and the development of these skills in both students and the adults in their lives.”

Takeaways

Among the lessons I took from this exciting, fun and informative conference (and I don’t say that about many professional development opportunities):

• To understand this work, one must do a lot of work on oneself. Being in touch with your emotions and understanding your “triggers” is critical. It is not nearly enough to just say that SEL is a “good thing.” One must “do the work.” We learned the same lesson when we started to study implicit bias—one needs to understand oneself before trying to teach others. We learned to use the “Mood Meter”, to get a real sense of where you are emotionally. It is a basic graph where you can plot your emotions based on how “energized” and “pleasant” you feel, which Dr. Brackett stated, are critical indicators of your current feelings. If you are in the “red” and “high energy”, but, lacking a degree of “pleasantness”, watch out!

Identifying and understanding what you are feeling is a large part of the training. You need to “name it [your emotion] in order to tame it!”

• Boards should understand that this is not “just another class” for students. SEL teaches life lessons, which should provide skills that can help them throughout their lives.

• Implementation of RULER is a difficult job, especially as so many

teachers are suffering from “initiative fatigue”, but, in the end, it should prove valuable to your students, staff and board members The learning in school can lead to better student achievement and more satisfaction with school. SEL training also should be helpful to your staff as it provides tools for helping students who are struggling. One meta-analysis of 213 studies with 270,000 students showed an 11 percent gain on standardized achievement tests after one year of systemic teaching.

While SEL is not one of the indicators in our Next Generation Accountability System, improving school climate and the well-being of educators will help districts improve their scores on the index.

• It is not an easy task to undertake this critical professional development and make it systemic in school districts. To be most effective, all members of staff need to receive professional development so that they are working off the “same page.” Lack of uniformity across districts makes it much harder to succeed.

The mental health of students is now one of the leading issues before our boards. According to the Center’s Executive Director and Byram Hills (NY) Central School District Board President Scott Levy, mental health and SEL have become critical areas of focus for school districts across the country. Schools are adopting SEL to create and sustain safer and more supportive school climates with fewer instances of bullying and cyberbullying.