NAIS - The Social-Emotional Foundations of Learning

I recently spoke to a board chair who reflected on the paradoxes of leading through the past few years, noting that he now understands that two seemingly different ideas can be true at the same time. This is the nature of leading today—the work is not simply about solving problems, but rather it’s about making sense of circumstances and managing the polarities inherent in the education enterprise. Polarity thinking allows us to balance the tension of two interdependent ideas and move from either/or to both/and thinking. This is a crucial lens today as uncertainty can drive us into fight or flight mode, which usually leads to binary thinking. And, in times of crisis, that binary thinking can become quite extreme. Psychologists often refer to this as “splitting.”

In a March 2012 Psychology Today article, psychiatrist Neel Burton explains that “Splitting is a very common ego defense mechanism. It can be defined as the division or polarization of beliefs, actions, objects, or persons into good and bad by focusing selectively on their positive or negative attributes.” Given the many anxiety-provoking aspects of the pandemic, it’s no wonder that either/or thinking is so prevalent today. We are all trying to control the uncertain world by solving problems as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is particularly true for parents who have struggled to manage life and a career while at the same time worrying about long-lasting pandemic effects on their children. A 2021 study appearing in Frontiers in Psychiatry identified that only 3.5% of parents reported high stress pre-pandemic, but during the first few months of the pandemic that number grew to 22.4%, with almost three-fourths of parents reporting an increase in stress. Further exacerbating this stress is media coverage about student learning loss and declining mental health. As a result, many parents have been driven into panic mode.

The Benefits of Social-Emotional Learning

When schools began returning face-to-face, that anxiety began playing out in the classroom, with many parents worrying that focus on social-emotional learning (SEL), often misrepresented as “soft skills,” would take away from academics. The debates began in school communities and raged through social media. Although educators are familiar with SEL and its importance, parents, trustees, and extended school community members may not be, so let’s step back to create a shared understanding of its purposes and history.

According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities; manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals; feel and show empathy for others; establish and maintain supportive relationships; and make responsible and caring decisions. SEL is often depicted as a trendy new approach that is not central to learning, but the concepts of SEL date back to the early Greeks. When Plato wrote about education in The Republic, he proposed a holistic curriculum that requires a balance of training in physical education, the arts, math, science, character, and moral judgment. Many trace SEL’s more formal systemic educational integration with the work of James Comer at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center in the 1960s. He founded the Comer School Development Program, centered on the thesis that the contrast between a child’s experiences at home and those in school deeply affects the child’s psychosocial development and that this, in turn, shapes academic achievement.

Over the ensuing decades, others have built on his work, understanding learning as a fundamentally social process. Today, advancements in neuroscience have deepened our understanding of the fundamental role that emotions play in the learning process.

What Neuroscience Tells Us About Student Success

Neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who recently spoke at the NAIS Annual Conference, has spent her career exploring the neuroscience of SEL. She says that it is our social brains that are responsible for learning. In 2016, on the New York Times’ Well blog, author Jessica Lahey explores the role of emotions in learning, quoting Immordino-Yang:

“Emotion is essential to learning, and should not be underestimated or misunderstood as a trend, or as merely the “E” in social-emotional learning. Emotion is where learning begins, or, as is often the case, where it ends. It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about. Even in academic subjects that are traditionally considered unemotional, such as physics, engineering or math, deep understanding depends on making emotional connections between concepts.”

Drawing from Immordino-Yang’s research, teachers today try to make content relevant to a child’s life so that the connection sparks interest and the learning becomes durable. This is how love of learning takes root.
A recent global study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international organization that shapes policies that foster prosperity, equality, opportunity, and well-being for all, sought to quantify these concepts by researching the link between SEL and academic outcomes. The study digs into the interdependencies that are so important to educational outcomes today:

“To navigate, indeed, thrive, in this turbulent new world requires careful balance between often competing demands. When innovation clashes with continuity; equity with freedom; autonomy with community; efficiency with the democratic process, what is the right answer? And is there one single right answer when differences seem irreconcilable? Let’s look at it another way. Perhaps it is not the answer that’s important so much as how we think about the question. We need to think in more integrated and creative ways. We need to recognize interconnections, be able to handle tensions and dilemmas, feel at ease with ambiguity, persist even in difficult times. We need an optimistic outlook that there are answers to our differences. These are the qualities—the skills—that help us live and work together resiliently and productively. And school is where we can learn and sharpen these skills.”

The study uncovered some important interdependencies between SEL and academic outcomes and identified other areas for further research. Some findings include:

Students’ social and emotional skills are strong predictors of school grades across students’ background, age cohorts, and geographic locations.
Socioeconomic status is the most significant correlate of students’ future educational expectations. Yet, among students of similar socioeconomic background, differences in expectations of completing tertiary education are related to differences in social and emotional skills such as intellectual curiosity.
The relationship between social and emotional skills and school performance is nuanced. Some skills are essentially uncorrelated with school performance, but other skills, most notably persistence and curiosity, are strongly related to higher school performance for both 10- and 15-year-olds.
Levels of creativity and curiosity are significantly lower among 15-year-olds than 10-year-olds, suggesting a decline in creativity as children enter adolescence.
How 15-year-olds portrayed their social and emotional strengths was strongly associated with their career expectations.

How do educators frame these important interdependencies for families at a time when anxiety is so high? How do educators respond to parent fears around learning loss and future success? In a blog post for the Learning Policy Institute, authors Sheldon Berman and Linda Darling-Hammond suggest that we need “to help parents understand the different ways in which schools approach SEL instruction through a combination of direct instruction, integration into academics, creation of identity safe-communities within classrooms and schools, and provision of service-learning opportunities that deepen social and cognitive skill development.” In essence, we need to help students, families, and our extended communities understand how these interdependencies weave together.

Our children can thrive beyond this difficult time and prepare for a world that will require them not just to succeed in one career but to be flexible and adaptive for a lifetime in which they will no doubt pursue many different careers. To do so, we must begin to think in polarities and embrace the interdependencies in education today.