The good news: Social-emotional learning is hot. The bad news: Some of it is gives cognition a bad name.
In 2014, I ran a post by veteran educator Larry Ferlazzo about how social and emotional learning (SEL) — and its ancestor, character education — was being manipulated by some in the education world. He wrote then:
I am a big supporter of educators helping students develop many of the qualities highlighted in the concept of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) — perseverance (or “grit”); self-control; personal responsibility, etc. I apply it regularly in my classroom, write in my blog about practical ideas on implementing SEL lessons in schools, and have even authored two books on the topic (and will have a third one published next year).At the same time, I am concerned that many proponents of Social Emotional Learning might not be aware of the increasing danger to SEL of being “co-opted” by well-heeled and well-known groups and individuals, ranging from “school reformers” to columnists like The New York Times’ David Brooks, and converted into a “Let Them Eat Character” strategy. I fear those “Blame The Victim” efforts may be used to distract from the importance of supplying needed financial resources to schools, providing increased support to families by dealing with growing income and wealth inequality, and developing a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy.“School reformers” in Los Angeles are using SEL terms (they even call their report, True Grit) to justify pushing performance pay for teachers and rewards for students, as well as advocating for an increased emphasis on being data-driven (instead of being data-informed) through the use of ”dynamic data.” KIPP schools use the destructive strategy of grading character traits. And, in a column last month, David Brooks proclaimed that Social Emotional Learning and training “average” parents to become better ones will take care of everything.
It’s 2019, and as SEL becomes increasingly popular, there are new concerns about the way it is interpreted. The following piece was written by Mike Rose, a highly respected research professor in the University of California at Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. And, interestingly enough, he wrote it after reading a new column by David Brooks of the New York Times about how students learn.
Rose is the author of books that include “The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker,” which demonstrated the heavy cognitive demands of blue-collar and service work and what it takes to do such work well, despite the tendency of many to underestimate and undervalue the intelligence involved in such work. His other books include “Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education,” “Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America” and “Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us.”
This post appeared on Rose’s blog, and he gave me permission to publish it.
By Mike Rose
On January 17, 2019, the New York Times, in the person of one of the newspaper’s premier columnists, David Brooks, discovered social and emotional learning. In a column titled “Students Learn from People They Love,” Brooks summarizes some of the research that over the last few decades has gotten us to appreciate the role of emotion in learning and thus the importance of the quality of the relationship between teachers and their students. “We used to have this top-down notion that reason was on a teeter-totter with emotion,” writes Brooks. “If you wanted to be rational and think well, you had to suppress those primitive gremlins, the CONTINUE READING: The good news: Social-emotional learning is hot. The bad news: Some of it is gives cognition a bad name. - The Washington Post
