Why the Whole-School Social Emotional Model Works
by Jennie Wadsworth, M.A. and Jennifer Johnston-Jones, Ph.D.
Integrating social-emotional learning (SEL) isn’t a quick or easy path for schools to embark on, but it is a necessary one if we are to keep our schools safe and develop thriving learning communities. In this article, we not only share research behind the importance of Whole-School social-emotional learning, but also provide cost-effective and practical strategies that can make this goal realistic to implement without overburdening teachers or school budgets.
What is the Whole-School SEL Model?
The Whole-School Social Emotional Learning Model invites every member of the school community to be a part of positive change by learning essential social emotional life skills from a trauma-informed perspective. From the parents/caregivers to the students and the teachers, and custodians and classroom assistants, every adult involved in a student’s daily life is invited to learn the components of SEL along with the children.
The beauty of this trauma-informed model is that not only will the adults help the children, but the SEL skills the adults learn could also improve their lives. Most school-based interventions address only the baseline tier of “typical” misbehavior. The Whole-School SEL model addresses all types of behavior so that all students needs are met. Most schools cannot be expected to implement this model with current financial and staff resources, so out-of-the-box thinking is essential to bring in necessary resources.
Teachers Need Support
How can teachers be expected to learn and implement all of these new SEL skills while keeping up with state testing, new curriculums and the ever-diminishing attention spans of students? They can’t. In order for Social Emotional Learning to be truly effective, teachers need help. Formalized partnerships with school leadership, local universities and PTAs can help transform this important dream into reality.
Malibu Model
Our Lady of Malibu has partnered with Roots & Wings, a non-profit organization, to implement their Whole-School SEL model. With non-profit partnership, the model is extremely cost-effective and less burdensome for teachers to integrate into the existing curriculum as it includes additional staffing at a fraction of the cost. For example, at Our Lady of Malibu, having SEL Specialists on site every school day during all school hours, a weekly parent educator, and a teacher trainer / coach for the year is less than one staff salary at minimum wage. Additionally, with the help of certified Positive Discipline and trauma-informed educators to provide training - and coaching for the parents and teachers, the adults have the support they need. To assist the students in learning SEL and help the teachers to teach SEL in the classroom, psychology graduate students, called SEL Specialists, are brought in. The SEL Specialists help teach growth mindset, run class meetings, teach mindfulness, teach kindness, teach conflict resolution, and other SEL skills. That way, the teachers can focus on teaching and have help for the children who may need SEL learning but who do not qualify for an IEP or special education services.
Social and Emotional Learning is a Social Justice Issue
Social and Emotional Learning training has become an essential social justice tool to support students’ emotional resources and life skills. For children who are raised in impoverished families, parents must often work longer hours and are therefore less available to model social emotional skills at home and are less involved. Living in poverty can also lead to a constant stress that creates a “pattern of trauma-organized behaviors that impairs family functioning and alters children’s neurological development” (Craig, 2016, p.24; Tomer, 2014).
For children who are not living in poverty there are still social justice issues: experiencing racism, being raised by parents with mental illness, or living in an abusive household are only some other other social justice issues that can impair a child’s potential. Research conducted by the Comer School Development Program in public schools around the country indicates that a well-implemented social and emotional learning program is an essential equalizing tool that can significantly lower the achievement gap (Comer, 2005).
The Whole-School SEL Model teaches social emotional skills as part of an integrated curriculum so that students who get less opportunity to learn these skills at home will learn them at school. While schools can’t singlehandedly solve larger socio-economic inequities, research shows that “schools can (and do) make a considerable difference in the lives of children and youth who live in poverty”(Parrett & Budge 2012, p.49).
The Whole-School SEL Model:Training Components
Teachers can be motivated to incorporate a positive discipline approach once they understand the neurological evidence as to why it is better than traditional consequences and punishment. From more than a decade of training teachers in Los Angeles, we’ve learned that when teachers learn how children’s brains respond to trauma, they are much more willing to embrace teaching SEL in their classrooms and try a positive discipline approach. We know that traumatic experiences are often the root of misbehavior. When schools discipline with shame and punishment, it re-traumatizes the students that are experiencing or have experienced trauma. What students need is a cure for the root of the behavior, not punishment for responding to a traumatic situation. Research shows that a positive instructional approach is more effective than traditional punishment-based alternatives in improving student academic success and improving overall school climate (Horner, 2000; Myers, 2001). The key to undoing the damage to children’s brains caused by trauma is collaborative, caring, predictable relationships with adults (Craig, 2016, p .26). In other words, our toughest students, the ones with behavioral challenges need adults they trust to collaborate with them to improve their behavior not adults they fear will punish them. Within the Whole-School SEL Model, teaching teachers the science and studies
behind a positive discipline approach is an essential first step to getting schools motivated to adopt SEL into their culture.
Encouragement not Praise: Teach Growth Mindset
What we now know from Carol Dweck and other positive psychologists is that all positive feedback is not created equally. In her studies of the effects of praise, Dweck discovered that praise actually made students less motivated and resilient in the face of challenges whereas process-oriented encouragement increased students’ efforts to succeed. (Dweck, 2016, p. 178) This research has far reaching implications for teachers in both academic and behavioral realms. When teachers are trained on moving from a fixed to a growth mindset, their classrooms become emotionally safe spaces for students to make mistakes and take risks. Dweck also cites schools that use growth mindset to train students to manage their emotions have seen reduced bullying (pp. 172-174). For a student coming to school with lagging social and emotional skills, an encouraging teacher, classroom and school environment can be transformative.
Class meetings: Teach Collaboration and Community
Class meetings are a powerful tool for equity and inclusion that are done by many positive classroom management systems: Positive Discipline, Responsive Classroom, Restorative Practices, and Collaborative & Proactive Solutions. When done right, class meetings activate the good will and problem-solving of the entire class (Nelsen, Lott, & Glenn, 2013). The structured practice of sitting in a circle and learning to listen to each other empowers the entire class to solve social conflicts, motivates students to help each other, and creates a resilient group bond where each student is valued and respected.
Connection before Correction: Teach Empathy & Relational Motivation
The way a teacher perceives the disciplinary moment has a huge impact on the student’s response to being disciplined. Researchers from Stanford looked at to what extent a teacher’s “punitive response to misbehavior can...incite the destructive, oppositional behavior it aims to prevent”(Okonofua, Paunesku & Walton, 2016). Their results confirmed that what teachers need is an empathic mindset that “[values] a student’s perspective and [maintains] high-quality relationships during disciplinary interactions.” In this recently conducted study of 31 middle school math teachers, “a brief online intervention to encourage an empathic mindset...about discipline halved year-long suspension rates”(Okonofua, Paunesku & Walton 2016). From this study, we can see how powerful the teacher’s emphatic mindset is to reducing student misbehavior.
Solutions-Focused Consequences: Teach Problem-Solving
The two archetypal discipline styles, punish or ignore, do not train the student to solve a problem and make a better choice next time. Our go-to methods for handling our toughest students, detention, suspension and expulsion, aren’t making these students less violent or more well-behaved. The zero tolerance policies that sprang up after Gun Free Schools Act of 1994 have lead to more, not less, behavior infractions and suspensions (APA Task Force, 2008). The hardest part of using solutions-focused consequences for teachers is that they are asked to give up control of the consequence for a process of collaborating with the misbehaving student. In shifting from a crime and punishment mentality to a solutions-focused one, the teacher first completes the empathy step with the student, connection before correction, to know what the problem is. The power in this collaborative approach is that the student feels listened
to, also hears the teachers concerns, and is asked to participate in solving the problem. An effective solution addresses everyone’s concerns and is realistic. (Greene, 2014 p. 94)
The View From Seattle: How Seattle Public Schools is integrating SEL into the School Curriculum
In September of 2015, the Seattle Public Schools (SPS), in response to what they perceived as high suspension rates of their elementary school students for non-violent, non-criminal offenses, committed to “take actions to break the School to Prison pipeline by eliminating out of school suspensions for students in K through 5th grade” (Seattle School District #1 Board Resolution Resolution No. 2014/15-35). They are now in the vanguard of school districts developing and implementing SEL programs. As David Lewis, Program Manager for SPS Department of Behavioral Health, told us, “We are the first district in the country, as far as I know, that has taken our general funds to dedicate to having a department that is focused on trauma and social emotional learning.”
Leveraging the Department of Behavioral Health, SPS has worked for 3 years to build SEL programs in a majority of their 103 schools. Lewis said that the key to the success of their school programs has been trust-building and collaboration between his department and the schools. He described phase one as convincing the teachers of the value of SEL program rollouts by doing school climate surveys and sharing data on trauma. According to Lewis, in some SPS schools, over half the students perceived that the adults at school didn’t care about them. This data was a big eye-opener for the teachers and administration in those schools and made them eager to learn SEL skills: “In education we've taught reading, writing and math for hundreds of years so we have figured out lots of different ways to do that from different angles.
But when we talk about a whole child or social emotional learning, there's a lot to still be learned from that.... Our teachers aren’t clinical psychologists that have backgrounds in brain science and neuroscience. The success has been that they wanted to understand that.” Lewis is encouraged by the results SPS is experiencing: “We have kids that are remaining in the classroom, not in disciplinary action, and while they are remaining in class they are actually accessing their learning. If that class feels safe, their brain is in a place where it actually retains the learning and now we are closing achievement gaps.”
In conclusion, when trauma-informed SEL learning is taught to parents, students, teachers and staff, it provides the support required that will equalize many of the social inequities and trauma that all students deserve to be freed from. Instead of being dismayed by the data that shows the same groups underperforming academically and behaviorally every year, we finally have a clear path to close the achievement gap. A thoughtfully-implemented SEL Whole-School program can transform school culture by addressing the root of the problem- trauma, and give adults and children the social and emotional skills to overcome it and live the life they deserve.
BIOS:
Jennie Wadsworth is an educational consultant who has trained hundreds of teachers on classroom management, student engagement and motivation, and social-emotional learning. www.jenniewadsworth.com
Dr. Jennifer Johnston-Jones is a clinical psychologist, author of Transformational Parenting, and founder of Roots & Wings Institute for Family Excellence. www.DrJenniferJones.com
References
American Psychological Association Task Force. (2008). Are zero tolerance policies effective in the schools? An evidentiary review and recommendations. American Psychologist, 63, 852–862.
Comer, J.P. (2005). Childhood and adolescent development: The critical missing focus in school reform. Phi Delta Kappan, 86, 757-763.
Craig, S.E. (2106). Trauma-sensitive schools: Learning communities transforming children’s lives, K-5. New York: Teachers College Press.
Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, 2nd edition. New York: Ballantine Books.
Greene, R. W. (2014). Lost at school: Why our kids with behavioral challenges are falling through the cracks and how we can help them. New York: Scribner.
Horner, R. (2000). Positive behavior supports. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 57(2), 97-105.
Lewis, D. (2018, April 26). Telephone Interview.
Myers, D. (2001, April). Creating a continuum of effective behavioral supports. Paper presented at the meeting of the Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network, Harrisburg, PA.
Nelsen, J., Lott, L., & Glenn, H. S. (2013). Positive discipline in the classroom: Developing mutual respect, cooperation, and responsibility in your classroom, second edition. Roseville, Calif: Prima Pub.
Okonofua, J. A., Paunesku, D., & Walton, G.M. (2016). Brief intervention to encourage empathic discipline cuts suspension rates in half among adolescents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113 (19), 5221-5226.
Seattle School District (2014/15). Board Resolution. Retreived from: http://www.seattleschools.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_543/File/District/Departments/School% 20Board/15-16agendas/092315agenda/20150923_SuspensionResolution.pdf
Tomer, J.F. (2014). Adverse Childhood Experiences, Poverty, and Inequality: Toward an Understanding of the Connections and the Cures. World Economic Review 3: 20-36.
Parrett, W.H. & Budge, K.M. (2012). Turning high-poverty schools into high-performing schools. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
by Jennie Wadsworth, M.A. and Jennifer Johnston-Jones, Ph.D.
Integrating social-emotional learning (SEL) isn’t a quick or easy path for schools to embark on, but it is a necessary one if we are to keep our schools safe and develop thriving learning communities. In this article, we not only share research behind the importance of Whole-School social-emotional learning, but also provide cost-effective and practical strategies that can make this goal realistic to implement without overburdening teachers or school budgets.
What is the Whole-School SEL Model?
The Whole-School Social Emotional Learning Model invites every member of the school community to be a part of positive change by learning essential social emotional life skills from a trauma-informed perspective. From the parents/caregivers to the students and the teachers, and custodians and classroom assistants, every adult involved in a student’s daily life is invited to learn the components of SEL along with the children.
The beauty of this trauma-informed model is that not only will the adults help the children, but the SEL skills the adults learn could also improve their lives. Most school-based interventions address only the baseline tier of “typical” misbehavior. The Whole-School SEL model addresses all types of behavior so that all students needs are met. Most schools cannot be expected to implement this model with current financial and staff resources, so out-of-the-box thinking is essential to bring in necessary resources.
Teachers Need Support
How can teachers be expected to learn and implement all of these new SEL skills while keeping up with state testing, new curriculums and the ever-diminishing attention spans of students? They can’t. In order for Social Emotional Learning to be truly effective, teachers need help. Formalized partnerships with school leadership, local universities and PTAs can help transform this important dream into reality.
Malibu Model
Our Lady of Malibu has partnered with Roots & Wings, a non-profit organization, to implement their Whole-School SEL model. With non-profit partnership, the model is extremely cost-effective and less burdensome for teachers to integrate into the existing curriculum as it includes additional staffing at a fraction of the cost. For example, at Our Lady of Malibu, having SEL Specialists on site every school day during all school hours, a weekly parent educator, and a teacher trainer / coach for the year is less than one staff salary at minimum wage. Additionally, with the help of certified Positive Discipline and trauma-informed educators to provide training - and coaching for the parents and teachers, the adults have the support they need. To assist the students in learning SEL and help the teachers to teach SEL in the classroom, psychology graduate students, called SEL Specialists, are brought in. The SEL Specialists help teach growth mindset, run class meetings, teach mindfulness, teach kindness, teach conflict resolution, and other SEL skills. That way, the teachers can focus on teaching and have help for the children who may need SEL learning but who do not qualify for an IEP or special education services.
Social and Emotional Learning is a Social Justice Issue
Social and Emotional Learning training has become an essential social justice tool to support students’ emotional resources and life skills. For children who are raised in impoverished families, parents must often work longer hours and are therefore less available to model social emotional skills at home and are less involved. Living in poverty can also lead to a constant stress that creates a “pattern of trauma-organized behaviors that impairs family functioning and alters children’s neurological development” (Craig, 2016, p.24; Tomer, 2014).
For children who are not living in poverty there are still social justice issues: experiencing racism, being raised by parents with mental illness, or living in an abusive household are only some other other social justice issues that can impair a child’s potential. Research conducted by the Comer School Development Program in public schools around the country indicates that a well-implemented social and emotional learning program is an essential equalizing tool that can significantly lower the achievement gap (Comer, 2005).
The Whole-School SEL Model teaches social emotional skills as part of an integrated curriculum so that students who get less opportunity to learn these skills at home will learn them at school. While schools can’t singlehandedly solve larger socio-economic inequities, research shows that “schools can (and do) make a considerable difference in the lives of children and youth who live in poverty”(Parrett & Budge 2012, p.49).
The Whole-School SEL Model:Training Components
- Trauma-Informed Community: Teach Trauma Sensitivity
- Encouragement not Praise: Teach Growth Mindset
- Class Meetings/Family Meetings: Teach Collaboration and Community
- Connection before Correction: Teach Empathy & Relational Motivation
- Solutions-Focused Consequences: Teach Problem-Solving
Teachers can be motivated to incorporate a positive discipline approach once they understand the neurological evidence as to why it is better than traditional consequences and punishment. From more than a decade of training teachers in Los Angeles, we’ve learned that when teachers learn how children’s brains respond to trauma, they are much more willing to embrace teaching SEL in their classrooms and try a positive discipline approach. We know that traumatic experiences are often the root of misbehavior. When schools discipline with shame and punishment, it re-traumatizes the students that are experiencing or have experienced trauma. What students need is a cure for the root of the behavior, not punishment for responding to a traumatic situation. Research shows that a positive instructional approach is more effective than traditional punishment-based alternatives in improving student academic success and improving overall school climate (Horner, 2000; Myers, 2001). The key to undoing the damage to children’s brains caused by trauma is collaborative, caring, predictable relationships with adults (Craig, 2016, p .26). In other words, our toughest students, the ones with behavioral challenges need adults they trust to collaborate with them to improve their behavior not adults they fear will punish them. Within the Whole-School SEL Model, teaching teachers the science and studies
behind a positive discipline approach is an essential first step to getting schools motivated to adopt SEL into their culture.
Encouragement not Praise: Teach Growth Mindset
What we now know from Carol Dweck and other positive psychologists is that all positive feedback is not created equally. In her studies of the effects of praise, Dweck discovered that praise actually made students less motivated and resilient in the face of challenges whereas process-oriented encouragement increased students’ efforts to succeed. (Dweck, 2016, p. 178) This research has far reaching implications for teachers in both academic and behavioral realms. When teachers are trained on moving from a fixed to a growth mindset, their classrooms become emotionally safe spaces for students to make mistakes and take risks. Dweck also cites schools that use growth mindset to train students to manage their emotions have seen reduced bullying (pp. 172-174). For a student coming to school with lagging social and emotional skills, an encouraging teacher, classroom and school environment can be transformative.
Class meetings: Teach Collaboration and Community
Class meetings are a powerful tool for equity and inclusion that are done by many positive classroom management systems: Positive Discipline, Responsive Classroom, Restorative Practices, and Collaborative & Proactive Solutions. When done right, class meetings activate the good will and problem-solving of the entire class (Nelsen, Lott, & Glenn, 2013). The structured practice of sitting in a circle and learning to listen to each other empowers the entire class to solve social conflicts, motivates students to help each other, and creates a resilient group bond where each student is valued and respected.
Connection before Correction: Teach Empathy & Relational Motivation
The way a teacher perceives the disciplinary moment has a huge impact on the student’s response to being disciplined. Researchers from Stanford looked at to what extent a teacher’s “punitive response to misbehavior can...incite the destructive, oppositional behavior it aims to prevent”(Okonofua, Paunesku & Walton, 2016). Their results confirmed that what teachers need is an empathic mindset that “[values] a student’s perspective and [maintains] high-quality relationships during disciplinary interactions.” In this recently conducted study of 31 middle school math teachers, “a brief online intervention to encourage an empathic mindset...about discipline halved year-long suspension rates”(Okonofua, Paunesku & Walton 2016). From this study, we can see how powerful the teacher’s emphatic mindset is to reducing student misbehavior.
Solutions-Focused Consequences: Teach Problem-Solving
The two archetypal discipline styles, punish or ignore, do not train the student to solve a problem and make a better choice next time. Our go-to methods for handling our toughest students, detention, suspension and expulsion, aren’t making these students less violent or more well-behaved. The zero tolerance policies that sprang up after Gun Free Schools Act of 1994 have lead to more, not less, behavior infractions and suspensions (APA Task Force, 2008). The hardest part of using solutions-focused consequences for teachers is that they are asked to give up control of the consequence for a process of collaborating with the misbehaving student. In shifting from a crime and punishment mentality to a solutions-focused one, the teacher first completes the empathy step with the student, connection before correction, to know what the problem is. The power in this collaborative approach is that the student feels listened
to, also hears the teachers concerns, and is asked to participate in solving the problem. An effective solution addresses everyone’s concerns and is realistic. (Greene, 2014 p. 94)
The View From Seattle: How Seattle Public Schools is integrating SEL into the School Curriculum
In September of 2015, the Seattle Public Schools (SPS), in response to what they perceived as high suspension rates of their elementary school students for non-violent, non-criminal offenses, committed to “take actions to break the School to Prison pipeline by eliminating out of school suspensions for students in K through 5th grade” (Seattle School District #1 Board Resolution Resolution No. 2014/15-35). They are now in the vanguard of school districts developing and implementing SEL programs. As David Lewis, Program Manager for SPS Department of Behavioral Health, told us, “We are the first district in the country, as far as I know, that has taken our general funds to dedicate to having a department that is focused on trauma and social emotional learning.”
Leveraging the Department of Behavioral Health, SPS has worked for 3 years to build SEL programs in a majority of their 103 schools. Lewis said that the key to the success of their school programs has been trust-building and collaboration between his department and the schools. He described phase one as convincing the teachers of the value of SEL program rollouts by doing school climate surveys and sharing data on trauma. According to Lewis, in some SPS schools, over half the students perceived that the adults at school didn’t care about them. This data was a big eye-opener for the teachers and administration in those schools and made them eager to learn SEL skills: “In education we've taught reading, writing and math for hundreds of years so we have figured out lots of different ways to do that from different angles.
But when we talk about a whole child or social emotional learning, there's a lot to still be learned from that.... Our teachers aren’t clinical psychologists that have backgrounds in brain science and neuroscience. The success has been that they wanted to understand that.” Lewis is encouraged by the results SPS is experiencing: “We have kids that are remaining in the classroom, not in disciplinary action, and while they are remaining in class they are actually accessing their learning. If that class feels safe, their brain is in a place where it actually retains the learning and now we are closing achievement gaps.”
In conclusion, when trauma-informed SEL learning is taught to parents, students, teachers and staff, it provides the support required that will equalize many of the social inequities and trauma that all students deserve to be freed from. Instead of being dismayed by the data that shows the same groups underperforming academically and behaviorally every year, we finally have a clear path to close the achievement gap. A thoughtfully-implemented SEL Whole-School program can transform school culture by addressing the root of the problem- trauma, and give adults and children the social and emotional skills to overcome it and live the life they deserve.
BIOS:
Jennie Wadsworth is an educational consultant who has trained hundreds of teachers on classroom management, student engagement and motivation, and social-emotional learning. www.jenniewadsworth.com
Dr. Jennifer Johnston-Jones is a clinical psychologist, author of Transformational Parenting, and founder of Roots & Wings Institute for Family Excellence. www.DrJenniferJones.com
References
American Psychological Association Task Force. (2008). Are zero tolerance policies effective in the schools? An evidentiary review and recommendations. American Psychologist, 63, 852–862.
Comer, J.P. (2005). Childhood and adolescent development: The critical missing focus in school reform. Phi Delta Kappan, 86, 757-763.
Craig, S.E. (2106). Trauma-sensitive schools: Learning communities transforming children’s lives, K-5. New York: Teachers College Press.
Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, 2nd edition. New York: Ballantine Books.
Greene, R. W. (2014). Lost at school: Why our kids with behavioral challenges are falling through the cracks and how we can help them. New York: Scribner.
Horner, R. (2000). Positive behavior supports. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 57(2), 97-105.
Lewis, D. (2018, April 26). Telephone Interview.
Myers, D. (2001, April). Creating a continuum of effective behavioral supports. Paper presented at the meeting of the Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network, Harrisburg, PA.
Nelsen, J., Lott, L., & Glenn, H. S. (2013). Positive discipline in the classroom: Developing mutual respect, cooperation, and responsibility in your classroom, second edition. Roseville, Calif: Prima Pub.
Okonofua, J. A., Paunesku, D., & Walton, G.M. (2016). Brief intervention to encourage empathic discipline cuts suspension rates in half among adolescents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113 (19), 5221-5226.
Seattle School District (2014/15). Board Resolution. Retreived from: http://www.seattleschools.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_543/File/District/Departments/School% 20Board/15-16agendas/092315agenda/20150923_SuspensionResolution.pdf
Tomer, J.F. (2014). Adverse Childhood Experiences, Poverty, and Inequality: Toward an Understanding of the Connections and the Cures. World Economic Review 3: 20-36.
Parrett, W.H. & Budge, K.M. (2012). Turning high-poverty schools into high-performing schools. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.