I hate it when retired teachers comment on how glad they are not to be in the classroom in 2024. Their reasons range from academic and justifiable (“teachers have lost their professional autonomy”) to annoying (“kids today…”) to reflections on teaching in the era of Trump, when general nastiness is perceived as strength.
When teachers leave the classroom early in their careers, we lose something that was once commonly understood, across a diverse nation: teachers as respected members of the community, educated people whose opinions were valued. Teachers taught kids to wash their hands, tie their shoes and read books, and hauled them up for threatening weaker kids on the playground. And parents appreciated those efforts.
In between critical content, from calculating sales tax to constructing a coherent paragraph, teachers must build little communities where kids can work productively together, pass safely through the halls, and experience the parameters of getting along with others.
Are all teachers successful in nurturing this? Of course not.
But all teachers do understand that there is not a lot of learning happening without order, structure and consideration for others. Every single teacher, from green newbie to grizzled veteran, struggles with this. And there’s turnover every year, a new set of behavioral challenges that need to be addressed.
It’s the foundation of that recently vilified educational concept: Social-emotional learning.
I am currently running for school board in the community where I (happily) live—a school district that is well-run and offers solid programming, a place where students are known and cared for. I attended a Board retreat last week, and as part of the goal setting process, the facilitator invited attendees to name teachers or other school staff who are doing an outstanding job.
A dozen hands went up immediately, and the comments made by Board members, administrators and parents were all about things staff members did to enhance students’ personal growth and well-being. In other words, social-emotional learning, woven into curriculum, instruction and school climate.
Understand: all teachers either consciously include social-emotional elements in their daily practice, or benefit from good SEL, instituted by other educators in the pipeline, teaching kids how to behave in school along with their ABCs.
This—empathically—does not refer to pre-packaged “character” curriculums, as one size never fits all. You can’t buy genuine social-emotional learning. It has to be custom-tailored to the kids in front of you.
If you try to remove genuine social-emotional considerations from instruction and classroom management, you’ve created more problems for yourself. It’s the old saw about kids needing to know the teacher cares and will try to make their classroom a safe space for everyone.
So they can learn.
I’ve read lots of pieces about the corrosive effects of SEL, which generally boil down to the fact that SEL, as a set of pedagogical ideas, is not value-neutral. And that’s true. Social-emotional learning reflects the values of the teacher and school, whether explicitly expressed or not.
That’s really not what anti-SEL commenters are worried about, however. As self-titled “Instruction Geek” Daniel Buck says: At its worst, SEL is a means to slip progressive politics into the classroom.
Gasp! There’s the rub, all right. Things like examining evidence for truth? Not in my school!
In fact, there’s always been social-emotional learning in schools, from the dunce cap to the hand-slap ruler wielded by Sister Victorine against misbehavers in your fifth grade. Labeling it and examining it—whether you call it character education, or classroom rules—is a good thing. What are we trying to teach kids, besides Algebra and World History?
I’ve always been intrigued by the KIPP Charter Schools’ founding motto, established in 1994: Work hard. Be nice. Those are certainly two explicit values, values embedded in what I think Americans want from their public schools—academic rigor and cooperative students.
When the KIPP organization decided to drop that motto in the summer of 2020, here’s what their CEO, Richard Barth said: It ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does not align with our vision of students being free to create the future they want.
Which the Wall Street Journal and a dozen right-wing bloggers called “woke nonsense”—and worse.
If KIPP schools can re-think their expressed values, for the benefit of students, so can public school teachers. It’s possible for schools to reflect the values of their community, as well as cultivating the characteristics of civic engagement, kindness and diligence.
It’s how you build a learning community.
Teacher in a strange land 
Well said.
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I wish you so much luck in your run for school board, Nancy! Any school district would benefit from you on their board.
Chief concerns for SEL which I believe you alluded to involve what many see as the unnecessary invasive behavioral data collected on children. Who wants this information? What are they using it for? And are the assessments fair? Will they help or hurt the student?
I’m sure you’d agree, to authentically address SEL, teachers would benefit with class size reduction and the opportunities to better learn about student and family needs.
Thanks for writing about this.
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Thanks.
I’ve not had any experience with SEL that involves collecting behavioral data on students– which I would, of course, be adamantly opposed to as a blanket policy, and which also happens routinely, esp. with students who have an IEP, where monitoring might be part of such a plan.
To me, the first rule of expert or even competent teaching is: Know your students. Which is, of course, easier when that number is limited. But speaking as an instrumental music teacher, you can know your students and encourage an atmosphere of caring and calm when you have lots of students.
If teachers merely spent time and energy getting to know their students and those students’ home situations, it would qualify as a base for social-emotional learning. Not the prepackaged variety, but the real skills in teaching.
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I am not a fan of “social-emotional learning” as it simply carves out one aspect of good teaching and makes it seem “special.” It is special . . . as special as all of the other parts of good teaching, but it sounds airy-fairy to conservatives who are proselytized with “readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic.”
I have preached (Amen!) for many, many years that we need to explain what an education is to our at large audience. Most think an education is the transference of knowledge from good sources: teachers, books, etc. into the minds of students. Since the amount of knowledge on any one topic that could be so transferred is <<1% of the knowledge on those topics, that is a fool’s errand. I define an education as “a social process in which people learn how to work and learn together.” This is why computers can’t teach our kids as they need to work with their peers and adults (mostly teachers) to get where they want to go.
Business owners know that new hires straight out of school know basics but they have much to learn about how the company works and what specialized knowledge they need to pick up. Those employers expect their new hires to be able to pick up on those things quickly because they have learned how to learn and how to learn together. (New hires are often made part of teams.)
The classic case is hiring a new cook in a restaurant. The new hire knows how to cook and maybe run a kitchen, but they need to learn how things run and are cooked in their new restaurant. The really, really good ones can do all that is needed in one day. And that is how the restaurant owner knows he/she has hired a winner.
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You’ve constructed a better description of what I call social-emotional learning than I did–
THANKS. I agree with every word.
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SEL has been a part of teaching since at least Plato. However, it got a bad name when people tried to standardize it.
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Exactly.
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I have just retired from AAPS and now live in Empire. I once had to good fortune to talk with you at an Ann Arbor Open conference when you had just recently moved to Cedar. You’re the real deal and know what it takes to create a great school. I have shared with everyone I know here – I have been a summer resident for quite some time – that you would be an incredible addition to the Glen Lake School Board. I am looking forward to hearing that you have secured a seat on the Board. Thanks for this post.
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Wow– thanks Christine. I loved those Ann Arbor Open conferences– homemade PD, just as it should be. Thanks for your vote!
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I am a bit confused by your last point.
You seem to say that inserting some set of values into the classroom, which may or may not reflect the values of your students and their families, is inevitable. But you go on to praise KIPP schools for dropping the motto “Work hard. Be nice,” which you earlier acknowledge as embodying two values fairly universally agreed-upon among Americans. The old motto reflected the community values of kindness and diligence that you encourage schools to cultivate, did it not?
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I would say that values insert themselves into the classroom, whether the teacher chooses to bring them in or not. Especially now. If you’ve worked as an adult in a school at any level, you know that kids bring what’s happening in the outside world and their homes into the classroom every day, for better and often worse.
Which is why I found the KIPP example so interesting. Many teachers, I think would, agree that working hard and being nice are core values– but KIPP, after living with that motto for 16 years, eventually perceived that their students were bringing what was happening in 2020 into their schools. They decided ‘work hard and be nice’ stressed the values of compliance and submission, when their real goal was giving students the skills to freely pursue their own paths.
I’m hardly a fan of KIPP schools. But I give them big props for paying attention to the way their students and families perceived the old motto. When interpreted that way, the motto doesn’t feel like elevating kindness and diligence– it feels like ‘chop wood, carry water, don’t talk back.’
I was aiming to use the story as an example of how social-emotional learning (or character education, take your pick) has to be tied to the students and communities you’re serving. Values are fluid things, and the language we use to promote certain characteristics is loaded.
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Hello Nancy,
I am a student going to school for teaching. I am happy I’ve stumbled upon your article. You might be aware of this, but social-emotional learning is discussed heavily in my college curriculum. Generally, it’s good to learn social-emotional learning. As someone who was not aware of this subject matter when I was in school, it would have been beneficial to me.
However, your perspective is one that is shared by my colleagues and the students that we interact with in the field. Social-emotional learning cannot be forced upon anyone. It’s organic and it’s happening all the time.
What I am curious about is how can this subject be integrated into school curriculum so that it is not treated like standardized material? How can it be integrated without being political? Are these impossible questions to ask of school material in modern schooling?
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Congrats on attending a university where social-emotional learning is an acknowledged part of the curriculum. It was, at one time, maybe 20 years ago, the subject of many books, seminars, video series, etc. (And, as you note, it has always been organic.) The shift came after 2000, with No Child Left Behind, and the focus on testing. Policymakers began to support the idea that test scores were real (not just a snapshot in time, impacted by multiple factors) and the only way we could effectively measure the impact of teaching was hard data analysis.
Your questions are perceptive– in fact they’re central to improving your eventual classroom practice. The first building block, for a young or novice teacher is this: Know your students. Listen to them. Care about them. Everyone makes mistakes in their early teaching career, either of commission (being “too political” for your student/family population) or of omission (focusing solely on content, and blaming students when they struggle to learn it). That’s why experience in the classroom truly matters– you will get better at finding the place where respect for your students pays off.
Thanks for a great comment.
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