In case you wondered, Peter Greene is not a fan of SEL (social-emotional learning). Just because the loathsome Florida Governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t like it is no reason to embrace it. He feels the way about SEL that I always felt about character education. Character education should not be a course or a program; it should implicitly permeate everything you do in teaching honesty, integrity. responsibility, and helpfulness. It must be modeled, expected, reinforced by example, not turned into lessons.
Greene writes:
Social and Emotional Learning is the new target of the GOP attempt to set multiple education brushfires in hopes of stampeding voters towards a Republican victory (as well as one more way for the authoritarian crowd to hammer home their central point of “Trust nobody except Beloved Leader”). The attacks range from overblown to intellectually dishonest to giant piles of bovine fecal matter to the odious, evil charges that the teaching profession is simply a haven for groomers.
And there is irony in these attacks from the right, because SEL is just the latest packaging of what we used to call “soft skills,” and some of the greatest push for getting these into schools has come from the business community (“Hey schools! Fix my meat widgets so they communicate and cooperate better!!”)
All that said, I’m not going to be the one to defend SEL in the classroom.
Perhaps I should say “formal SEL instruction.” SEL has always been in the classroom and always will be, because it’s impossible for an adult teacher to lead a roomful of young humans through learning and education and all the bumps and interactions that come by putting so many human beings in one room–well, you can’t navigate any of that without including SEL. “Don’t interrupt” and “keep your hands to yourself” and every group project ever are part SEL. Everything a teacher imparts, directly or indirectly, about how to work with, talk to, and get along with other humans is SEL. 95% of all the “this teacher changed my life” stories are about SEL and not actual subject content. So it is impossible to remove SEL from a classroom.
But formal SEL is another thing.
As soon as we try to formalize SEL instruction, we run into all sorts of problems. Are we doing it to help people get a better job and better grades or to be a better human being? And if it’s the latter, as it should be, who the heck is going to define what a better human being looks like? And is there just one definition? And if not (as is true), then exactly what sort of assessment are we going to use to measure the “effectiveness” of the program or the social and emotional learnedness of the students? And can you promise me that you aren’t going to record all that data to build some sort of digital social and emotional swellness file on each student? Also, will the program require every teacher to have a trained counselor level of expertise? Every single one of these questions ought to stop the march toward formalized SEL instruction dead in its tracks. But it hasn’t-not any of the times SEL, under various monikers has come trundling down the tracks…
If you spend an hour a week talking about how to be a decent person, and the rest of the week behaving like a lousy person, you’re wasting that hour. And if you spend the week being decent people, what do you need that hour of class for?
And, I would add now, you don’t model character for young humans by engaging in lying and slander to score political points. If 2022 is, as some activists are promising, the year that SEL takes over for CRT as the object of panic du jour, good luck to us all. But just because you call out the throwing of poo, that doesn’t mean you have to support the thing the poo’s being thrown.
We agree.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Peter Greene nailed it. We have this insatiable urge to try to map human behavior into marketable chunks of one kind or another. I became intimately involved with “the student will be able to…” statements when trying to write IEP goals. I never quite got the hang of reducing behavior into objectives that were supposed to allow me to count some evidence of that behavior. It was difficult enough in a subject that revolved around numbers, math, and patently impossible to claim that counting occurrences of some arbitrarily designated behavior was evidence of positive growth. It’s not that dissecting behavior was/is without value, but in most cases trying to turn it into data points strips the activity of meaning.
Nailed it, speduktr!!!
I just wrote a “masterpiece” of a comment that disappeared into word press oblivion, so I will just admit that Peter Greene said it all better than I ever could. Let’s see if this comment makes the cut. 🙂
This is a spot on and very important post – with so much to unpack.
Diane sums it all up with, ” it should implicitly permeate everything you do in teaching honesty, integrity. responsibility, and helpfulness. It must be modeled, expected, reinforced by example, not turned into lessons.”
But unfortunately we are so far down the data rabbit hole that…… if there isn’t a concrete “lesson” with some sort of data attached, the thinking is:
1. How do we know teachers are doing their job and being held “accountable” if there isn’t a program or lesson explicitly tied to a measurable outcome.
2. How can we measure that kids are learning if there isn’t data attached to SEL?
More parents should be outraged at the amount of data tracked on their child.
I remember someone advocating an IEP for ever”y child and I shuddered. I spent hours trying to craft objectives prefaced with the student will be able to…” I never taught in a school that managed to meet the lofty goals contained in the process, which would have created an even more egregious mountain of useless paperwork.
I am assuming the “advocate” was not a classroom teacher. Those on the periphery of the classroom can churn out these types of ideas very easily.
Actually, it was! To be fair, though, the intent was to focus attention on all children.
Imagine schools with sufficient resources to have a team–a couple teachers, parents, a guidance counsellor–dedicated to crafting and monitoring a plan for every student! That would be a very different world. When I last taught, the paperwork and meetings for IEPs and 504 plans was insane. Not possible to attend to properly given the rest of the ridiculous workload.
I don’t imagine it is much different now. Classroom special ed teachers were responsible for collecting all the info. The meeting with all those people was after the teacher had spent hours crafting the draft, which never changed much. Ten hours minimum of work on each IEP before you got to the meeting!
I know. Insane. Impossible. Not enough time and enough staff to do this stuff.
I agree entirely.
I apologize for the poor editing. I am on a borrowed computer that makes my attempts at writing even less satisfactory to me than usual.
Your posts were so eloquent, and spot on!!! Thank you!
Thanks, Bob. That is high praise coming from you.
Yep, let’s just keep on with the grit and growth mindset exercises. Continue on with the days long “empathy trainings” and the constant DEI questionnaires/seminars that seem to roil up the emotional/ hormonal minds of adolescents. All of this to try and raise test scores on stupid standardized tests. The problem is that school gun violence is increasing, fights are an every day occurrence, general bad behavior is now the norm and depression/suicide in children is increasing (and this was on the rise BEFORE Covid). But like our government always does, it keeps on with the same bad ideas year after year, hoping it will get better. SEL/DEI is just another reform business model that siphons off tax payer dollars that could be used for more school counselors/psychologists and teachers. Big business wins….the kids lose (and sometimes with their lives).
“Hey schools! Fix my meat widgets so they communicate and cooperate better!” This is really the crux of the problem. The overall big picture approach to education is that developing children into functioning adults is the job of schools that starts in K. The widgets in the school factory are all the same and if we just find the right formula we can churn out productive adults – right?
Diane has posted many times about Finland so I realize this is not a new thought. But I always come back to needing a full paradigm shift – which I don’t think is possible on a large scale in our country.
https://airmail.news/pilot/2022/4/good-news-for-kids-2
“The overall big picture approach to education is that developing children into functioning adults is the job of schools that starts in K.”
What you hint at bt is the purpose of public education. From a review of the 50 state constitutions’ authorizations for public education I consolidated the purpose down to “The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.” With an addendum that if that occurs the state will benefit from having an educated citizenry.
I remember all that character stuff. School is not for that. Kids saying the pledge does not guarantee good citizens. Slogans build nothing relating to character. I remember our district using thousands of dollars to pay someone for an hour of in service to teach us about character. What a waste. SEL is another invention to steer money away from teaching kids about the important stuff.
If you are not a fan of SEL take a look at these two programs:
Capturing Kids Hearts (https://www.capturingkidshearts.org/ )which concentrates on improving the culture in the school throughout the entire school day, from when the student arrive until they go home. Every staff member from the cafeteria workers to adjunct staff are trained along with the teachers.
The Thinking Project (https://www.thethinkingproject.org/) which teaches students to question their negative, stressful thoughts and choose a more positive direction.
They are excellent.
You’ve bought in to the marketing scheme. No school system should need to purcha$e “products” that “teach” kids how to be respectful and kind. Being respectful, considerate and kind is what human nature is all about and is “learned” via modeling from every human that a child interacts with from birth.
Actually, it is teachers who tell me they these two programs in particular along with PBIS but there are others that they think are not worth the investment.
PBIS is a nightmare! It only works for the K-2 kids and then after that, the kids catch onto the scheme. By the time these kids reach MS and they are still using PBIS, the halls/classrooms look like a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Ask me how I know……we pay for the 2nd child to go to private HS. SEL dittoes and the bad behavior were the last straw for us.
An overall approach to creating a positive school culture that teaches and supports healthy social thinking and habits can be really helpful – if it helps teachers create a positive classroom environment….. IF it is embedded within a school that has other things going for it…. such as an appropriate academic curriculum, staff supports, class size, good leadership. . . . .
I checked out the links you posted and both programs look more wholistic in nature. One looked like it would be used with the guidance office / social work to support students social thinking.
Our school used “Responsive Classroom” for many years. The training teachers receive relates to creating an overall culture and how to teach routines and support a healthy social environment. I have only good things to say about Responsive Classroom.
My concern is for SEL programs that are data driven, quick fixes – with pieces of data are collected and stored on individual students. Or SEL that is more of a token system – where children are comparing themselves to others.
Thank you for looking at them. I agree that the ones that are not imbedded sound like next to nothing. You are correct; the one program is lead by certified counselors and the other is imbedded in the whole school environment. Everyone seems very supportive of them. It makes a world of difference if you pick carefully.
What is an SEL program that “collects data”??
I don’t really understand this although I see it referred to all the time.
Do the students in NYC public schools have their social emotional learning data stored somewhere? Where would that be stored and do parents have access to this data?
And I must have a poor imagination because I can’t think of a way that the data about kids’ that would be collected via an SEL program can be monetized?
Do they sell the data on kids with issues to pharmaceutical companies to push/ advertise therapeutic drugs for kids to their parents
Do they sell the data on kids with issues to vendors offering their counseling services for kids to their parents?
NYC Public School Parent, See: James Heckman, Nobel Prize winning “human development economist” who developed the Heckman Equation, a way to monetize soft skills so that impact investors can make up to 13% return on interest. In my school district (and in yours, too) SEL becomes data through surveys done by Panorama Education.
On a local level, you have decisions on individual students made on the basis of data points rather than any more visceral knowledge of what is going on with a child. A high school where I taught used PBIS to “reward” students for positive behavior. The whole process was artificial and disruptive to teaching, and the students were underwhelmed by the whole endeavor. When you think about it is rather demeaning. I don’t know if our data went any further than the administration which was already too far. Any company that used our data to develop new products would have a hard time doing so since utilization was spotty and highly subjective.
I am not familiar with what the NYC schools do for SEL.
Currently we do not collect SEL data, but we did a trial run of a survey that rated behavior of each child using a leichhardt scale.
A few years ago a couple of colleagues tried using “Class Dojo” which tracks student behavior (sometimes displayed on a smartboard/Apple TV) throughout the day. It is displayed in a cute fun way. The teacher inputs class names / data and gives each students points or rewards during the day. Looks cute but the data is stored and reports can be generated on behavior.
PBIS is widely used in schools throughout the country. I believe it has a behavior tracking component (but I could be wrong).
When a program has a behavior tracking component, your child’s teacher’s perception of your child’s behavior (with a score attached) could be saved in a database.
This attached article advocates for tracking students behavior by collecting data:
Click to access 180530_TransformED_MHA.pdf
NYC public school parent:
Also – I am not sure how this data could be monetized or used in the future – but the fact that it’s stored in a databased by a system other than the school may be alarming for some parents.
NYC PSP….. The information is stored on your State Longitudinal Data Base and you SHOULD be able to access that information with the correct paperwork. A blog post from 5 yrs ago(?)(NPE) alerted to this and had a link for additional info and a sample letter to send to get this information. Remember as a kid when your parents would tell you to stay out of trouble or it would go on your “permanent record”?…..well, it now really goes on your permanent record thanks to SEL and surveys/questionnaires brought into schools via 3rd party vendors (the erosion of FERPA allows this).
NYC PSP….and another thing. The blog post from 5 yrs ago graded the SLDS from around the country on security measures. Most were not very secure and many were poor. Student PPI is stored on the data bases. What happens when those SLDS’s get hacked and student info gets into the hands of some really bad actors?
I looked up and read about “responsive classroom”. It too sounds excellent when used throughout an entire school.. I only wish I had been listened to, encouraged and respected in the ways the program describes when I was a child.
Thanks for mentioning it. There are stellar programs out there.
Beachteach and Diane “. . . an appropriate curriculum …” SEL is a band-aid for the systematic loss over the years of the informal SEL that kids learn from reading HISTORY and literature, e.g., good fiction and nonfiction, film, and documentaries, discussion groups, etc.
Our obsession with testing has led us to overlook the deeper developments that occur in such activities, along with discussions and classes exploring and analyzing, what need not be tested for (especially bubble-tests).
There is “information,” and there is human development. <–the latter tends to “stick” and easily hides from test makers. Remembering the idea of the “hidden curriculum,” FORMAL SEL is a thoughtless effort at quick fixing what most of us tacitly understand is broken and/or gone: The hidden informal teaching of SEL that we assumed was already there in both culture and curriculum, not to mention religious groups.
Also, large classes are directly related to the loss of reflective ESSAY writing that teachers can actually take time and an abundance of spirit to read and comment on. The bigger the class, the more victimized is the teacher, and the easier it is to think that bubble cards are much less exhausting and time/effort consuming; or they just leave teaching.
Developing a field of understanding (in ourselves and in our students) comes from interacting with others/students, not merely pouring information into them with little or no time to care for that interior development, which occurs with qualified and regular interaction. “An appropriate curriculum.”
For Diane: The other thing is that, as you say: SEL “should implicitly permeate everything you do in teaching honesty, integrity. responsibility, and helpfulness. It must be modeled, expected, reinforced by example, not turned into lessons.”
Right. But the problem with that thinking is that children come from a home and neighborhood environment (and now technology and diversity, both good and bad) that is vastly changed from when we grew up. Certainly, it was far from angelic . . . homogeneity has its dark side. However, the idea that “it should implicitly permeate everything” cannot be assumed in the same way it was 60+ years ago.
Couple that with the LOSS of the above kind of curriculum that tends to deepen and expand the human spirit, and we have the likes of, for instance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or even highly intelligent people who can only use their intelligence to serve the narrow “education” they happen to have received. CBK
I still feel as if there are a lot of vague answers here and no convincing argument about how a child’s SEL data is being “monetized”.
And I haven’t seen any convincing argument about why even the supposedly “bad” SEL programs are harmful to students, and I certainly haven’t seen any convincing argument as to why the good programs that “force” teachers to teach about compassion and kindness are not helpful.
So often the right wing takes the name of a program that is a good idea, and then re-defines that program by claiming it is dangerous, nasty, and awful and should be banned from schools.
Our side far too often concedes that whatever the far right is demonizing is “bad” — but what our side means is that some versions of the program might be stupid or have flaws. It is irrelevant to the propaganda demonizing it that the Republicans are pushing, but it does help legitimize the right wing narrative that what the Republicans are demonizing is “bad”.
An example that might help teachers understand: When the Republicans say that teachers unions are very dangerous and protect child predators, it is not the time for people on our side to start talking about all the flaws with teachers unions and reinforce the narrative that there is something bad about teachers unions. It is the time to directly call out the lies.
Responding to a Republican media blitz about how the union is bad by our side having a completely different discussion that concedes that there are bad things about the teachers union is not helpful and simply reinforces the Republican false narrative instead of countering the lies directly.
What is needed when the Republicans – for political purposes – are demonizing something that is sometimes flawed, but not dangerous or even particularly bad, is to directly call out the lies that the Republicans are using to demonize something. It isn’t the time to concede that whatever the Republicans are demonizing is “bad” when what you mean by “bad” has nothing at all to do what the Republicans are telling the public is “bad” about them. All that does is legitimize the Republicans’ attacks to voters. “Even teachers agree SEL is very bad, and we are so happy that finally Gov. DeSantis is doing something about that dangerous thing.”
If we ever want to make the public understand the truth about DeSantis, the best response to DeSantis demonizing SEL is for there to be a constant drumbeat of parents and teachers asking DeSantis why he doesn’t want kids to learn compassion and kindness and is banning that from schools. We need a constant drumbeat of teachers and parents asking Republicans to explain why they want to fire all teachers who mention being kind and compassionate to their students. Republicans should be put on the spot to answer why they are banning any mention of students learning to be kind and courteous to others.
Instead we take Republicans off the hot seat and have irrelevant discussions of the flaws of SEL programs. It’s like having an irrelevant discussion of the flaws in teachers unions when the Republicans are demonizing them with lies and the Republicans are never forced by anyone to defend their lies, since what is amplified is “even parents and teachers know that unions have problems – we are so glad those Republicans are doing something about the problems because the Democrats refuse to do anything about these horrible things”.
Yay for DeSantis, finally doing something about those horrible SEL programs that those Democrats want your kids to be subject to = more support for Republicans.
“We need a constant drumbeat of teachers and parents asking Republicans to explain why they want to fire all teachers who mention being kind and compassionate to their students.”
That is much different, but a good point. However, show me an elementary school teacher who doesn’t have a toolbox of SEL teaching strategies, and I will show you a teacher who is missing a key component in their instructional repertoire. I will also allow that there are students who benefit from direct instruction in particular behavior, but a one size fits all manufactured approach. On another level, I found out one day that my high school students notices that I didn’t swear, and were impressed! I can’t say I ever remember my own teachers swearing or those of my kids, but it took me totally by surprise that my not swearing was respected by my high school students. Modeling is a powerful tool, even when or most effectively when it is unconscious.
NYC PSP. There are many ways to monetize this stuff. These aren’t charitable organizations. They are for-profit organizations that sell training and materials and data tracking.
I taught for thirty years and retired, THANK GOD!, in 2005. This is what I think after spending those thirty years teaching. Teachers are human, but we were expected to, at least in the classroom, to create a fake persona to model what a perfect human should act like. In some cases there were regulations written into the ed-code for our district by our elected board that supported this and maybe even the ed-code at the state level voted in by the legislature.
I often felt like I was expected to be like an on/off robot. When class ended, that I was turned off and stored in a cupboard. And I suspect many students and parents had no idea I had a life after school when I drove off campus and went home. The unwritten rules were never to cuss, no profanity. When I started teaching, you couldn’t date or be married to another teacher at the school where you taught. I did it anyway and we hid the fact that we were dating and got married. We even enlisted another teacher at the same school, a friend of ours, to help us keep it a secret so one of us wouldn’t be transferred to teach at another school in the district. He loved helping us. He listened to all the gossip and if he heard anyone mention me and my wife, he’d interrupt and say that couldn’t’ be true be cause we didn’t know each other. Well, he was more creative than that. He loved spreading false gossip in the teachers lounge.
Teachers had to dress better than most of our students. If I used profanity in the classroom, the principal would probably hear of it. The kids could cuss but if a teacher even said damn, the entire class would be shocked silent.
And as a former US Marine, I could could easily have out cussed all of the thousands of students I taught. I told some of my classes that when a student would pop off with an “F” word in class, and they wanted me to demonstrate, but I told them I couldn’t or I might lost my job. Then I’d tell them if they have to use the “F” word, be creative about it and stop embarrassing me. I said you guys do not know how to cuss. After that conversation, I never heard the “F” word in that class again.
👍👍
Sent from my iPhone
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SEL is product being sold, not a method of instruction. It’s the stuff of my spam folder.
I’m sorry, but I must have missed Gov. DeSantis saying he planned to ban all formal SEL instruction from public schools. Why didn’t Gov. DeSantis simply say that?
What Gov. DeSantis did is demonize a math textbook for having a single page with two students with speech bubbles where one says “To learn together, disagree respectfully”.
What Gov. DeSantis did is invoke SEL the way Christopher Rufo did in the NYT article published 4/22/22:
“In a March interview conducted over email, Mr. Rufo stated that while social-emotional learning sounds “positive and uncontroversial” in theory, “in practice, SEL serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogies such as critical race theory and gender deconstructionism.”
“The intention of SEL,” he continued, “is to soften children at an emotional level, reinterpret their normative behavior as an expression of ‘repression,’ ‘whiteness,’ or ‘internalized racism,’ and then rewire their behavior according to the dictates of left-wing ideology.”
When a Republican invokes something in order to demonize it, too often the left concedes their point and do not even realize that all the public hears is that “even the left agrees that SEL is rampant in schools and very bad” and then voters see that as confirmation of the Republican definition of SEL being evil — “even the left” agrees that CRT and gender deconstruction and telling white kids they are racist is also rampant in schools. Isn’t it great that DeSantis is protecting our children from that?
This happens over and over again. The right wing re-defines something as truly evil and presents themselves to voters as protecting them and their kids against this terrible thing, and the left reinforces that narrative by conceding that some other thing with the same name is bad for entirely different reasons.
I don’t think folks realize how easily the right wing gets all of us to reinforce THEIR narratives which is not that SEL is annoying or a waste of time, but that it is something that is harmful to children because it delivers CRT and radical pedagogies that teach white children to hate themselves.
The Republicans invoke something that doesn’t exist, and the left agrees that something completely different that does exist is bad but all the public hears is that even the left agree with DeSantis.
DeSantis and the Republicans have never wanted to have a discussion about how packaged SEL is good or bad. They want the public to believe that SEL has infiltrated our schools to teach radical ideology and parents better be scared of their public schools and allow the right wing to control what teachers can teach.
SEL does not teach radical ideology. It is not “dangerous” and it is no more annoying than other programs that students have been subject to for the last 50 years. I myself had to take a stupid, packaged “drug decision” class in 7th grade.
What would have happened in the 1970s if the Republicans decided the best way to convince the public that they should take over public schools is to tell voters that public schools were the place where radical hippies were turning kids into drug addicts, and teachers kept saying “yes, we have to teach this awful drug decision program”, maybe the right wing could have taken over public schools decades ago.
Let’s all stipulate that packaged SEL programs are stupid and get back to fighting against what the Republicans are actually doing, which has nothing to do with banning those annoying (but not dangerous) packaged SEL programs and everything to do with getting teachers to confirm the Republican propaganda that something very bad is going on in public schools and our children, especially white children, are suffering because of it.
I have never heard parents in the public schools I have direct experience with complaining about their kids being subjected to some dangerous SEL program, and FYI – parents complain about a lot of things in schools, but these supposedly dangerous SEL programs are not what they complain about in any schools I have experience with.
If anything there are far more parents concerned that schools are not interested in their kids social and emotional needs, not parents who want to ban schools from addressing those needs.
Click to access Inspire-Paper-Transforming-Ed-FINAL-2.pdf
https://financialsustainability.casel.org/cost-modeling-tool/
More political theatre. The 2024 primary race has begun. And this guy has a huge war chest already.
The truth from a REAL conservative, Republican parent:
The TRUTH is that caring, loving, responsible parents like me would have absolutely no problem whatsoever with public schools teaching our children SEL if it was really what people think it is: teaching our children to be compassionate and responsible people. However, upon conducting countless hours of deep dive research and investigation into the real philosophy and agenda behind SEL from a company called CASEL, who is the foremost pioneer of SEL, the concerns that are being made public by us “right wingers” is accurate. The following excerpt is copied and pasted from CASEL’s website and here’s the link to the site itself. PLEASE read through their website and learn what their true intentions are: to turn our children into social justice activists. Check out a few of their past webinars. Watch their instructional videos. The problem is that instead of parents on the Left and the Right taking the time to truly research these claims for themselves, they instead just parrot the talking points from their respective side. SEE FOR YOURSELF!
“Developing and Refining Transformative SEL toward Equity
CASEL is refining a specific form of SEL implementation that concentrates SEL practice on transforming inequitable settings and systems, and promoting justice-oriented civic engagement–which we are calling “Transformative SEL.” Through our long-term learning agenda and ongoing collaboration with practitioners, policymakers, and researchers, CASEL continues deepening what we know about how to implement Transformative SEL toward equitable learning opportunities and developmental outcomes.
Core features of Transformative SEL include:
Academic content that integrates issues of race, class and culture.
Enhancing and foregrounding social and emotional competencies needed for civic engagement and social change, such as reflecting on personal and social identities, examining prejudices and biases, interrogating social norms, disrupting and resisting inequities, and co-constructing equitable and just solutions.
Prioritizing students’ individual and collective agency to take action for more just schools and communities.
Watch the CASEL CARES Webinar Series: SEL as a Lever for Equity and Social Justice (2020).
Our 5-part webinar series discusses equity and racial injustice through the lens of social and emotional learning.
Cultivating & Communicating Commitment
Adult SEL to Support Antiracist Practices
Elevating Student Voices and Vision
Authentic Partnerships with Families & Communities
Policy & Data Practices that Dismantle Inequities”
THIS IS JUST A TINY EXAMPLE! You truly have to dive into these organizations and actually get past the first page in order to find the truth. My children’s school is trying to adopt SEL curriculum from “Character Strong” (which is for 6-12th graders) and “Purposeful People” (for K-5th grade). https://characterstrong.com/purposefull-people/
Dive deeper into this website and you’ll see their graphics showing exactly how their lessons meet the standards for CASEL’s SEL goals. Many other SEL curriculums from different companies all follow the guidelines from CASEL. This curriculum incorporates short video lessons, follow on questions, activities and questions to “get to know the child” The topics of these lessons DO NOT just include the typical behavior and character guidelines you would expect a teacher or school administrator to model or teach to children. There are THIRTY FIVE lessons for EACH grade level!
Some of the lessons are: “Being Different”, “Defining Identity”, “Different Identity Issues”, “Redefine Your Identity Foundation”, “Breaking Free from My Secrets”, “Creating Real Change”, “Born to be Different”, “Reshape Our World”, “Racism”, “Is There a Higher Purpose?” “Why Are You Here?” “Confusion, Pain and Identity”, “Find Where You Belong” and many, many more. There are lessons on everything from smoking to Divorce and even Death.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PEOPLE! RESEARCH FOR YOURSELF!
I truly hope that this post helps to shed some real light on why there are so many people opposing SEL. It is not really the innocent sheep behind all the fluffy white wool. It is MUCH more involved and there are many different underlying ideologies that should be up to the parent to teach their children about. Put it this way… If you wouldn’t want someone coming into your child’s classroom conducting bible studies, or holding communion, or baptizing your child, or holding a seance, or conducting a palm reading, or telling their future with tarot cards, etc. etc. etc. Then Please understand why some of us don’t support THIS KIND of SEL.
Good teachers are sensitive to the emotional states and issues of their students. People used to say, we teach students, not subjects. Well, that’s wrong. We teach students and we teach subjects, but those we teach are other humans, and often very fragile or troubled humans, and we need real people skills if we are to do our jobs well. One of the difficulties of this part of the job is that kids have complex, unique issues, and teachers have lots and lots and lots of students, and there simply isn’t enough time to know them all well enough. This is why the most important thing we could do for schools is to DOUBLE the number of teachers and dramatically reduce class loads. Every good teacher knows that part of the job involves encouraging soft skills like self-awareness, social awareness, self-control/management, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. I’m extremely skeptical of making this stuff, which an important component of good teaching, into overt, standalone curricula. I know my highschoolers would just laugh at this stuff and think anyone who presumed to “teach” it fools. Kids, as Neil Postman used to say, have excellent crap detectors.
cx: anyone . . . a fool
What kills me is that people think that these matters are a lot simpler than they are–that they can be addressed by starting to use some social awareness worksheets, lol. This is like addressing a nation’s transportation needs by buying every family a Tonka truck. It’s just dumb. And is yet another time waster with enormous opportunity costs, as if we didn’t have enough of these in schools already.
” I know my highschoolers would just laugh at this stuff and think anyone who presumed to “teach” it fools. Kids, as Neil Postman used to say, have excellent crap detectors.”
Yup.
Hello, Thanks for your blog, which I enjoy reading. I’m responding to this post, though my comment is unrelated to SEL. I don’t know how else to send you a note. I recently came across an old newspaper article (yes, yellowed newsprint) in a file I was cleaning out. It appeared in 1984 in the NEA newspaper (there’s no other identifying information). The article is about Sidney Hook and his call for “civic education” (which little did he know would go away with “educational reform”). How far we’ve fallen in teaching kids (and adults for that matter) about our government, but it’s so relevant to today’s problems–ignorance of our government is one of many. I thought you’d enjoy seeing it and maybe sharing it since it is so relevant. (See attachment.)
Lynne Glasner
Lynne,
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