My summer job while in college—and my first experience teaching—was as a Head Start aide in the inner city of St. Louis—in the notorious Pruitt-Igoe Project that has since been torn down. Every morning I waited for the van that would take me from my middle-class neighborhood into a world of high-rise poverty.
Once when we took the kids outside to play, the teacher happened to glance over at the van to notice a 10-year-old sitting behind the steering wheel pretending to drive. When she called out, a horde of adults and kids took off after the boy, who fled, leaving his burglar's tools behind. When they caught him, he cried. The community was divided between calling the police and begging the teacher to let him go (he was only playing). The upshot was that the police came and they let him go. The teacher was concerned that he didn't "understand the consequences." I felt sorry for him.
I experienced mixed emotions that summer. The teacher for whom I worked seemed old-fashioned to me. Every morning and afternoon, she gathered the children around her. In a quiet voice, she spoke to them of their behavior, about not pushing, for example, or how to behave during nap time. I was bored with such a time-consuming approach—and wondered why we weren't teaching them the alphabet or reading them a story or something.
Meanwhile, my special assignment was to look after two children, who were opposite in temperament. Allan was a furiously aggressive kid who hit people. Brenda, his little sister, was so withdrawn that she spoke only once or twice in a whisper that whole summer. Allan's redeeming grace was that he was protective of Brenda. Once when we took the kids to Grant's Farm, both of them were so terrified when the goats tried to eat their name tags that they practically climbed me to get away from them. I loved those kids for that.
Reflecting now on this month's theme, I have to give that teacher more credit than I did back then. In her daily circle activity, she was trying to teach the children the so-called soft skills —how to express their emotions but also how to control them. She believed in consequences, but she also believed in gentleness. Feeling compassion for kids did not alone make for effective teaching.
Speaking at the ASCD Annual Conference, Dan Goleman (p. 12) brought home the need to teach social and emotional learning in school. Emotional intelligence, more than IQ, he tells us, is the most reliable predictor of success in life and in school, more than a child's fund of facts or a precocious ability to read. Predictors of success include:
...being self-assured and interested; knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with other children (Goleman 1995, p. 193).
Goleman tells us further that emotional intelligence can determine whether or not a child or teenager is undone by poverty or by having been brought up in an abusive family or by a parent with severe mental illness.
Goleman's message is compelling. The brain research he cites describes the neurochemistry of emotion. We truly cannot help the way we feel, and the "amygdala attacks" that trigger our impulse to fight or flee are part of being human. But his message is also hopeful. The studies show that neither temperament nor harsh circumstance is destiny. All our life we continue to learn emotional response. Even those who have experienced severe emotional trauma can relearn how to better respond to the pain. What seems to work best in schooling the emotions is a quiet consistent coaching, especially in early childhood (good parenting). Such measures help children choose their response to their emotions and find ways to get their needs met constructively.
Teaching such skills is a tall order. Authors in this issue relate ways they are responding to the challenge—some by integrating the skills throughout the curriculum, and some by targeting specific skills like resolving conflicts, recognizing feelings, overcoming shyness, learning to control bullying, learning how to be a friend.
Critics often find fault with such programs, as Maurice Elias and colleagues tell us (p. 15). They may, for instance, believe schools are taking up the slack for families. And indeed that might be true. The answer to that criticism, though, is not to abandon the programs but, as James Comer has so successfully done, involve the community in schools (p.6).
Probably, there will still be those who see social and emotional learning as fluff. But, those educators who invest time in such programs vouch for the improvements in the tone of a school and in students' academic achievements. Social and emotional learning, more than any other prevention program out there, can give children the heart start they need.
