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SEL FORWARD

Social and Emotional Learning Towards Meaningful Social Contributions

SOCIAL RELEVANCE

CIVIC ENGAGEMENTS ARE DRIVEN BY OUR KNOWLEDGE OF SELF, OUR VALUES, AND OF OTHERS. DEVELOPING STUDENTS SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE BEGINNING WITH SELF-AWARENESS BUILDS ON A STRONG UNDERSTANDING OF THEIR VALUES AND BELIEFS. THESE ATTRIBUTES ARE THE FOUNDATION OF HUMANIZING STUDENTS FROM THE SOCIAL INJUSTICES THAT SURROUND THEM. ONLY THEN CAN THEY ACT UPON IT.

Social and emotional skills are not something that can be developed overnight. We believe that the way to gain social and emotional skills is by developing self-awareness, establish understandings of one’s own values and be able to employ self-management. These attributes must be designed as a collective effort when adopted in a school and applied across all ages/grade levels starting at the young age of kindergarten. In order to have a cohesive culture and practice of self-knowledge in a school community, we propose a six-week curriculum intended for grades K-5 that builds on students’ awareness of self and others, creates a deep understanding of values and the importance of self-management, familiarizes them on civic engagements around them, thus finally culminating these learnings through a project-based activity for every grade level. Inspired by the spiral curriculum that was popularized by Bruner in 1960, each year students venture on bigger tasks that are differentiated by level of depth and complexity building on from the previous year. According to Wiggins & McTighe (2005), Dewey (1938) suggests that tasks must be designed as related challenges, while new ideas become the ground for further experiences as students and teachers identify new problems. (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, p. 297).

We have identified social and emotional skills as a starting point for building civic engagement. In this curriculum we define social and emotional skills as the ability to successfully build relationships and navigate through social environments. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning identifies a number of broad competencies including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making that Lawlor identifies as improved and shaped by strong mindfulness and practiced attending (Lawlor, 2016, p. 65). Among the specific skills that this curriculum will aim to strengthen are positive self-identity, optimism, delayed gratification, impulse control, managing stress and effective self-soothing techniques, and self-motivation.

Emotions must be ordered enough for students themselves. First, in order to be able to take meaningful action, one needs to feel emotionally compelled to a cause. It is not merely enough for students to be aware of societal needs and social problems. Therefore, social and emotional learning in this curriculum is intended to facilitate the ability for students to identify and describe their emotions, the ability to discern that one’s personal beliefs and values determine their actions, the understanding that others can have varying views and emotions on the same matter, and that the same matter can bring about different emotions in others. Only then can civic participation be truly achieved as the students will have attained certain emotional proficiencies to discern, plan effectively, work together constructively, and rebound in the wake of setbacks. Metzger et al. (2016) identified a number of personal strengths related to civic actions. Character strengths such as being future-minded, responsible, purposeful, and grateful were seen by middle schoolers as strongly related to civic activities like voting, volunteering, protesting, and environmentalism (Metzger et al., 2016, p. 516).

During civic participation which may require collaboration and active participation with others, disagreements or unwillingness to feel distressing emotions when things do not go as one would like them to or when people behave in ways that one does not agree with, may arise. Building students’ social and emotional capacity for deliberate self-control, attention regulation and acceptance of potentially negative emotions will empower them to act meaningfully in accordance with their values.

Social intelligence will enable students to participate with the teacher in a negotiated curriculum. Boomer mentioned, “if teachers set out to teach according to a planned curriculum, without engaging the interests of the students, the quality of learning will suffer (Boomer, 1992, p. 13). Through a negotiated curriculum, children’s energies, understandings, and actions determine various aspects of the study, directly affecting how meaningful the material is to them and how motivated they will be as the curriculum is inherent in the relationship among children, teacher, and content (Diamond, 2011, p. 70). Daily negotiations surrounding issues of necessary skills and content means students have a stake in what is taught and how (Mathison & Freeman, 1997, p. 17). In line with this, the proposed curriculum will involve students in the decision-making process of inquiries and performance tasks central to their personal surroundings/community while practicing the socio-emotional skills they will have gained.

This curriculum aims to utilize social and emotional skills towards meaningful social contribution by developing students skills in identifying real-world authentic problems, communicating their ideas and collaborating with others in order to achieve solutions through Project-Based Learning or PBL (Walker, Leary & Hmelo-Silver, 2015, p. 7). PBL will allow the students to demonstrate and put into practice their social emotional as they carry out a project together. PBL will also allow the student to recognize one’s emotions and thoughts and how emotions have the potential to influence others. Students will also learn to regulate, manage and evaluate one’s emotions and actions as they engage with one another. During the process they will establish an understanding of each other’s perspective, strengths and weaknesses thereby learning to empathize, cooperate, communicate and negotiate constructively. After students have completed projects, they will reflect on what group processes and individual behaviors produce good results for team activities and how their own behaviors met or did not meet those expectations.

Assessment through the PBL method allows students to be the main movers of their knowledge building, while they engage in self-awareness, self-management, collaboration, and cooperation. Participants, guided by their teachers will identify a social problem and find various solutions and/or explanations to it. In this design, teachers perform the role of a mentor, advising the participants thus allowing teaching and learning to be learner-centered, society-centered, personalized and process-driven.

This curriculum is intended for students in primary years of education starting in Kindergarten to Fifth Grade in a multicultural and urban setting like New York City. We envision our students to be from diverse groups of cultures including race, ethnicity, class, gender and ability - much like the demographics one may be able to find in a school in a metropolitan city. With the presence of diverse cultures in a big city, we predict that the needs and values of the students will be deeply-embedded in the city culture and are more complex. The curriculum aims to develop the social and emotional skills of urban learners so that they can be equipped with abilities to navigate through complex experiences they may encounter in big cities as young members of a much larger society.

Thus, it is the nature of the curriculum to serve a diverse group of students by providing flexibility for teachers to redesign lessons and negotiate inquiries and tasks that are culturally relevant to the learners (Ladson-Billings, 2014, Boomer, 1992). Thus, resources will depend on these topics.

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