Social Emotional Learning
When a global company studied its star performers, they discovered that the emotional intelligence talents that made these executives outstanding had started to emerge very early in life. For instance, a star team leader had first started practicing these skills when she was still in middle school. Her family had moved to a new city, and she figured she could meet new friends by joining a team. So she joined the field hockey team.
As it happens, she was not that good at the game, but she was terrific at showing kids new to the sport how to play. So she became an assistant coach. Right out of college she got a job as a drug rep. No one showed her how to make a cold call at a physician’s office, but once she got the hang of it, she started showing new reps how to do it. And she got so good at this that the company made a video of her that they then used with all their new reps.
So emotional intelligence abilities start in our early years, and develop naturally in the curriculum of life. If we need to improve on one or another, we can do it at any point. But why not give every child a head start on these life skills? That’s why I’m an advocate of the movement in “social/emotional learning,” or SEL, school-based programs that teach the whole spectrum of emotional intelligence abilities. The best programs run from kindergarten through high school, and teach these abilities at every age in a developmentally appropriate way.
All the emotional intelligence skills develop in life’s curriculum, from childhood on – but SEL gives every child an equal opportunity to master them. That’s why as I was writing Emotional Intelligence I co-founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning at Yale (now at the University of Illinois at Chicago)33.
The brain is the last organ of the body to become anatomically mature. When you see the changes from year to year in how a child thinks, behaves and reacts – the stages children go through – what you're really looking at is how their brain is developing. For example, when it comes to creativity, children are fabulously open and imaginative – particularly young children. But there are two stages in brain growth that change this. The first is called the “five-to-seven-shift,” where the emotional circuitry comes under stronger prefrontal control. So children are better able to control their impulses, and to coordinate their imaginative efforts – not to mention be better behaved.
The second landmark is at puberty, when the child’s brain goes through a radical “sculpting,” losing neurons that aren’t used much. This may make them lose some of the capacity to be wildly imaginative, and then at puberty, there's what’s called a sculpting of the brain, a huge loss of under-used neurons. We are actually born with many more neurons than we use later in life, and the principal is use-it-or-lose-it (however, as I said before, this is not the same as a steady deterioration throughout life – neurogenesis still creates new neurons daily, throughout our lives).
Social Emotional Learning programs are designed to give children the neural lessons they need as their brain grows – that’s what “developmentally appropriate” means.
I visited an inner-city middle school where there is lots of misbehaving in and out of class, lots of delinquency, and lots of teen crime.
But there is also a SEL program. On the wall in every classroom there's a picture of a stoplight with its red, yellow and green lights. And it says, “When you're getting upset, remember the stop light. Red light, stop! Calm down and think before you act.”
What is that teaching? “Stop” is behavioral inhibition: activate the left prefrontal circuitry that can manage your amygdala impulses. “Calm down” shows that you can change your state to a better one. And “Think before you act” teaches a critical lesson: you can't control what you're going to feel, but you can decide what you do next. Then, “Yellow light” – think of a range of things you might do and what their consequences would be, and pick the best alternative. And “Green light:” try it out and see what happens. This is drilled into kids. And this kind of lesson, along with all the others in the SEL program, actually works. The vice principal told me that since the SEL program began a few years earlier, the number of kids sent to him for fighting had steadily decreased.
A study by Roger Weissberg, the psychologist who directs CASEL, looked at over 200 SEL programs that were compared to schools without them, involving a total of 270,000 students34. He found that, on average, SEL programs reduce anti-social behavior like misbehaving in class, fights or substance abuse by about ten percent. And they increase pro-social behavior – liking school, attendance, paying attention in class and so on – by about ten percent. And you see the biggest gains in the schools that need it the most.
But the big surprise in the payoff for social and emotional learning: academic achievement scores go up eleven percent. Why would that be? I suspect it has to do in large part with how HPA axis arousal interferes with cognitive efficiency and learning. If you are a kid who’s preoccupied by worry, anger, distress, anxiety, or whatever stress causes in you, you're going to have a diminished capacity to pay attention to what the teacher is telling you. But if you can manage those emotional upsets, your working memory – that is, the capacity of attention to take in information – increases. And SEL teaches you how to manage these disruptive feelings – not just through lessons like the stop light, but through learning how to get along better with other kids (a major source of those turbulent feelings). And that lets you be a better learner.
And of course if you’re an adult at work, this identical skill set will make you a better performer. And it’s never too late to develop further strengths in emotional intelligence.
Also by Daniel Goleman from More Than Sound
Better Parents, Better Spouses, Better People with Daniel Siegel
Knowing Our Emotions, Improving Our World with Paul Ekman
Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Intelligence with Richard Davidson
Good Work: Aligning Skills and Values with Howard Gardner
The Inner Compass for Ethics and Excellence with Naomi Wolf
Socially Intelligent Computing with Clay Shirky
Rethinking Education with George Lucas
Leading the Necessary Revolution with Peter Senge
Of Interest:
Resonant Leadership: Inspiring Others Through Emotional Intelligence
by Richard Boyatzis