Social And Emotional Learning - Hey, Maybe Let The Measurements Be?

A pretty good article in the NY Times about the promise of social and emotional learning programs to help children with both academic performance and life skills.

The gist is this:

If you can help children to reframe how they view something that has happened to them, it can have a a positive effect on how they react to the incident and move forward from it:

With the district’s support, Aydlett attended social-emotional learning training. The program was an unlikely choice for Aydlett — a socially awkward man who confesses to being “awful” at ordinary human encounters. But since beginning the emotional-literacy work, Aydlett said, he had become more aware of interpersonal dynamics, and even made going on a vacation with his wife a priority — something he never bothered to do before. (“I didn’t see the point in that kind of connectedness,” he admitted. “But I’ve learned that it’s important.”) On the morning I visited, he stood greeting children at the gate with high-fives, then led me to the classroom of Jennifer Garcia, who teaches second grade. 

As Aydlett and I watched, Garcia walked her class through an exercise in nonverbal cues, asking the children to imagine times when they felt sad or angry or frustrated, and then to freeze in those expressions and postures. As the kids slumped forward in exaggerated positions of woe, Garcia complimented them on small details: a bowed head or hangdog expression. Afterward, Garcia turned to the class. “This is the thinking part of your brain,” she said, holding up her thumb. She pointed to her fingers. “And this is the feeling part of your brain.” Folding her thumb into the center of her palm, she closed her fingers around it. “When we have strong emotions, the thinking part of our brain can’t always control them,” Garcia explained, waggling her fist. “What do we do in those moments?” As the kids called out answers — counting to five, “self-talk,” “dragon breaths” (a kind of deep-breathing exercise) — Garcia nodded. 

Such strategies may seem simplistic, but researchers say they can have a profound effect. When I spoke with Mark Greenberg, who developed a social-emotional curriculum known as Paths (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies), he noted that repeatedly practicing these skills means they gradually become automatic. “The ability to stop and calm down is foundational in those moments.” 

The value of such skills was evident later that day, when I sat in on a fourth-grade class meeting, in which students worked through interpersonal conflicts as a group. Sitting in a circle on the carpet, Anthony, a small boy in a red shirt, began by recounting how he cried during a class exercise and was laughed at by some of the other students. Asked whether he thought the kids were giggling to be mean, or just giggling because they were uncomfortable, Anthony paused. “I think that some people didn’t know what to do, and so they giggled,” he admitted finally — though he was also adamant that a few of the kids were actually laughing at him. “I was really sad about that,” he added.

Though Anthony was still upset, his acknowledgment that not all the kids were snickering — that some may just have been laughing nervously — felt like a surprisingly nuanced insight for a 9-year-old. In the adult world, this kind of reappraisal is known as “reframing.” It’s a valuable skill, coloring how we interpret events and handle their emotional content. Does a casual remark from an acquaintance get cataloged as a criticism and obsessed over? Or is it reconsidered and dismissed as unintentional? 

Depending on our personalities, and how we’re raised, the ability to reframe may or may not come easily. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that while one child may stay rattled by an event for days or weeks, another child may rebound within hours. (Neurotic people tend to recover more slowly.) In theory, at least, social-emotional training can establish neurological pathways that make a child less vulnerable to anxiety and quicker to recover from unhappy experiences. One study found that preschoolers who had even a single year of a social-emotional learning program continued to perform better two years after they left the program; they weren’t as physically aggressive, and they internalized less anxiety and stress than children who hadn’t participated in the program. 

It may also make children smarter. Davidson notes that because social-emotional training develops the prefrontal cortex, it can also enhance academically important skills like impulse control, abstract reasoning, long-term planning and working memory. Though it’s not clear how significant this effect is, a 2011 meta-analysis found that K-12 students who received social-emotional instruction scored an average of 11 percentile points higher on standardized achievement tests. A similar study found a nearly 20 percent decrease in violent or delinquent behavior. 

But as usual in 21st century America, reformers and researchers are wondering just how you measure whether social and emotional learning is effective.

What data will prove that kids are reacting better to incidents after learning how to reframe than before they had those lessons?

Also, education reformers in general seem loathe to go down the road of social and emotional learning skills because, well, to be honest they're lacking in these skills as well.

Read the following paragraph from the Times article and ask yourself if Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, et al. would score "highly effective" in these skills?

Social-emotional learning programs often rely on strategies from conventional therapy, like the ability to get distance on a feeling, or to unpack the deeper emotions that may be hidden within it. But fostering these skills in a child is a complex undertaking. For a child to master empathy, Jones notes, she first needs to understand her own emotions: to develop a sense of what sadness, anger or disappointment feels like — its intensity and duration, its causes. That awareness is what lays the groundwork for the next step: the ability to intuit how another person might be feeling about a situation based on how you would feel in a similar circumstance. 

And so, because there is difficulty and complexity in measuring the effectiveness of social and emotional learning programs and because many people who are less than skilled at handling their own emotions feel like this stuff is too touchy-feely, social and emotional learning programs can often be dismissed.

I say, maybe let the measurement stuff go a little here.

We overemphasize measurement and data in education, we fetishize statistics and so-called scientific research (ever notice how many "definitive" scientific studies get over turned later by new "definitive" studies?), we make believe like the data used in so many studies is untainted and the results garnered from them are "objective" and "scientific" (think VAM.)

In 12 step programs, there is this idea that it is only in letting go of trying to control everything that a person truly frees himself/herself from his addiction.

It seems counter-intuitive, but the more you try and control something, the worse that something often gets, the more out-of-control things become.

Again, in 12 step programs, the idea is the more you try and control your drinking, your drugging, your overeating, your overspending, or whatever, the more out-of-control things get because control mechanisms ultimately do not work.

Surrender to the problem, let go of the control, accept that you cannot solve the problem yourself and ask for the help of some higher power, force or group to help you.

I don't think we can run education reforms this way, of course, and I'm not saying we shouldn't measure programs for effectiveness, viability, etc.

But I do think we often kill the greater good by automatically thinking, how do we control what it is we're doing here, how do we measure it, how do we track it?

The obsessiveness over measuring and tracking data to test for effectiveness is just a kind of control mechanism that in the end doesn't seem to be working so well.

Maybe that's because the data we're using is funky, the way the studies are funded is problematic, the way we frame everything as "Sure we can measure and solve this!  We're humans!" is a flawed way of thinking about things.

In a couple of centuries from now, people are going to wonder about the 20th/21st centuries' over-reliance and festishization of so-called scientific studies.

One of these cliches these days you hear all the time is "Research shows..."

Ah, but how often later we find that the research that showed what we were told it showed didn't actually show that at all?

I don't have any answers here other than to say, "You know, maybe you scientific observers and researchers aren't as smart as you think you are and maybe you're causing more problems than you're solving with your overreliance on data and your compulsions around measuring everything."

Maybe just once in a while, let the measurements be, track no data and just see how the universe works things out.

It's been my experience that often the universe works things out a helluva lot better than humans, in all their arrogance and hubris, do.

I first learned that by reading the Greeks.

Then learned that lesson in my own life.

Now I watch it unfold daily in education and other important issues of the day as humans apply their "solutions" and so-called wisdom to problems and make things worse.

Science is great and certainly I'm not looking for us to go back to reading bird entrails or anything when it comes to making policy decisions.

But I do want to point out how humans aren't as smart as we think we are and our science isn't as good as we think it is.

After all, both have helped give us the world as it is in 2013.