Tag: character education

This Revolution Is Not Being Televised

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on This Revolution Is Not Being Televised

There’s an important new consensus developing around how people learn – and a missed opportunity about how to start applying that knowledge in schools. We’d be wise to pay closer attention to both trends.

The consensus is that man cannot live by intellect alone – that our physical, social and emotional selves matter equally when it comes to human development and growth. You’ll see evidence of this consensus across a wide range of mediums and public voices:  from opinion pieces in the New York Times to bestselling books about both the brain and school reform. As David Brooks writes in a recent column, “It’s become increasingly clear that social and emotional deficits can trump material or even intellectual progress.” And as a veteran educator points out in Paul Tough’s new book, How Children Succeed, “This push on tests is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”

Although the amount of attention being paid to these sorts of observations is new, the insights being chronicled are not. Indeed, decades of strong social science research, sparked by Dan Goleman’s groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, have helped bring a more integrated view of learning into focus.

The good news is that our historically myopic view of schools as knowledge factories is starting to fade away, and public voices like Brooks and Tough are helping to promote a more holistic view of education to a wider audience of Americans. The bad news is that too many public voices are continuing to overlook a body of research and evidence-based practices that schools can rely on right now to transform their learning environments.  Across the entirety of his new book, for example, Tough cites copious research studies and school-based programs – yet not once does he reference the expansive field – social and emotional learning, or SEL – that has, for twenty years, been at the forefront of researching how schools can apply the science of learning in ways that will deepen, not diminish, the art of teaching.

SEL’s flagship institution is the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning – or CASEL. And the programs it evaluates have been thoroughly researched, revised, and well received. The RULER Approach helps schools support the development of five essential life-skills: Recognizing emotions in oneself and others; Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions; Labeling the full range of emotions using a rich vocabulary; Expressing emotions appropriately in different contexts; and Regulating emotions effectively to foster healthy relationships and achieve goals. Responsive Classroom’s widely used “Morning Meeting” approach helps children build both academic and social-emotional competencies.  And states like Illinois have gone so far as to adopt a statewide set of social and emotional standards that schools can use to guide and frame their work.

Recently, CASEL extended its work even further by partnering with eight school districts around the country in an effort to demonstrate, across a variety of settings, what it looks like when a system of schools is organized to value both what children know and who they are.  Yet most of the leading public voices on school reform act as though SEL doesn’t exist.

What organizations like CASEL demonstrate is something we would all be wise to remember: that we know more than we think we do about what great learning environments actually look like – and require. And what contemporary commentators like Brooks and Tough overlook is something we would all be wise to acknowledge: that when it comes to reimagining education, we do not need to start from scratch.

Great schools already recognize the multiple pathways through which young people must grow and develop. Great programs already exist to support schools in this work. And while it’s true that we are still waiting for the great policies, that doesn’t mean the  learning revolution isn’t already well underway.

How Many Sacred Cows Does It Take to Sustain A Movement?

Posted on | by Sam | 14 Comments on How Many Sacred Cows Does It Take to Sustain A Movement?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

How do we transform the quality of teaching and learning in America?

Like a lot of people, I’ve been wrestling with that riddle for the bulk of my career. And this month, three separate events are making me wonder in a new way about how to bring about such a shift – and sustain such a movement.

The first two were meetings that represented parallel, powerful constituencies and ideas – an Imagination Summit hosted by the Lincoln Center Institute in New York City; and an Empathy in Action working group, hosted by Ashoka in Washington, DC. At each gathering, I heard stories and insights from some of the world’s most influential thinkers – from Sir Ken Robinson to Deepak Chopra to Kiran Bir Sethi. I heard compelling cases for helping our education system become more effective at ensuring that all children become empathetic, and develop the ability to think imaginatively, act creatively, and behave innovatively. And I left feeling impressed by the energy and the motivation that was driving each group to push its work forward.

In a few days, I’ll also be attending the Save Our Schools (SOS) March, a grassroots-led movement of teachers and parents from across the country that disagree with the Obama administration’s current reform path – and plan to peaceably assemble in DC to indicate their displeasure. Since I’ll also be covering the march for CNN, I’ve been reflecting on the goals of those private meetings, the goals of this public march, and the essential questions that must be answered for any movement to be successful: Who or what is the movement’s opponent? What is its core idea, and how can that idea be expressed as simply and compellingly as possible? And how can a complex network of individuals, organizations and alliances come together to forge a common agenda?

Our own history tells us just how possible, and difficult, it is to turn ideas and energy into transformational change. That’s because reforming a system requires not just the capacity to know your enemy and forge a compelling narrative, but also a systemic approach to the problem – an articulation of the whole. Too often, what happens instead is we lose sight of the whole out of our preference for a specific piece of the puzzle – I call it the sacred cow syndrome. Instead of a unified movement, we get a cacophony of parallel efforts. And instead of paradigm shifts, we get Groundhog Day.

If you’re a principal, you know this all too well. In addition to everything else you do, you have to regularly sort through the literature from a range of school-improvement approaches and programs that, to your eyes, seem to have similar objectives and research bases: is it a service-learning focus you want to adopt, or a character education program? Is civic education where you will choose to hang your hat, or will you double down on social and emotional learning?

To be certain, each of these field’s approaches to learning is distinct, and each field has its own unique advantages. Each would also clearly benefit from a larger movement that brings about a shift from our Industrial Age model of schooling to one that is suited for the Democratic Age. And yet for years the different leaders of these different fields have sought, genuinely, to unite their efforts – only to fall back, eventually, on their respective sacred cows.

Which returns us to the present. What will the future hold for these nascent Imagination and Empathy networks, and for this weekend’s DC protest? Since all three tribes talk of movement building, will one be able to craft a big-enough umbrella to unite the aspirations of the many? Will we develop the capacity to understand the whole? And is it possible to sustain a movement of sacred cows that, by definition, no one is willing to eat?