Current Issue

Letter from the Director

I am most grateful for the opportunity to serve as the next Director of the Center for Character and Social Responsibility (formerly the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character.) It is an honor to carry on the traditions and programs built by our four previous Directors – Kevin Ryan, Karen Bohlin, Bernice Lerner, and Hardin Coleman. Thanks to their tireless and creative efforts ours has been a rich and productive history. As we expand our mission we also face many promising opportunities in our near future.

Our past efforts have included several signal achievements focused heavily on enabling teachers to weave more ethical and character-building learning opportunities in their classrooms and across their schools. We have also significantly strengthened academic ties between the School of Education and other colleges within and beyond Boston University. The subsequently strong academic foundation has served to make our professional improvement achievements more durable. These relationships have also fostered an impressive list of scholarly publications which have helped shape the direction of much of character education on a national level.

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As we turn our mission statement and activities to the implementation stages we will need you advice and your help. We need your large and small ideas that are all indispensible to success in our plans to deepen our national influence and reputation. Correspondingly, we will need your advice on how to secure funding for the continuation of our past success and the expansion of our future ideas. As many of you know we have received the generous, anonymous support in the form of a matching fund. Any contributions you are able to make will be doubled up to a maximum of $25,000 over each of the next two years. This means our highest funding success would allow us to get these plans off to a great start with $100,000.

Please forward this newsletter to any fellow educators you think would like to join our community. Our primary goal is to ensure that Character Education and Social Responsibility are woven into as many schools as possible across the country.

Best regards,

Steve Ellenwood
Faculty Director
Center for Character and Social Responsibility
Boston University School of Education

Leader in Education  |  Interview with Professor Maurice Elias

 

1) Can you define a “healthy climate?” For instance, what would it look like, feel like, and sound like if I walked into a school with a “healthy climate?” Can you give us specific examples you have seen in practice? Does it have to be a holistic school approach to be successful?

There are two ways to think of a healthy school climate.  One is in terms of assessment—that a healthy climate is one that is substantially positive overall and for subgroups of students and staff on such dimensions as respect, friendship and belonging, feelings of contribution to the environment, perceptions of fairness in rules and discipline systems, safety, and caring.  Another way to think of a healthy school climate is more common sense.  It’s when students and staff want to be in school, see it as a place that is welcoming and validating, a source of positive identity and pride, a place where things are learned and where one’s contributions are valued.  My colleagues at ASCD define a healthy school climate as one in which students are safe, supported, engaged, healthy, and challenged, and although it’s implicit in these, I do like to add cared for and respected.

I have had the privilege of working with schools that have had a positive, healthy school climate.  But it takes work to maintain.  Changes in Federal, State, or District policies, and significant changes in leadership, can lead to changes in climate in a school.  It is not inevitable, but instability does increase the potential for change.  When the adults put children’s well-being second and their own worries first (like test scores), when the school becomes an arena for ego and/or power, children lose and the climate suffers.  Good leadership manages this.

In Promoting Social-Emotional Learning:  Guidelines for Educators, CASEL identified “flagship” schools that were positive.  And the Character Education Partnership has a wonderful program for identifying National and even State Schools of Character.  But there are certainly instances where one would go to visit schools getting these designations and find that things have changed.  We have the knowledge to keep school climates positive for SECD and for learning.   But this knowledge has yet to become a core part of the preparation of educators, whether teachers or administrators

2) You mention a transition from social-emotional learning (SEL) to social-emotional and character development (SECD) in your faculty profile. What separates the two? What is driving the transition to SECD?

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While I appreciate the sentiment, I would not say there is a “drive” toward SECD.  Here is how I see it.  Both CASEL and CEP are, in a way, “stuck” with their brand products, SEL and CE.  SEL has traditionally focused on a set of skills, now referred to as the CASEL 5 (http://casel.org/why-it-matters/what-is-sel/skills-competencies/), and the importance of these for effective interpersonal interaction and well-being.  In the past decade, after CASEL changed its name to emphasize that SEL skills are also important for academics, considerable research has been directed toward elaborating the link of SEL and academics, and the results have shown clearly that SEL skills are associated with greater academic success, positive adaptation, and reductions in problem behaviors.  This is best summarized by the Durlak et al. (2011) meta-analysis article in Child Development.

At the same time, the CE field established a journal, The Journal of Research in Character Development, and also directed more focus on elaborating the relationship of character to mental health and academic outcomes.  Lickona and Davidson made an important formulation as part of their Smart and Good Schools work, in which they articulated the constructs of moral and performance character.  This operationalized much of what I had been articulating about the need for an integration of SEL and CE perspectives.  Skills without character is not a desirable outcome.  And it is hardly possible to enact such character attributes as honesty, responsibility, and fairness without a good complement of SEL skills.

While there are many debates about what character “should” be or who gets to define what is “moral” and how it is defined, it is clear that schools establish norms, rules, climate, and character, implicitly or explicitly, and that SEL competencies play an important role in what happens in a school.  There are so many apt analogies. One that comes to mind at the moment is that SEL is the engine room and the propellers and all that goes along with maintaining them, and CE is the rudder that determines where the boat is headed.  SECD is the journey, and that journey depends on both SEL and CE—there is no way to disentangle them, certainly when one is focused on education and schools.

So the field is inevitably headed toward SECD, in my opinion, but at present, SEL will become more accepting of notions of climate and CE will gradually embrace the idea of skills.  One of my colleagues, Marvin Berkowitz, who is a recognized leader in the CE field but very attuned to SEL said to me that he is no longer as focused on vocabulary and labels.  The majority of those working in the SEL and CE fields recognize that a greater integration of perspectives is theoretically and pragmatically essential and the labels given to this are of secondary importance.

3) I am attracted to your comment on preparing students “for facing the tests of life, and not a life of tests.” What do you see as the “tests of life” and how can educators adequately prepare students for the “tests of life?” Can there be a balance with the current push in academic testing?

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4) Can you tell us about your academic and personal journey into this field of social-emotional learning, civic engagement, service learning, and healthy school climates? Where did it all start for you?

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Over time, I have come to understand, and the research has increasingly shown, that “program” cannot be considered outside of the overall school context and climate and the degree of engagement of students in the life of the school.  Citizen and service become cornerstone concepts for me, and so I have embraced an expanded notion of SEL (social-emotional learning) as SECD- social-emotional and character development, and all that is encompassed by efforts to promote it effectively.

5) You have a significant number of projects going on at the Rutgers Social- Emotional Learning Lab. Over the course of your career, what are some of the most significant findings of the Research Lab? How do these findings dictate your programs?

This is a very challenging question to answer.   I appreciate the chance to reflect, which I don’t usually give myself much time to do.

I can identify several major projects in the Lab and one effort that has been an outgrowth of the Lab but it not a research project per se.

Early in my career, the focus was on assessing, implementing, and evaluating social decision making-social problem solving programs (SDM-SPS).  Over ten year period of time, we used action-research to create disseminable curricula for grades k-8 (www.researchpress.com).  The curricula was recognized by all the relevant “certifying” authorities at the time, including the National Diffusion Network, National Mental Health Association, and National Education Goals Panel—all of which have been superseded by other organizations at present.  Our work has been recognized by CASEL, CEP, and professional groups such as the National Association of School Psychologists as well as international groups.

One main contribution, supported by our research, is that programs must focus on generalization, and we piloted what we called the “application” phase in which the SDM-SPS skills systematically incorporated into academic subject areas, special subjects, and the routines of classroom and school as a systematic part of the curriculum structure.   This approach is now featured in virtually all curricula of this kind.

A second contribution was to focus on emotion recognition, labeling, and regulation as an essential, and early, part of the problem solving process.  Ours was the first curriculum to put emotions/feelings into the problem solving “steps” students received, because we were persuaded by our own research and those of others that emotions affect how and what we learn—including problem solving, and academic work—in substantial and guiding ways.

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I am not going to comment on my work to help in the development of CASEL as part of this response, but I do want to note that this has been a highlight of my professional career and has been the vehicle for forming many lasting professional partnerships and lifelong friendships.  This work is really the outcome of my research, in a sense.

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Learning all this was very powerful in animating our sense that schools, even troubled schools, can be turned around better by SECD than by emphasizing test scores and test prep.  We also learned that the antidote to bullying in schools is the creation of a climate of respect, and systematically and genuinely involving students in the operation and life of the school.  In addition, we found that students are watching their teachers carefully and to the extent to which they see teachers treating each other in caring and supportive ways, they are more likely to believe the anti-bullying and positive SECD messages they are sending.  But if teachers do not walk the talk, students will tend to ignore the talk—no matter how many blue ribbons, blueprints, or other accolades a curriculum might have.

We also have learned a lot about the complexities of school climate- that overall school climate scores can be very misleading and that breakdowns by grade level and ethnicity matter.  We also learned that 3 years is an essential minimum window to expect to change the climate of a school in a way that is less likely to backslide.  And we learned that even if there are many areas of school climate that are problematic, they cannot be attacked all at once; a gradual, steady approach is what works, as hard as it may be to see problems persist.  Changing the climate requires genuine collaboration and strong student involvement.

Our most current project is the redesign of school report cards to reflect social-emotional and character dimensions systematically.  We believe that once SECD becomes part of the language of teacher feedback to students and to parents, we will reach the tipping point for SECD in schools.  We have begun to empirically study the relationship of SECD and academics—including standardized test scores- even in the relatively few indicators of SECD on existing report cards and we find that there is a clear connection.  We are continuing to explore the nuances and will begin to pilot more SECD-explicit and intentional report cards in the coming years.

So from this journey, I have taken away a strong sense of optimism that all schools can be improved, that we know how to do this, that it involves adults setting a caring, challenging, supportive tone and walking their talk, that students are looking for relationships with caring adults and to be inspired in school, that they want to do good in the worlds and be recognized for positive contributions, and that success requires pooling of knowledge and approaches.  Hence, the kids do not need competition between SEL and CE, between School-Wide Positive Behavior Supports and Whole Child Education, or any other such distinctions.  They need us to put them first and get on with it….preparing them for the tests of life and not a life of tests.

6) In your opinion, how distinct, if at all, are social intelligence and emotional intelligence?

We are biological beings. Therefore, I find that it is not useful to attempt to differentiate social and emotional intelligence.  That’s why, when CASEL created the term, we moved from social and emotional to social-emotional.  Social-emotional intelligence (which is another way of taking about SECD) is exciting because it brings biology and psychology, and the social, cognitive, and emotional aspects of our functioning, together. It doesn’t allow us to separate these aspects of what it means to be human. For example, we know that the unit of human memory is not solely based on bits of information. The unit of human memory consists of information, but it also consists of the context in which we learn and our feelings about what we learn. This is one of the reasons why we need to look at social-emotional intelligence- and its variants–  as holistic and unifying approaches.

And the good news is that social-emotional and character attributes take shape not only through the school years, but throughout life. People who have gone to therapy have developed their social-emotional abilities and character modified at various ages of life. If there was a biological barrier to doing that, it wouldn’t happen. So the ability to develop emotional and social competence and develop one’s character is life-long.

Ultimately, SECD is a core aspect of who we are and must be nurtured as such, including in our education, parenting, and informal education subsystems.   What is it that makes us human? What is it that makes us special? We are special because we have compassion. We are special because we have empathy, because we have the ability to organize and do things for others and not just for ourselves. Those kinds of attributes are linked to SECD. It is also part of the human being to be goal- and plan-oriented. One of the most important principles of everyday life is that we need goals to help us organize. These are things that we have not been taught – they are a part of us.

However, these abilities can be developed. There are social conditions that make them more or less likely to take place. In fact, there are a lot of social conditions that do not enhance the natural development of social-emotional competencies and positive character. For example, the media and the fast pace of society are actually working against the way that human beings work their best. Interpersonal relationships are things that can’t be “surfed” and can’t be “scanned” and “twittered.” These are things that take time and depth. You have to look at somebody for a few seconds to get some clue about how they are feeling. Yet in our current society, we’re training people visually to stay on the surface, to move very quickly, and to go from virtual place-to-place in fractions of seconds.

Social and emotional intelligence are functionally intertwined and inextricably connected to character.  While research may find some distinctions and separations at some molecular or physiological levels, those are not distinctions that should enter into policy and practice decisions for the foreseeable future.