Elisabeth Hahn and Geoff Marietta

Disruptive students can be a big challenge for teachers in charge of a room full of 30 students. There isn’t always time to get to the bottom of student behavior and in a large class those students can derail learning for everyone. But what if there was a way to help kids stop acting out and show more empathy for classmates and teachers?

A group of Harvard education researchers have developed a virtual simulation for “walking in another person’s shoes” to help students relate to one another better. It’s part of a project called Social Aspects of Immersive Learning (SAIL) funded by the National Science Foundation. “The ability to accurately read people is really important to make compromises,” said Elisabeth Hahn, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Education in a recent edWeb webinar.

The technical term is “social perspective taking” and it means understanding another person by taking in their thoughts, feelings and motivations. Accurately reading another person requires both motivation and ability, qualities that Hahn and other researchers are discovering can be taught.

The benefits of reading others are well documented, Hahn said. Taking in social perspective helps people become less ego-centric, decreases use of stereotypes, increases perspectives of similarity, and diminishes social aggression. These effects could make a big impact on many classrooms where the success of the lesson can hinge on how well a teacher is able to interact with the students. “It becomes much easier to empathize and leads to benefits in relationships and ultimately educational outcomes for kids,” Hahn said.

In an effort to create an experience that will help build these types of positive relationships through nuanced social perspective, Hahn’s team used a video game simulation to give participants the experience of “walking in another’s shoes.”

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The scenario involves a confrontation between a park ranger and a golf course owner who share land, but disagree over how to use it. The simulation allows a participant to play the role of the golf course owner, walking around in his world, talking to his colleagues and getting a sense for his perspective and opinions about the world. The player then has the same experience walking in the shoes of the park ranger. Finally, the player is asked to negotiate from the perspective of the golf course owner with the park ranger over various differences of opinion related to how the land should be treated. Each of the points of negotiation had a money value attached, giving the player a stake in the outcome of the negotiations.

“There was a pretty large positive effect from walking in the shoes of the ranger and we seemed to get down to what caused this to happen,” said Geoff Marietta, another doctoral candidate on the research team. Participants were more likely to compromise in the negotiations resulting in positive relationship building between the golf course owner and the park ranger. “What caused the effect on the relationship was really enhanced social perspective taking and people perceiving greater behavioral similarity,” Marietta said.

The researchers also experimented with giving participants written information about the park ranger’s perspective, but that didn’t improve willingness to compromise or negotiate. When they gave participants a detailed transcript, however, they were able to achieve negotiation results and positive relationship building similar to those of participants who walked in the virtual shoes of the park ranger.

“This has great potential to use virtual environments to improve interpersonal relationships that are not possible in the real world, to actually walk in the shoes of another party,” said Marietta. So far researchers have tested the game on adults and a few middle school students, but they are looking for more test subjects.

The researchers used a virtual world created in Unity, a web-based application that could be easily used in schools. They’d like to build out a virtual school so that students could interact with peers and teachers in different ways, helping them gain skills in social perspective taking that would allow them to build positive relationships within a school context, hopefully leading to greater academic and social success.

The research team sees the technique as widely applicable since communication and negotiation can so easily break down in any context. Teacher training, language development and management training could all benefit from the ability to understand the perspective of another. Researchers also hypothesize the technique could work well with bullies.

Flickr: fhwrdh

Scientists are always uncovering new ways into how people learn best, and some of the most recent neuroscience research has shown connections between basic survival functions, social and emotional reactions to the world, and creative impulses.

Students’ social and emotional reactions to learning are imperative to feeling motivated to learn and to their ability to creatively solve problems, according to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who wrote Musings on the Neurobiological and Evolutionary Origins of Creativity via a Developmental Analysis of One Child’s Poetry [PDF]. Her research tries to understand why emotions are so important to learning by examining what happens to brain functions.

“Neuroimaging experiments show us that we use the very same neural systems to feel our bodies as to feel our relationships, our moral judgments, and our creative inspiration,” said Immordino-Yang, a professor at USC’s Rossier School of Education and an expert on the neuroscience of learning and creativity. Her whose work focuses on how neuroscience can help teachers understand the ways students learn best, and to that end, she’s created a free online curriculum for teachers.

The neuromechanisms responsible for feeling and managing the body’s physical survival and consciousness have been co-opted to also manage social survival. “Survival in the savanna depends on a brain that is wired to make sense of the environment, and to play out the things it notices through patterns of bodily and mental reactions,” Immordino-Yang writes. “This same brain, the same logic, helps us make sense of and survive in the social world of today.” To make something relevant to a learner, it should inspire an emotional reaction in the person, triggering these survivalist parts of the brain that indicate something is important.

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“The way that we make meaning out of situations, and the way that we feel and evaluate things, is plated on the same neural platforms as do the basic job of managing our viscera,” Immordino Yang said. When a topic strikes a chord with a student it feels meaningful because the part of his brain firing is the same part that keeps him conscious and alive. It’s also the part of the brain responsible for novel, creative or new ideas.

“Creativity is representing some kind of relevant problem in a new way and making people understand it, and feel about it, and have some insight into something that matters,” Immordino-Yang said. She argues that creative moments are motivated by caring deeply about a subject. Furthermore, humans make meaning by relating new information to feelings, memories and other personal information to give it context.

To undertake that complicated process of internalizing information Immordino-Yang has found that it’s necessary to shut out external inputs and focus intensely on what’s going on internally. Asking students to constantly pay attention or allowing them to be distracted by games, phones, and other stimuli may deprive them of the important inward-looking time crucial to deeper learning.

“The way in which people learn information, the way in which they make it their own, assimilate it, are dependent heavily on a neural system that is fundamentally incompatible with external information and distraction,” Immordino-Yang said. Long term learning happens when the brain calls up old memories and incorporates the new knowledge into a personalized understanding of the world. And that’s often a creative process. It takes creativity to synthesize new information within the context of old experiences and to reshape difficult concepts into something understandable. Immordino-Yang argues that the essence of that process requires the thinker to disengage from the world around them.

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That doesn’t necessarily mean that daydreaming is the key to developing innovative ideas. There are times when insight strikes while the mind wanders, but Immordino-Yang says that in those cases the information is already present. When it comes to learning something new, the inward focus is often real work.

“Help kids know how to make meaning and sense of what they are learning so they can see who they are,” Immordino-Yang said. “Creativity is just an extension of that.” She gave the example of her young daughter who wrote a song about loving her young brother, but the imagery in the song incorporated space, planets, and the galaxy. She had just learned about those concepts, but in order to really understand their significance, she needed to express them within the totally understood and emotional space of family love. Allowing kids the space for the interplay between the emotional and cognitive spaces will benefit the long-term learner.

Flirck:WoodleyWonderworks

Every educator wants to create an environment that will foster students’ love of learning. Because the criteria are intangible, it’s difficult to define or pinpoint exactly what they are. But one group is giving it a try.

Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched the Innovative Learning Environments project to turn an academic lens on the project of identifying concrete traits that mark innovative learning environments. They sifted through and categorized the research on learning science, documented case studies, and compiled policy recommendations they hope will transform the current system.

Their book, The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice and the accompanying practitioner’s guide, lay out the key principles for designing learning environments that will help students build skills useful in a world where jobs are increasingly information and knowledge-based. The principles are not job-specific – no one knows what the future economy will demand. Instead, the main goal is to develop self-directed learners, students with “adaptive expertise.”

“Adaptive expertise tries to push beyond the idea of mastery,” said Jennifer Groff, an educational engineer and co-founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign. “You may be proficient, but without adaptive expertise you can get stuck very quickly as the world shifts.”

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Groff doesn’t dispute that mastery is important and that students need to learn age-appropriate content, but she also argues it’s equally important to develop students’ ability to go beyond that, to question and apply learning in new situations.

To that end, these are their identified principles for innovative learning.

1. 1.Learners have to be at the center of what happens in the classroom with activities focused on their cognition and growth. They have to actively engage in learning in order to become self-regulated learners who are able to control their emotions and motivations during the study process, set goals, and monitor their own learning process.
2. 2. Learning is a social practice and can’t happen alone. “By our nature we are social beings and we learn by interacting,” Groff said. “We learn by pushing and pulling on concepts with one another.” Structured, collaborative group work can be good for all learners; it pushes people in different ways.
3. 3. Emotions are an integral part of learning. Students understand ideas better when there’s interplay between emotions, motivation and cognition, so positive beliefs about oneself are a core part of reaching a more profound understanding. The power of emotions and motivation in the classroom are well documented, but often overlooked because they are “soft.” Still most teachers know that if a student is upset about something that happened at home or in school, he won’t learn well. Similarly, keeping students motivated should be the starting point of learning. If students understand why it matters, learning becomes more important to them.
4. 4. Learners are different and innovative learning environments reflect the various experiences and prior knowledge that each student brings to class. “You really want practices and processes that help teachers engage each student where they are,” said Groff. This principle is understood by every frustrated educator teaching to a “middle” that doesn’t exist.
5. 5. Students need to be stretched, but not too much. “It’s really critical to find that student’s sweet spot,” Groff Said. Educators should try to prevent both coasting and overloading. Students need to experience both academic success and the challenge of discovery. In a diverse classroom group work can help achieve this as students at different levels help one another.
6. 6. Assessment should be for learning, not of learning. Assessments are important, but only to gauge how to structure the next lesson for maximum effectiveness. It should be meaningful, substantial, and shape the learning environment itself. “Good teachers do this informally most of the time,” Groff said. “But when it’s done well and more formally it’s a whole structure and methodology where you collect feedback on the learning pathway and it drives the next step that you take.”
7. 7. Learning needs to be connected across disciplines and reach out into the real world. Learning can’t be meaningful if students don’t understand why the knowledge will be useful to them, how it can be applied in life. Understanding the connections between subjects and ideas is essential for the ability to transfer skills and adapt. “We can’t just have things remain in silos that never interact,” Groff said.

IMPLEMENTING THE PRINCIPLES

Many of the seven principles Groff outlines are second nature to good teachers, but they can feel hard to achieve within education systems that are slow-moving, bureaucratic and resistant to change. Still Groff says there are ways for teachers who want to create an innovative learning environment to begin down the path, even without the full support of their colleagues and administration. Groff also hopes shifting to the Common Core could offer openings for building in these practices. “It’s designed in a way that condones a lot of the principles that we’ve been talking about,” she said.

Everyone knows the common barriers educators face: the school culture, the students and themselves. Groff says with some reflection and problem solving, teachers can often begin to work around these barriers. An educator might think she’s open to innovation without realizing that there are preconceived notions about how one should teach that are deeply ingrained.

What’s more, if the school culture does not encourage experimentation, educators can mitigate negative reaction by framing the ideas in a way that will be accepted, or by bringing in outside resources to try and convince naysayers. Even finding one colleague in or outside of the school to bounce ideas with can make the process much smoother.

Educators can also test ideas with students before implementing them. Students have been indoctrinated into the same educational mindset about what makes a “useful” education as everyone else, and some might be resistant to new teaching methodologies. Without their enthusiasm it can be hard to persevere through other obstacles.

CASE STUDY

The darling of the Innovative Learning Environment case studies is the Jenaplan School in Germany. It’s one of the few schools embodying all the principles fluidly. The school has about 450 students that range three to 20 years old. Students aren’t broken up into grade levels, instead they learn in mixed-age groups as well as in groups of roughly the same age. Learning is directed by students, often project-based, evaluated primarily through writing and projects, self-assessments and peer-assessment. The schedule is periodic, focusing on a topic like geography or history for three to four weeks and crossing into multiple disciplines. The teacher is seen as an active mentor and coordinator and the school has active parental involvement.

The Jenaplan School has won awards for its model and in the eyes of the Innovative Learning Environment researchers is doing an excellent job at preparing students to be adaptive and nimble thinkers in a knowledge-based world.

Educators are aware that social problems like poverty, unsafe neighborhoods, violence, and family trauma can affect how students learn when they come to school. Though teaching subjects like math and literacy are the biggest part of their job, in many cases they’re also called on to attend to their students’ emotional health as well, incorporating social and emotional skills.

“Science is starting to show that there is a very strong integration between social and emotional skills and learning,” said Vicki Zakrzewski, education director of the Greater Good Science Center at U.C. Berkeley, which studies the psychology, sociology and neuroscience of well-being during a recent Forum radio show. “Some scientists believe that cognitive achievement is 50 percent of the equation and social and emotional skills are the other 50 percent.”

Some school districts are taking that idea seriously and integrating the research into teaching practices. Oakland Unified School District, for example, is piloting a program called Roots of Empathy in 20 schools across the district. The program teaches students how to be empathetic by bringing a baby and the baby’s parent into K-12 classrooms. The students are asked to think about the baby’s experience as it explores the classroom, while a trained facilitator helps them name the baby’s feelings and emotions. Focusing on the baby and its vulnerability allows students to practice empathy, making it easier to identify their own emotions in the future. As they become more self-aware they’re better able to develop respectful and caring relationships.

“It’s a launching pad for the children to apply the understanding of emotion and perspective taking that they’ve learned through this little baby to themselves and then the bridge to understanding how their classmates feel,” said Mary Gordon, who founded the program. Gordon says that when children learn to be empathetic they naturally behave less aggressively. Researchers at the University of British Columbia have documented her claim that when students develop emotional literacy they can begin to talk about their feelings, frustrations and anger without acting out. She’s implemented her program in schools across the U.S. and Canada, in rural, suburban and urban settings and says it works everywhere.

“We have to be able to understand our own experiences emotionally to have a better relationship with others in the world and also to engage deeply in dialogue, to take other people’s perspective and examine our own,” said Tony Smith, superintendent of Oakland Unified School District. He’s aware that his city is plagued by race and class divisions as well as high levels of violence, which have left many students traumatized and angry.

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“Many of our young people don’t have the capacity to struggle productively with other people around their ideas and not shut down if they’re feeling uncomfortable,” Smith said. He believes that by building emotional skills, his students will be able to focus more on learning and become more socially successful. “There’s a lot of work to do around building the emotional capacity to be a deep thinker,” Smith said.

“Giving students a safe caring classroom won’t necessarily mitigate all the trauma they’ve experienced, but it will help them develop a secure attachment with the teacher, and they need that strong attachment with an adult to feel safe exploring the world,” Zakrzewski said. That freedom to explore is at the center of what many consider to be deeper and self-directed learning.

By Matt Levinson

For parents, the pre-teen and teenage years can be overwhelming, disorienting and puzzling. Students encounter the tangled web of changing hormones, shifting social dynamics, entrée into social media, the desire for greater independence as well as the need for emotional safety.

Many parents can feel at a loss as to how to communicate and connect with their child during this period. This is where schools can play a key role. Schools have the data point of hundreds of children over many years, and with the benefit of this broad perspective, can help parents make sense out of the social and emotional issues that come up.

Communication between parents and schools can provide a frame of reference for parents to put things in perspective, and to break the isolation that many parents feel when trying to work with and understand their child. This can happen through parent education programs and gatherings where parents share their questions, struggles and concerns and receive reassurance and guidance from skilled and trained teachers, who can place these issues in a larger perspective. This can also happen through phone calls to the school to talk through a thorny situation, to just see if what is going on at home is in the realm of the developmental stage that the child is going through.

In order to form this relationship between schools and parents, here are some ideas that have proven to work well.

• PARENT GROUPS. A well-coordinated advisory group built on the developmental needs of each grade level, with communication to parents about the goals of the advisory program, built on the foundational skills of social emotional learning (SEL). Schools can develop advisory programs using SEL themes particular to the developmental needs of the grade level and host parent education evenings or morning coffees centered around some of these themes.
• ORGANIZED PROGRAMS. Advisory programs can incorporate the rating scale or check in as a part of regular practice. Janice Toben and Rush Sabiston, who run a summer workshop for teachers on SEL, have refined the rating scale and have introduced it to many school communities. On a scale of 1-10, students rate their mood that day, with 10 being the most positive feeling and 1 being the least. This challenges the other students to demonstrate empathy and connection with the way the student leading the check-in has organized the scale. The rating scale also provides a safe way for middle school students to let an adult know how he/she is feeling. Instead of asking a student, “How are you doing?” to which the response is most often “fine,” the check-in creates a space to signal feelings, moods and emotions through metaphor. If a student checks in at a very low number, the opportunity is there for the teacher to follow up with the student and the family if necessary, thus further cementing the home-school connection.
• STUDENT TRAINING. A separate Social-Emotional Learning class that provides the opportunity for students to share their worries, concerns and anxieties, coupled with the skill-building strategies to talk about and cope with these challenges. Toben and Rush, for example, have developed Open Session as the framework for kids to communicate with each other in the SEL or advisory classroom setting. In open session, students anonymously share an issue or concern on a 3×5 notecard.  The teacher collects these cards and then uses the cards to generate a student led discussion around problem-solving, empathy, listening and connection. The cards also provide the teacher with the “inside” view of what middle school students are thinking about and can compile the cards to make sense of grade level themes and issues, which can then be used at parent evenings and coffees to discuss developmental stages of pre-teens.
• OPEN COMMUNICATION. When problems and issues arise, the school communicates closely with parents to work with them in the solution-building process, using SEL tools, to illustrate modeling for students.
• DESIGNATED ADVISER. With the help of a skilled teacher, which could be a dean of students or an adviser, students seek the support and guidance of this teacher to help work through challenges. This teacher can also bring together groups of students to sort through challenging social situations and have students practice the skills of SEL to work to resolve. Communication home happens as a follow up, to reinforce the SEL skill building.

Prioritizing social and emotional learning in schools, and building bonds between students, parents, and schools is crucial in creating a safe learning community. These non-cognitive skills help students build capacity for emotional connection and investment that makes school a more gratifying place to be.

By Katrina Schwartz

More schools are working to change school culture through programs aimed at improving the social and emotional skills of students. The lessons directly teach young people how to interact with one another in positive ways, deal with anger, and solve problems, and new studies show they improve academic performance, too. As more schools try this approach, researchers have begun paying closer attention to the effects of social and emotional learning on behavior and academic achievement.

That research is showing that social and emotional learning (SEL) is crucial to mitigating the social problems that inherently exist in schools and detract from learning. These programs are much more than an anti-bullying strategy – they teach life skills.

To that end, the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning – better known as CASEL – has spearheaded the effort to evaluate and measure the positive effects of social and emotional learning programs. The organization is releasing a new report that updates the guide released 10 years ago, when this movement was in its infancy.

The 2013 CASEL Guide: Effective Social and Emotional Learning Programs reflects increased rigor in evaluation of programs and draws from the more than 200 studies on SEL learning that have been published in Child Development. CASEL has also designated 23 programs as SELect because they are well-designed for classroom-based instruction, include training and other implementation support for teachers, and are evidence-based. Many of the programs that received the SELect designation went through randomized control trials, while others were evaluated, but only in what the report calls a “quasi-experimental” manner, meaning conditions were assigned to groups in a non-random way.

“Social and emotional learning involves the processes through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions,” the report states.

In order to do that, programs focus on teaching students at a young age how to communicate, problem solve, deal with frustration and set goals through focused activities. They stress five competency areas: self-management, self-awareness, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. If students do well in these five areas research shows that on average academic achievement improves 11 percentile points.

The programs that CASEL evaluates in the report are designed for preschool through elementary school-aged kids. For example, one program called 4Rs (Reading, Writing, Respect and Resolution) provides materials for teachers to read aloud and discuss with their students. There are then specific, sequential, interactive lessons to help students develop creative problem solving, acceptance of diversity, management of feelings and the ability to stand up to teasing or bullying. The lessons are interspersed throughout the year, about one per week. The stories come from a variety of cultural backgrounds and the program is offered from pre-k through eighth grade. Additionally, there are homework assignments that require the student to bring their social and emotional learning home to guide parents and caregivers.

This program was evaluated in the third and fourth grades of an urban school where 62 percent of students were on free or reduced lunch and the population was largely African-American and Latino. The randomized control trial followed students over three years and discovered an improvement in academic performance for students who often act out, increased positive behavior, fewer conduct problems and less emotional distress.

CASEL sees programs like 4Rs as proof that students need explicit instruction in fundamental social and emotional lessons that will help them cope with interpersonal problems throughout life. They argue that spending a small amount of class time focusing on SEL learning saves teachers a lot of time dealing with conduct and social issues during other lessons.

The CASEL guide, essentially a clearinghouse for SEL programs, can be a practical tool for educators. All the SELect programs are evaluated and there are Consumer Report-type descriptions of each program for administrators or educators looking for a program that suits their classroom context  And the various programs, approaches, and outcomes provide a valuable tool for schools trying to reflect on their own attempts at SEL education.