What Every School Can Learn From Preschools
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Turns out Robert Fulghum’s 1988 runaway bestseller, “All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” was really onto something — only now, education experts lament, valuable lessons about cooperation and sharing often stop after pre-kindergarten. And that’s a big mistake, according to a significant new report from the New America Foundation, which declares that the teaching of social and emotional “skills for success” should continue throughout high school.
“Some say schools must confine themselves to academic content due to accountability systems that focus only on outcomes on subject tests,” write report authors Melissa Tooley and Laura Bornfreund, both education policy analysts with New America. “But research shows that many of these skills, such as self-regulation and cooperation, are, in fact, closely linked to academic achievement.”
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The report’s viewpoint is one that many educators, tired of what’s often seen as the country’s myopic emphasis on testing, have been coming around to more and more lately. And it’s one that Lisa Fiore, education expert and dean of faculty for Lesley University, in Cambridge, wholly agrees with. “The fundamental underpinnings of healthy and successful development, which segues into healthy and successful engagement in society, haven’t changed in (dare I say it?) thousands of years, if not longer,” she tells Yahoo Parenting in an email. “It doesn’t matter what someone’s math test score is if he doesn’t know how to share, or cultivate friendships, or zip up his jacket.”
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In this country’s early history of education, Fiore imagines, there might have been specific lessons on social skills, most likely anchored in religious and moral beliefs. But being “good,” she argues, is not quite the same as what’s meant today by integrating social-skill lessons — more about cultivating a classroom that promotes learning, and in which “mistakes aren’t viewed as failures, effort is rewarded for its own sake, and ‘growth’ may be measured in storytelling, artwork, and acts of kindness.” The false distinction between “academic” and “non-academic” subjects today, she notes, is simply “antithetical to how people learn best. We are social beings… An excited, engaged student will gladly participate in a class with a despised subject matter, just as a bored, stressed, or tuned-out student will likely perform poorly on her work and assessments.”
With that in mind, a growing trend is now aiming to integrate school subjects with life lessons — which are not always inherent, and can and should be taught, say many.
“Now a lot of groups are coming together, saying it’s important to look at the whole child,” says Mary Beth Forton, spokesperson for Responsive Classroom, a fast-growing education model that believes in the “integration of social and academic.” Its focus on skills such as cooperation, assertion, respect, empathy and self-control, she says, provides a vital foundation for academic achievement.
“Good teachers have always done this,” Forton points out, though some have felt pressed to move away from it because of today’s emphasis on testing everything. “This is not something you cannot easily test,” she says. “How do you measure social and emotional skills? Figuring out how might bring it more into the mainstream.” (Several promising approaches to assessment, notes the New America report, are increasing around the country.)
Forton credits several other groups for furthering the integrative goal — namely the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), a Chicago-based non-profit who aims to make social and emotional learning an integral part of education through high school. Last year, CASEL, also referenced in the New America report, made a case for its goal through its report, “The Missing Piece: A National Teacher Survey on How Social and Emotional Learning Can Empower Children and Transform Schools.”
“From the schoolhouse to State House, ‘academic skills’ have been emphasized, tested, and reported upon,” the report notes, “but another essential aspect of a child’s education, social and emotional learning (SEL), has been underemphasized or altogether forgotten — with serious consequences to children, schools, and communities.”
Because of that, CASEL fights for laws that support its goals, such as a pending piece of federal legislation called the Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning Act of 2013, introduced by Representative Tim Ryan (D-Ohio). Such a law would “expand the availability of evidence-based programs that teach students social and emotional competencies such as self-control, goal setting, collaboration, conflict resolution, and problem solving.”
For now, experts emphasize various pre-K skills that students could benefit from learning throughout adolescence, including:
Work ethic (a.k.a. “grit,” tenacity, or self-control). “These kinds of habits, mindsets, and non-technical skills are integral to academic, professional, and personal success,” note Tooley and Bornfreund.
Communication. “Without it, students are left without the skills needed to have rigorous academic conversations — skills that allow them to be good listeners, to assert their ideas, and to respectfully disagree,” says Forton.
Empathy. “The ability to see something from another’s perspective and to feel a connection to another is so vital to our success as a species, let alone a nation,” Fiore notes. “I firmly believe that the damage being done to students in American classrooms today is toxic — it is squashing their innate joy in learning, their natural curiosities, and their ability to see others first as resources or allies rather than threats.”
