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Social-emotional learning and achievement at Valor

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Valor Collegiate Academies in Tennessee is crediting a sharp focus on social and emotional learning (SEL) for students’ astonishing academic success, which propelled its Tennessee schools to the top 1 percent of all middle schools in the state in its first year.

The success at Valor not only sheds light on the value of social-emotional learning, but also provides an opportunity to connect those lessons with broader discussions about good character and morals.

The Charter School Growth Fund, which invested $1.5 million for Valor’s first two schools launched in 2013, featured the schools in a recent “CSGF Portfolio Spotlight” on the organization’s website.

Todd Dickson, CEO of Valor Collegiate Academies, explained that the concept for the charter school was inspired by his work at a high-performing charter school in California that focused heavily on academics, and his twin brother Daren’s time helping children in social services with social and emotional skills.

“Students at Valor spend more time on their social and emotional growth than most traditional students. We first work on self-awareness and self-management to help them develop a strong sense of who they are. Then, we work on social awareness and social management to help them develop positive relationships with others. We believe that doing both things well helps develop healthy kids and communities,” Dickson said.

“We also hear from students that they feel safe here and that they have trusting relationships with peers and adults in the building. This has been beneficial in an academic setting; scholars are more willing to take academic risks. They listen to other people’s opinions and accept a diversity of perspectives.”

Valor schools use “The Valor Compass” to guide student growth and help them focus on four primary objectives: Sharp Minds, Noble Purpose, Big Hearts, and Aligned Actions.

“Mentor time, Expeditions, and academic courses all incorporate explicit and experiential experiences to help scholars develop sharp minds, big hearts, noble purpose, and aligned actions,” according to the Valor website. “Valor scholars develop character strengths such as kindness, determination, curiosity, gratitude, and integrity within a supportive community.”

Ryan Olson, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies on Culture at the University of Virginia, points out in “Character Education” that an SEL researcher argued that “the orientation of social-emotional learning toward action and skill” in SEL programs can complement the “concern for volition and intention often found in character and moral education programs.”

Adding curriculum resources on why students should do and be good—reasons outside oneself and for the benefit of others and a community—improves the stickiness of character formation, and getting students to go deeper by working on developing good sense when there is conflict between the social and emotional skills they’re learning, is an excellent next step, Olson argues.

The UK’s Jubilee Centre offers a worksheet to assist teachers to help students think about the kind of person and type of life they want to pursue.

On bullying and learning: A Girl Scout’s “buddy bench”

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MUSCATINE, Iowa – Iowa Girl Scout Nicole Frisbie knows what it’s like to face bullies, and she doesn’t want young students to face the harassment alone. She decided to do something about it, to combat bullying with kindness. And when it comes to character formation, kindness is essential.

The 17-year-old recently received the Girls Scouts’ highest honor, the Gold Award, for her work to create a “buddy bench” at her former grade school, McKinley Elementary, that’s already making a positive impact.

According to the Muscatine Journal:

Frisbie’s award-winning project involved the creation of a “buddy bench”—a space where students who are feeling bullied or left out can go to sit on the playground that alerts teachers or other students that they need help or would like companionship. Frisbie’s project involved not only the construction of the bench at her grade school alma mater, McKinley, but a training program for students and administrators regarding use of the bench and its impact, backed up by various studies in education and social science.

“It felt awesome to be a part of this and earn this award, but it’s an even more amazing feeling to know that my work is going to help kids from being bullied,” Frisbie told the news site. “I went to school at McKinley and I was bullied and it was terrible. My goal was to help the school and other kids so they don’t have to go through what I did.”

The buddy bench, she said, has already improved learning in measurable ways in its first year.

“The number of disciplinary reports have gone down and attendance has gone up,” Frisbie said. “The first is pretty explanatory, but the second—kids who are being bullied sometimes won’t want to be in school and will try to avoid it if they can.”

“I had a parent tell me that her son used it and it helped him and that was really cool,” she said. “When you do a project like this you want it to work, but you’re not really sure if it will. You hope it will. And when it does, especially a project like this, it feels really good.”

Many believe the epidemic of bullying in schools is tied closely to the disappearance of character education, which helps students develop important traits like empathy, compassion, and kindness without regard to the social costs.

“It is easy to affirm a general idea of kindness, but quite another to believe that other people are intrinsically worth being treated kindly, and that because of that belief, one has an obligation to actually treat them kindly,” James Davison Hunter, founder of University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, wrote in his book The Tragedy of Moral Education in America.

“The first is a much more flexible and convenient morality than the second, and it is one that is easier to ignore when the cost of holding to it rises.”

Lessons on character would help students identify classmates in trouble, even without the buddy bench. But while efforts to teach good character are organized, Frisbie’s project can be an effective way to address a lack of kindness. For instance, elementary-school educators could try a lesson on the virtue of kindness by asking students to become “secret agents of kindness.”

Frisbie’s own character provided the fortitude to persevere through the two-year project while balancing many other demands as a top student at Muscatine High School, where she participates in dance, color guard, and band, the Journal reports.

She raised $700 to buy the bench, as well as other funds for the frame and training materials, which the teen collected through bake sales, by soliciting donations, and other fundraising efforts.

Maura Warner, spokeswoman for Girls Scouts of Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois, said the Gold Award is an earned achievement and that it requires a lot of time, effort, and determination to bring a meaningful service project to life.

It’s an experience that builds character.

“She’s the first girl in about five years to win the honor from Muscatine,” Warner said. “It’s a really prestigious award. There’s a lot of time put into it. You have to create and manage a project and get it done successfully. It’s not about winning it; it’s about earning it.”

Teaching students discipline, respect, and understanding through music

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HUMBLE, Texas – Park Lakes Elementary School teacher Stephanie Tiner is using music to teach students important qualities like discipline, respect, and understanding—lessons that can be a foundation for deeper conversations about good character.

Tiner secured a $3,700 grant from the Humble Independent School District Education Foundation this school year to purchase drums, bongos, maracas, and numerous other percussion instruments she plans to use to introduce students to “D.R.U.M.”

The acronym stands for Discipline, Respect, and Unity through Music, and it’s the title of a book authored by veteran Humble music teacher Jim Solomon about the power of music to bring people together, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Tiner told the news site that Park Lakes serves a large population of bilingual students, some with limited English, and her music class brings those students together with their traditional classmates.

Unlike schools that keep students segregated by their English abilities, Park Lakes blends the students in non-core classes to help them work together and learn about their racial differences and language barriers.

“I really wanted to try and figure out a way to use music to really tackle those issues that I kind of feel our country is even having a hard time with,” Tiner told the Chronicle. “Getting along with people who don’t look like you or sound like you through music is a wonderful way of doing that.”

Tiner said that although she just recently received the new instruments, they’ve helped to engage students in a collaborative effort to carry a rhythm and to learn to share the various drums, bongos, and lummi sticks on a rotating basis.

“It would help them to have to work together, to have to listen, to be disciplined, to treat each other with respect,” she said. “When you try to create music with people you are not listening to or that you don’t get along with, it’s noise, and I tell them all the time, ‘This isn’t noise class—this is music class.’”

And students have responded well to infusing lessons on character with the music.

“Having a more character education driven classroom in general around this has made a big difference,” Tiner said. “They are constantly trying to work together to earn points to move onto the next step.”

Tiner’s music-driven character lessons are an excellent way to engaging students in more in-depth conversations about the virtues of good character.

The experience of cultivating habits of respect, attentiveness, and humility in schools through music and other subjects should lead to deeper conversations about why we should show respect and listen attentively when it’s easier to insist on our own perspective and disregard others’ opinions and feelings. Incorporating character virtues into music classes (example here) will make the character lessons explicit.

A community-wide effort to ingrain shared values into local culture, curricula

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NEW PROVIDENCE, N.J. – New Providence schools superintendent David Miceli contends quality character education isn’t the result of “an occasional presentation,” but rather a community-wide effort to ingrain shared values into both local culture and school curriculums.

Miceli was joined by New Providence Mayor Al Morgan, New Jersey Commissioner of Education Kimberly Harrington, and County Superintendent Juan Torres earlier this month at New Providence High School to celebrate the district’s recent recognition as one of only four National Districts of Character.

The awards are bestowed by Character.org, which works with state affiliates to highlight school districts “that demonstrate a dedicated focus on character development programs and a positive impact on academic achievement, student behavior, school climate and their communities.”

“Through an in-depth and rigorous evaluation process, these schools were found to be exemplary models of character development,” according to the organization’s website.

School board president Adam Smith told students, parents, staff, and others at the award event that character education doesn’t work without families and a community that embraces volunteerism, Tap into New Providence reports.

“Education is more than algebra, language arts and history,” he said. “Our character education is based on integrity, fairness, respect and responsibility.”

The foundation of the program—an approach that incorporates parents and the community—is central to developing good character in students, according to James Davison Hunter, distinguished University of Virginia sociology professor and author of The Tragedy of Moral Education.

“Moral education can work where the community, and schools and other institutions within it, share a moral culture that is integrated and mutually reinforcing: where the social networks of adult authority are strong, unified, and consistent in articulating moral ideals and their attending virtues; and where adults maintain a ‘caring watchfulness’ over all aspects of a young person’s maturation,” Hunter writes.

“These are environments where intellectual and moral virtues are not only naturally interwoven in a distinctive moral ethos, but embedded within the structure of communities.”

Miceli told CultureFeed that lessons on good character have existed in silos at different schools in the district since the early 2000s, “but students wouldn’t necessarily come away understanding that was part of our character education program.”

“They wouldn’t necessarily connect all the dots,” he said.

It wasn’t until schools began to focus lessons on an annual theme at different schools that things began to click.

“They made tremendous progress with that and it pulled in community members,” he said. “From there, it just grew and other schools started taking on their own themes.”

Four years ago, district officials opted to extend the annual theme district wide, and added a celebration during a “Week of Respect” to align the focus in schools with the greater community, Miceli said.

“This year’s theme is ‘Start small, end big’ . . . ‘Be today’s hero’ was last year’s theme,” he said. “It’s short catchy phrases and we use that all year round . . . and it just ties everyone together districtwide.”

The unified theme, along with a concerted effort to connect with local groups, is “really the hallmark we were recognized for with the national award,” he said.

“We include the constituent groups in our programs and activities. They often participate in many of the programs we run on a yearly basis,” Miceli said, adding that the effort has proved successful in many ways. “When you have a caring and supportive community, you’ll see better gains on academic achievement.”

Expanding CTE, character formation should advance together

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WASHINGTON, D.C. – Several states are highlighting and expanding career and technical programs for students after years of focusing mostly on college preparedness, and experts say students will need character and citizenship in addition to an industry credential to truly thrive.

“What we’re seeing is that there’s a shift from focusing purely on college readiness to thinking also about career readiness,” Jennifer Thomsen, policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States, told Education Week.

“For the longest time, the ‘career’ part just kind of dropped off. But now, states are really getting back to the idea that college and career readiness really does mean both of those things,” she said.

The news site points to recently approved legislation in states like Arizona, where officials have worked measures of career readiness into the school accountability system, and Kansas, which pays schools for each student who earns an industry-recognized credential or completes 120 hours of work-based learning.

In Colorado, a new law requires schools to discuss certificates, apprenticeships, and military service with students during career counseling, while Oregon approved a law to ensure the state’s labor bureau shares apprenticeship opportunities with schools.

Idaho now requires schools to inform students about dual high schools and college credit opportunities for career-tech courses, while education officials in Texas must work with colleges and workforce departments to post an inventory of certification and credentials available to students for high-skill trade occupations.

Other states, including Illinois and Virginia, are making it easier for schools to recruit career-tech-ed teachers by waiving some licensure requirements. In Indiana, state officials approved legislation to require the state board of education to use workforce data to design new career and technical education pathways and alternative avenues to high school graduation, Education Week reports.

“For too long, we’ve been focused on four-year colleges, and that’s not necessarily the right course for every student,” Indiana state Rep. Robert Behning told Education Week.

Behning said he helped craft the changes to career and technical education in the Hoosier state because he wants schools to “get creative, think out of the box” to help students with career-focused programs.

Other states are including completion of career programs on high school diplomas to help the business sector find students with the right skills for the job.

Meanwhile, others point to important though less obvious skills and virtues students will need to thrive in trade occupations.

Mike Rose recently addressed this in an essay, “Vocational Education and the New World of Work,” in The Hedgehog Review.

“If the theorists of the new world of work are right, then tomorrow’s CTE student will need to be computer savvy, resourceful, and entrepreneurial. But the theorists’ predictions suggest the need for other educational goals as well. Intellectual suppleness will have to be as key an element of future CTE as the content knowledge of a field . . . Students will need to learn the conceptual bases of the tools and techniques and how to reason with them, because future work is predicted to be increasingly fluid and mutable,” Rose wrote.

“These considerations will require a philosophy of education that has at its core a bountiful definition of intelligence and that honors multiple kinds of knowledge and advances the humanistic, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of an occupation as well as the more traditional academic of study.”

Rose contends schools should “educate young workers so that they have multiple skills and bodies of knowledge to draw on, so that they are able to analyze and act upon opportunities to affect the direction of their employment, and so that they can strive to create meaning in their working lives.”

To that end, states and schools could ensure students are intentionally formed to have good character by thinking through the virtues required by specific professions.

The UK’s Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues provides resources for educators to help students make that connection between their career or technical training and the moral virtues they’ll need on the job.

State police speak out on bullying

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PAW PAW, Mich. – Michigan State Police are reaching out to students and parents to combat bullies both online and in schools, a persistent problem research suggests could be addressed through a stronger focus on character education.

Parents raising concerns about bullying in Kalamazoo schools over the last month prompted the Michigan State Police to speak out on the subject, and offer parents and students advice on how to respond to the harassment.

“They say 71 percent of students have seen bullying while they were in school, so it’s quite frequent for students to see it happen,” Paw Paw Post Sgt. Andrew Jeffrey told WWMT. “Roughly 25 percent of students who have been bullied never even tell an adult that they’re being bullied. It’s very important that you let somebody know what’s going on.”

Jeffrey suggested students not respond with anger or physical attacks, but rather “act brave” and walk away when they’re targeted by bullies. MSP encourages students to talk about incidents with friends and adults, and to speak up if they see others under attack.

He also spoke about online harassment, and told WWMT state police have authority to investigate cyber bullying.

“Bullying does not have to be face to face. It can be behind people’s backs, like spreading rumors and things like that especially on the internet,” Jeffrey said. “A phone is also a computer, so if you’re using that you’re also using a computer which can potentially be a crime.”

University of Birmingham education researcher Tom Harrison studied the intersection of bullying and technology for “Virtuous reality: moral theory and research into cyber-bullying,” published in Ethics and Information Technology.

Harrison’s team interviewed 60 11–14-year olds from six schools in England about bullying online, and “themes emerging from the interviews included anonymity; the absence of rules, monitoring and guidance, and the challenges associated with determining the consequences of online actions,” he wrote.

“The new opportunities that the Internet has opened up for young people require them more than ever to ‘do the right thing’; not so much motivated by rules, duties or consequences (since these may not always be explicit), but by having the character to choose wisely between alternatives,” according to Harrison.

The situation not only calls for ways students can handle bullying once it occurs, but also a strong character foundation to prevent it from occurring to begin with.

Schools should focus on character education—public schools especially, using a virtue ethics approach highlighted in Harrison’s research—to change a school culture so that it defuses bullying and encourages the practice of virtuous habits of kindness, empathy, patience, and forgiveness.

The UK’s Jubilee Center provides resources for schools to create a framework for virtue ethics lessons, and they’re available free online.

Study: Link between bullying and mental health issues

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A new study confirms the link between children who are bullied and mental health issues later in life, and many of the proposed remedies focus more on the effects rather than the cause of the problem.

The research confirms what many in the mental health community already know, and what character education aims to address in schools.

University College London outlined the recent UK based study:

The study involved 11,108 participants from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), which is based at King’s College London. By surveying twins, researchers were able to look at the associations between bullying and mental health outcomes, and then account for the confounding effects of their genes and shared environmental influences because they studied both monozygotic (“identical”) twins who have matching genes and home environments and dizygotic (“non-identical”) twins, who don’t share all of their genes, but have matching home environments. Both children and their parents filled out the questionnaire: at age 11 and 14 they were asked about peer victimization, and at 11 and 16 they were asked about mental health difficulties.

The UCL-led research team found that, with all factors considered, bullying contributed to anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems, and the anxiety persisted for years afterward. Five years after the bullying, “there was no longer an effect on any of those outcomes,” according to the university website.

“While our findings show that being bullied leads to detrimental mental health outcomes, they also offer a message of hope by highlighting the potential for resilience. Bullying certainly causes suffering, but the impact on mental health decreases over time, so children are able to recover in the medium term,” said Jean-Baptiste Pingault, UCL Psychology & Language Sciences professor and lead author of the study.

“The detrimental effects of bullying show that more needs to be done to help children who are bullied. In addition to interventions aimed at stopping bullying from happening, we should also support children who have been bullied by supporting resilience processes on their path to recovery. Our findings highlight the importance of continuous support to mental health care for children and adolescents.”

The study, funded by MQ: Transforming Mental Health and the Economic and Social Research Council, was published in JAMA Psychiatry.

MQ: Transforming Mental Health Director of Research Sophie Dix echoed Pingaults’ call for supporting students once they’ve been victimized by bullies.

“This important research is further strong evidence of the need to take the mental health impacts of bullying seriously,” she said. “We hope this study provides fresh impetus to make sure young people at risk—and those currently being bullied—get effective help as soon as possible.”

Often overlooked but vital is the role character education can play in preventing bullying.

Character education advocates argue that rather than attempting to correct the effects of bullying, evil treatment of other students should be addressed holistically through a focus on kindness and other virtues so students understand why all people are worth being treated with respect.

James Davison Hunter points out in his book, The Tragedy of Moral Education in America, that the holistic approach only works when adults are on the same page, focused on character formation so that it’s integrated into all teaching, and embedded in a school’s culture.

And not only the school, but parents must be attentive to those who are vulnerable, along with all who “are part of [the] larger network of social groups and institutions” that include sports, youth organizations, faith communities, YMCAs, and others, Hunter writes.

Measuring social-emotional learning for ESSA: no takers

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States submitting plans to the U.S. Department of Education to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act are opting not to measure social-emotional learning as part of school performance metrics.

The decision stems in part from the difficulty of measuring important character traits and interpersonal skills like cooperation, respect, and empathy, though groups like The Jubilee Centre are making strides in assessing character education in local schools.

Two years after Congress adopted the Every Student Succeeds Act, not a single state has submitted a plan to comply with the federal law that incorporates social-emotional learning into state measures for school accountability systems.

According to Education Week:

Schools that adopt social-emotional learning seek to nurture students’ development in areas like self-management and responsible decision making alongside traditional academics. Doing so helps to deepen students’ learning experiences and prepares them for interpersonal situations they will later face in the workplace, educators say.

As the U.S. Department of Education works to approve states’ ESSA plans, some of social-emotional learning’s biggest boosters are expressing relief that states are steering clear of trying to measure such personal skills for accountability.

“There is a groundswell of recognition that the academic, social, and emotional development of children are intertwined in all experiences of learning,” Tim Shriver, co-founder of Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), told the news site. “I think that’s booming . . . Someone might say, ‘Why aren’t you holding states accountable for teaching it?’ The answer to that is we are not ready for it yet.”

Current measures of social and emotional development consist mostly of student surveys in which they self-report on their own character traits, which makes it difficult to comply with ESSA regulations that require “meaningful differentiation in school performance” that are “valid, reliable, comparable, and statewide.”

Joseph E. Davis, an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, highlighted the difficulty of “Measuring Virtue in the Audit Society” for The Hedgehog Review, a journal on interdisciplinary topics published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

“The very act of creating measures and benchmarks and rating scales can badly distort the nature of the thing being audited, throwing off all sorts of unintended consequences. Far from a merely derived and neutral activity, auditing and performance measurement can construct a system of knowledge and then re-shape the organizational environment to make that system successful. More germane to virtue is the distinct possibility that because the disposition itself is not readily amenable to verifiable, non-subjective measurement, what will be quantified is simply some aspect that is easy to count, often a crude and not very meaningful aspect at that,” Davis wrote.

“This aspect, because verifiable and thus more tractable and ‘real,’ then gets confused with the thing itself. Virtue becomes, as one of the speakers at (a January conference on character at Oriel College, Oxford) argued, ‘what virtue tests test,’” Davis continued.

“I recently heard a social scientist argue that when it comes to measuring morality any measure is better than none, an at-least-we’re-counting-something view . . . But surely, in light of the dynamics of real-world assessment practices, such a facile view is deeply mistaken. Only a very good measure is better than none,” Davis wrote.

And while experts argue that good measures of character and social emotional learning “are not ready for prime time,” as Louisiana State Superintendent John White told Education Week, the Jubilee Centre and others are providing excellent resources for schools to develop their own means of evaluating character education programs on a local level.

The Centre’s “Character Education Evaluation Handbook For Schools,” for example, “is intended to be a source of inspiration that schools should adapt their own context” based on “the premise that by using varied forms of self-evaluation teachers can develop a holistic and formative picture of their school’s character-education profile.”

The handbook is broken down into four sections, and takes educators from planning an evaluation, to developing a self-evaluation framework, evaluating curriculum strategies and activities, and eventually how “students’ self-reflection can support the development of character and more specifically practical wisdom.”

The handbook also provides examples of different approaches to student self-reflection on character currently in use by schools, according to The Jubilee Centre website.

The Character Frame Shift

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The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) predicted a day when it would be impossible to say, “Thou shalt not.” In late-modern North America, we are fast approaching that day. To the degree that this is true, it will influence how we think about and engage in character formation.

To fully appreciate what Nietzsche anticipated, we will need to know what character is, how it is formed, and what assumptions about the nature of the human person are involved.

Traditionally, character is composed of discipline, attachment, and autonomy: the inner capacity for restraint, an alignment with values and aspirations of a larger community, and the capacity to freely make ethical decisions.

This traditional definition, however, is largely dependent on one’s anthropology. Traditionally, the child was seen as underdeveloped and thus dependent on others for moral formation. It was thought that humans are not born with a well-developed moral sensibility, much less anything approaching “character.” As a consequence, moral formation has always been seen as an essential part of parenting and schooling.

However, over the last century, this anthropological understanding of the child has been abandoned. Today the child is seen as inherently good and capable of self-deriving their own moral perspectives. The process of moral formation has thus shifted from restraint to permission. Moral education is about getting out of the child’s way in order to enable the child to express their inherent moral capabilities. Much of the debate has been in how one best gets out of the way. In this manner, the entire moral education enterprise has been turned on its head.

Rather than discussions of given moral creeds and communities of engagement, we encourage the individual child unencumbered by historic or community standards to simply express his or her values. The locus of authority for morality has shifted from outside to inside: from virtues to values, from community standards and traditions to the autonomous self.

Since society’s moral institutions in this new understanding have no essential role, they have been weakened or encouraged to abandon their formative role. The best that they can do is simply get out of the way of the child.

All of this pivots then on whether we have an accurate assessment of human nature. The anthropological basis of moral formation is foundational.

If character formation is understood in its traditional understanding, we’d have to conclude that this new understanding of moral education renders character dead. This situation demands plain speaking. We want character without unyielding convictions; strong morality without the burden of guilt; virtue without moral justifications that offend; the good without

having to name evil; community without limitations on personal freedom. We want the benefits of moral formation without any effort at or responsibility for moral formation.

Thus the entire enterprise of moral education pivots on one’s foundational understanding of the nature of the child. We cannot restore character without first asking whether we have adopted an accurate assessment of human nature. The contemporary approach to moral education is an inversion of past approaches. We have abandoned pedagogies of restraint in favor of pedagogies of permission. These are two diametrically opposed frames. All analysis of moral education needs to start by acknowledging this shift and these two frames

 

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

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