My teenage daughter was recently regaling me with the woes of having to sit through Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) at school. SEL, according to her and her heavy dose of eye rolls, was basically a pep rally aimed at telling students they could work hard and reach their dreams. She wasn’t having it. Listening to her regale me with all the reasons SEL is a waste of time, I started to wonder where we went wrong with our well-intentioned efforts to “teach the whole child.”

From years of working with students who struggle with learning how to read, I’ve seen firsthand the emotional toll academic struggle takes on students. Parents and teachers alike feel the pain of the pernicious cycle of frustration, failure, and hopelessness that can be initiated by learning difficulties. (To get a glimpse into what it feels like to fail at the first gate to academics, attend the Dyslexia Simulation at Redwood Day hosted by Everyone Reading Illinois.) When students struggle in school they often develop negative coping mechanisms and behaviors. They tell themselves a story:

I will continue to fail.

I have no power to change the situation.

I might as well not try.

And the evidence isn’t simply anecdotal. Big names in the reading research field, like Dr. Yaacov Petscher, Dr. Hugh Catts, and Dr. Fumiko Hoeft, among others, have spent years conducting research on the social-emotional collateral damage of academic failure, and the power of growth mindset, resilience, and self-efficacy to combat these woes. Reading their work it is easy to get on board with the notion that students who struggle need more than academic skills; they need to understand their own potential and their own agency. We can’t be wrong in feeling an urgency to change this narrative for our children. But what if we aren’t getting it right? What if we tweaked our approach and tried integrating SEL into our children’s daily lives, instead of placing it in an isolated silo, a time period that students have to muddle through to get on to the next thing?

Dr. Nicole Landi, a cognitive neuroscientist at Haskins Laboratories* goes into schools to gather fMRI brain images of how the brain changes in struggling readers due to effective reading instruction. Sharing these images with students gives students a unique window into the power of neuroplasticity; the ability of the brain to change as a result of effort and experience. That is true SEL. While these select students reap the benefits of self-empowerment and self-efficacy as a result of this unique collaboration, most students will never have this opportunity. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us are left without a way to create meaningful, powerful SEL experiences for our students.

At Redwood Day School and Redwood Literacy, teachers, social workers, occupational therapists, and literacy specialists collaborate to integrate an SEL framework throughout instruction. The curriculum, known as “Triple E: Educate, Encourage, Empower,” goes beyond the cringey pep rally format, to bring neuroscience into the lives of students, even without access to the actual fMRI machines. By compiling decades of research from The Frostig Center, Rational Emotive Therapy (RET), growth mindset theory, and nonviolent communication practices, Redwood equips students with an understanding of brain science so they appreciate how capable they truly are. This knowledge provides students self-understanding, empowerment, and the ability to self-advocate for what they need to succeed in and outside of the classroom. We can’t just teach students how the brain works; they need to know what to do with this knowledge. That's why the “empower” part of the integrated curriculum needs to come with instruction on advocacy. Our students need to understand what they need and how to ask for it. This is not an easy task and requires a great deal of practice. When we give students access to brain science, accompanied by strategies they can implement to harness growth and change in their own learning, and actionable strategies for advocacy, SEL moves away from another class students have to sit through, and becomes a force of change that disrupts a cycle of failure.

*https://www.thewindwardschool.org/the-windward-institute/haskins

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