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Emotions drive learning, decision-making, creativity, relationships, and health. The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence conducts research and teaches people of all ages how to develop their emotional intelligence.

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Emotions drive learning, decision-making, creativity, relationships, and health. The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence conducts research and teaches people of all ages how to develop their emotional intelligence.

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Guidance for supporting students who have experienced trauma or grief and for coping with violence and disasters.

©Shutterstock.com/wavebreakmedia

Understanding Trauma's Effects on Learning

Childhood Trauma and Positive Health: Learn about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and how they can impact a child's developing brain and are linked to high-risk behaviors, chronic diseases, and negative health outcomes in adulthood. (The Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative, 2017)

How Trauma Is Changing Children's Brains: Explore the latest research on the effects trauma has on young people's brains, and learn strategies you can use to make your classroom feel safer. (NEA Today, 2016)

Responding to Trauma in Your Classroom: Examine the signs and causes of student trauma, and explore strategies for responding to and supporting students who are experiencing trauma. (Teaching Tolerance, 2016)

How Teachers Help Students Who've Survived Trauma: Read about how experiences with trauma impact student learning, and review several expert suggestions on ways that educators and schools can help. (The Atlantic, 2014)

Helping Kids Recover From Trauma: Discover how resilience can be fostered by supportive factors in schools, and read takeaways from research. (Edutopia, 2009)

Helping Students Who Have Experienced Trauma

Brains in Pain Cannot Learn: Learn three ways to calm the stress response in students affected by anxiety or depression. (Edutopia, 2016)

5 Ways to Help Students in Trauma: Read strategies and tips for creating a calming classroom environment that can help troubled students learn. (Edutopia, 2016)

Helping Students Who Have Experienced Trauma: Explore seven strategies you can use in your classroom to help support and empower students in trauma. (Edutopia, 2016)

How Not to Be a Mountain Troll: Take a look at four strategies that educators can use to build trust with students, especially vulnerable students who may have experienced abuse from adults. (ASCD's Educational Leadership, 2015)

Emotional Recovery Begins With Teachers: Examine five RULER-based suggestions (recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions) for helping adults and children cope with the aftermath of school violence or other experiences with trauma. (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)

Activities to Help Students Cope With Traumatic Experiences: Discover games, videos, and other activities to help children endure traumatic experiences. (Sesame Street in Communities)

School-Wide Approaches to Addressing Trauma

Trauma-Informed Practices Benefit All Students: Learn how utilizing school-wide trauma-informed practices can benefit the entire school community, including helping all students learn coping skills and self-efficacy. (Edutopia, 2017)

How Schools Are Helping Traumatized Students Learn Again: Discover best practices, strategies, and tips your school can employ to foster safe, calming, and supportive learning spaces. (NEA Today, 2016)

Student Trauma: How School Leaders Can Respond: Explore the latest proven strategies that can help your school make a difference in the lives of students. This guide includes a rich collection of additional resources. (Education Week, 2016)

It's Not What's Wrong With the Children, It's What's Happened to Them: Find a list of school-based alternatives to zero-tolerance policies that can help nurture resilience in youths who have experienced adversity. (Edutopia, 2015)

A Guide to Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools: Understand the causes of trauma, discover how trauma manifests in schools, and learn about a framework that can help educators develop trauma-sensitive schools. (Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative/Massachusetts Advocates for Children, 2013)

Strategies for Coping With Violence and Disaster

Helping Students Cope in a Violent World: Explore 10 useful and practical strategies for discussing violence in the classroom, fostering student coping skills, and helping students make sense of violence. (Edutopia, 2016)

Tips for Resilience in the Face of Horror: Learn how educators and parents can help protect children and themselves from the effects of vicarious trauma. The linked article "Resources for Helping Children Cope with Trauma" is also worth reading. (Greater Good, 2013)

Talking to Your Children About Tragedy: Watch a video that describes relevant principles parents can consider in relation to young children and personal or family reactions to traumatic events. Though the introduction to the video is focused on Boston, the principles discussed can be applied to a wide variety of situations. (Bright Horizons, 2013)

Mr Rogers Talks About Tragic Events: Watch an episode featuring Fred Rogers speaking about how to cope with violence in the world-his advice is still relevant today. (The Fred Rogers Company, 2018)

Supporting Grieving Students

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Resources for Responding to Trauma and Tragedy

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Guidance for supporting students who have experienced trauma or grief and for coping with violence and disasters. ©Shutterstock.com/wavebreakmedia Childhood Trauma and Positive Health: Learn about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and how they can impact a child's developing brain and are linked to high-risk behaviors, chronic diseases, and negative health outcomes in adulthood.

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The field has learned a lot about social and emotional learning (SEL) in the past few years. Science tells us that social and emotional skills are as important for long-term success-including college-going and graduation-as the skills measured on annual tests. You can't separate the two, and a student's emotional and social well-being is a critical aspect of their ability to master and retain academic learning. Many districts are prioritizing SEL-Cleveland and Washington D.C. are examples-and Oakland Unified Public Schools saw how helping educators prioritize SEL contributed to dramatic increases in graduation rates for students of color, and a nearly 50 percent decline in suspensions.

We will invest in building the evidence base for social and emotional learning and the field's knowledge of adolescent development, translating research findings into tools and best practices, and helping to spread that knowledge and those practices .

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Social Emotional Learning - K-12 Education

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The field has learned a lot about social and emotional learning (SEL) in the past few years. Science tells us that social and emotional skills are as important for long-term success-including college-going and graduation-as the skills measured on annual tests.

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Combinations: The emotions with no color represent an emotion that is a mix of the 2 primary emotions. For example, anticipation and joy combine to be optimism. Joy and trust combine to be love. Emotions are often complex, and being able to recognize when a feeling is actually a combination of two or more distinct feelings is a helpful skill.

There are also tertiary feelings, not shown on the feelings wheel, that are a combination of 3 (and maybe some feelings have 4 or more parts? Let us know what you think in the comments below),

Intensity: The cone's vertical dimension represents intensity - emotions intensify as they move from the outside to the center of the wheel, which is also indicated by the color: The darker the shade, the more intense the emotion. For example, anger at its least level of intensity is annoyance. At its highest level of intensity, anger becomes rage. Or, a feeling of boredom can intensify to loathing if left unchecked, which is dark purple.

This is an important rule about emotions to be aware of in relationships: If left unchecked, emotions can intensify. Herein lies the wisdom of enhancing your emotional vocabulary: it's the bedrock of effectively navigating emotions.

Plutchik's wheel of emotions helps us look at literacy through a broader lens. Literacy means "a person's knowledge of a particular subject or field." So enhancing emotional literacy means not only having words for emotions, but understanding how different emotions are related to one another and how the tend to change over time.

You can read Robert Plutchik's explanation of his model of emotions in an article that was originally published in American Scientist in 2001 and can be read on Springer International Publishing AG.

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Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions: Feelings Wheel

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Plutchik's wheel of emotions helps you visualize the spectrum of emotions and how they relate to each other - a great tool for enhancing emotional literacy.

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Browse a list of articles, videos, and other links for exploring the connection between education and neuroscience.

Five-Minute Film Festival: Learning and the Brain: Watch a collection of videos about the brain that will get you thinking about how findings from neuroscience can be applied in the classroom. (Edutopia, 2014)

Nine Things Educators Need to Know About the Brain: Take a look at this brief list of lessons from neuroscience with implications for learning. (Greater Good, 2013)

The Neuroscience Behind Stress and Learning: Understand how neuroimaging and EEG studies have provided a scientific basis for student-centered educational models. (Edutopia, 2014)

Positive Brains Are Smarter Brains: Discover how educators can help students take charge of thoughts, feelings, and brain chemistry to steer themselves toward positive learning outcomes. (Edutopia, 2015)

How to Enhance Learning by Teaching Kids About Neuroplasticity: Learn how teaching students about neuroplasticity can help them to adopt a growth mindset. (Edutopia, 2014)

Metacognition: The Gift That Keeps Giving: Explore how students can become stronger, more independent learners by reflecting on learning, and try out strategies that can facilitate this process. (Edutopia, 2014)

Brain Development and Adolescent Growth Spurts: Understand the forces at work inside a tween brain, and discover several strategies to help adolescents grow their executive-function skills. For more information on adolescent brains, also see "Understanding the Hyperrational Adolescent Brain," "The Mind of a Middle Schooler," and "How the Mind of a Middle Schooler Works." (Edutopia, 2016)

Strategies for Strengthening the Brain's Executive Functions: Use these classroom strategies to help students better understand and develop executive functions. (Edutopia, 2015)

Putting Working Memory to Work in Learning: Explore techniques like repetition, gamification, visualization, and peer teaching to help activate and, over time, enhance the central executive function of working memory. (Edutopia, 2015)

Brain Movies: When Readers Can Picture It, They Understand It: Encourage students to visualize meaning in order to boost reading retention. (Edutopia, 2014)

Move Your Body, Grow Your Brain: Exercise has physiological and developmental benefits for children's brains; discover ideas for putting a new spin on active learning. (Edutopia, 2014)

Meta-Collaboration: Thinking With Another: Explore four strategies for teaching students how their brains work through acts of collaboration. (Edutopia, 2015)

Educator Resources From BrainFacts.org: Find resources and activities to help teach students about the brain; available resources include interactives, videos, lesson plans and more -- sorted by grade, topic, and resource type. (BrainFacts.org)

Matching Edtech Products With Neurological Learning Goals: Use the critical questions from this post to identify the best edtech products to help you meet learning goals that are consistent with what we know about how brains learn. (Edutopia, 2016)

Applying Neuroscience in the Classroom

Brain Labs: A Place to Enliven Learning: Consider creating a brain lab in your classroom or school to teach children about metacognition and develop skills for self-reflection, attention, emotional regulation, and cognitive flexibility. (Edutopia, 2015)

Brains in Pain Cannot Learn!: Understand how trauma affects the brain, and read about three ways to calm the stress response and ready brains for learning. (Edutopia, 2016)

Cracking the Code of Student Emotional Pain: Learn about three collaborative processes that will help reset expectations and rethink outcomes in the face of academic, emotional, or social challenges. (Edutopia, 2015)

Strengthening Executive Function Development for Students With ADD: Explore targeted mindfulness exercises that will help children with Attention Deficit Disorder to be more aware of reactions and decisions and to practice better emotional regulation and self-control. (Edutopia, 2015)

Cultivating Practical Optimism: Read about an activity that can help promote an attitude about life that relies on taking realistic, positive action. (Edutopia, 2014)

Change It Up and Calm It Down!: Discover ways to incorporate brain breaks and focused-attention practices into the school day to boost students' brain health and knowledge acquisition. For more information, also see this earlier post on brain breaks and focused-attention practices. (Edutopia, 2016)

Maslow Comes to Life for Educators and Students: Explore a blueprint for classroom practice that translates Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs into actionable, brain-compatible strategies. (Edutopia, 2014)

Social and Emotional Learning and the Brain

Humor Boosts Retention: Learn about the research on humor, and consider how you can use it more effectively to engage students in learning. (Edutopia, 2015)

The Engagement-Based Classroom Management Model: Invite your students to participate in a behavioral model that helps them level up with their engagement and attitude -- much like a video game. (Edutopia, 2015)

Strategies for Getting and Keeping the Brain's Attention: Use strategies like incentives, adjusting the pace of your teaching, and helping students recognize how focus feels. (Edutopia, 2015)

Cognitively Priming Students for Learning: Consider a few ways that you can promote curiosity and get students ready for an upcoming unit or lesson. (Edutopia, 2014)

Training the Brain to Listen: Learn how the brain processes auditory information, and find out how to introduce the HEAR strategy as a way to help students develop their listening skills. (Edutopia, 2014)

Strategies to Prevent the Neurotoxic Impact of School Stress: Pursue strategies for counteracting the chronic stress of frequent boredom on the classroom. (Edutopia, 2013)

Brain-Based Student-Engagement Strategies

Assessment, Choice, and the Learning Brain: Learn about neuroscientific research on assessment, and explore takeaways for classroom practice. (Edutopia, 2014)

To Improve Test Scores: Hit Reset: Find out how to help students deal with feelings, including stress, that inhibit test performance. (Edutopia, 2014)

Survive and Thrive During Testing Season: Consider some questions you should ask yourself during testing season, and explore brain-compatible strategies to help students feel better about themselves and more connected to the material. (Edutopia, 2014)

5 Assessment Forms That Promote Content Retention: Explore several assessment forms that will help students retain content and access higher performance levels. (Edutopia, 2014)

Helping Students Understand What a Test Is and Is Not: Learn how students' performance on tests can often be affected by their perceptions of and feelings about why they're being tested and what's being assessed. (Edutopia, 2014)

Brain-Compatible Study Strategies: Explore an array of brain-compatible study strategies for fifth graders, methods that can be adapted for use at any age. (Edutopia, 2013)

Brain-Friendly Assessment Practices

6 Ways to Build Independent Thinking: Try out one of several suggestions, aligned to Common Core, for pushing students beyond their comfort zone, exercising brains' executive functions, and developing independent thinking. (Edutopia, 2014)

11 Tips on Teaching Common Core Critical Vocabulary Help your students learn critical vocabulary through activities suggested by a learning and memory specialist. (Edutopia, 2013)

Education, the Brain, and Common Core State Standards: Read about potential benefits and practical applications of the Common Core State Standards through the lens of the Brain-Targeted Teaching model. (Edutopia, 2013)

Student Responses to Common Core Instruction and Assessment: Understand implications of the move to Common Core-aligned instruction and assessment for students and their brains. (Edutopia, 2013)

Neuroscience and the Common Core

Research on How the Brain Works

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Browse a list of articles, videos, and other links for exploring the connection between education and neuroscience. Five-Minute Film Festival: Learning and the Brain: Watch a collection of videos about the brain that will get you thinking about how findings from neuroscience can be applied in the classroom.

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What is Social and Emotional Learning?

How do we define social and emotional learning (SEL)? Researchers generally agree upon five key competencies of SEL ( Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor & Schellinger, 2011; Weissberg, Durlak, Domitrovich, & Gullotta, 2016). These competencies provide the foundation for maintaining high-quality social relationships and for responding to the challenges of life.

1. Self-Awareness:

What are my thoughts and feelings?

What causes those thoughts and feelings?

How can I express my thoughts and feelings respectfully?

2. Self-Management:

What different responses can I have to an event?

How can I respond to an event as constructively as possible?

3. Social Awareness:

How can I better understand other people's thoughts and feelings?

How can I better understand why people feel and think the way they do?

4. Relationship Skills:

How can I adjust my actions so that my interactions with different people turn out well?

How can I communicate my expectations to other people?

How can I communicate with other people to understand and manage their expectations of me?

5. Responsible Decision Making:

What consequences will my actions have on myself and others?

How do my choices align with my values?

How can I solve problems creatively?

Learning Outcomes

A meta-analysis of 213 programs, primarily covering three decades of research, found that social and emotional learning interventions that address the competencies listed above increased students' academic performance by 11 percentile points, as compared to students who did not participate in such SEL programs (Durlak et al., 2011). The social and emotional learning programs also reduced aggression and emotional distress among students, increased helping behaviors in school, and improved positive attitudes toward self and others (Durlak et al., 2011). Effective SEL programs addressed the five key competencies listed above, explicitly and sequentially, and used active-learning techniques to engage youth in developing understanding of them. Specific practices and programs shown by multiple, rigorous, peer-reviewed studies to benefit K-12 youth are described on the Evidence-Based Programs page of the SEL research review.

SEL Skills and Academic Success

Relationships and emotional processes affect how and what we learn. By reducing misbehavior and the amount of time spent on classroom management, SEL programs create more time for teaching and learning. SEL also strengthens students' relationships with their peers, families, and teachers, who are mediators, collaborators, and encouragers of academic achievement.

Researchers have documented the importance of caring teacher-student and student-student relationships in fostering students' commitment to school and in promoting academic success (e.g. Blum & Libby, 2004; Hamre & Pianta, 2006; Hawkins, Smith, & Catalano, 2004; Jennings & Greenberg 2009; cited in Durlak, et al., 2011). Safe and orderly environments that encourage and reinforce positive classroom behavior have been identified by research as one of the necessary conditions for academic achievement ( Marzano, 2003).

There are also several person-centered reasons SEL can promote academic success. Self-regulation, the ability to control and manage thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, has been linked to academic achievement in numerous studies. Students who are more self-aware and confident about their learning capacities try harder and persist in the face of challenges (Aronson, 2002; cited in Durlak et al., 2011; Dweck, Walton, & Cohen, 2014). Students who set high academic goals, have self-discipline, motivate themselves, manage stress, and organize their approach to work learn more and get better grades (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005; Elliot & Dweck, 2005; cited in Durlak et al., 2011). Finally, students who use problem-solving skills to overcome obstacles and make responsible decisions about studying and completing homework do better academically (Zins & Elias, 2006; cited in Durlak et al., 2011).

According to a national survey of middle and high school students, less than one third indicated that their school provided a caring, encouraging environment, and less than half reported that they had competencies such as empathy, conflict resolution and decision-making skills (Benson, 2006; cited in Durlak et al., 2011). By strengthening students' social support networks and their skills in self-management, SEL can help to unleash the potential within academic environments to support students' well-being and success.

Several studies explore the long-term benefits of social and emotional learning programs. In one, researchers examined how SEL intervention programs (such as social skills training, parent training with home visits, peer coaching, reading tutoring, and classroom social-emotional curricula) for kindergarten students impacted their adult lives, and found that these programs led to 10% (59% vs. 69% for the control group) fewer psychological, behavioral, or substance abuse problems at the age of 25 ( Dodge et al., 2014). Another study examined kindergarten teachers' ratings of their student's prosocial skills (e.g. kindness, sharing, and empathy) and discovered a strong correlation to adult outcomes such as higher educational attainment, stronger employment, and better mental health, in addition to reduced criminal activity and substance use ( Jones, Greenberg, & Crowley, 2015). In 2015, researchers analyzed the economic impact of six widely-used SEL programs and found that on average, every dollar invested yields $11 in long-term benefits, ranging from reduced juvenile crime, higher lifetime earnings, and better mental and physical health ( Belfield et al., 2015). Additional research supports the long-term benefits of SEL programs, finding evidence that investing in high-quality programs for all children can increase the number of productive, well-adjusted adults and yield positive economic benefits in the future ( Jones et al., 2017). Finally, a 2017 meta-analysis of 82 school-based SEL programs found long-term (between 6 months and 18 years) improvements in four areas: SEL skills, attitudes, positive social behavior, and academic performance. Additionally, decreases were found in three areas: conduct problems, emotional distress, and drug use ( Taylor et al., 2017).

A 2015 economic analysis found that in the period from 1980 to 2012, automation has increasingly replaced repetitive and analytical tasks, placing greater demand on jobs that require social skills ( Deming, 2015). In a 2015 Amici Curiae brief, nearly 50 Fortune-100 and other leading American businesses argued that in order to be competitive, businesses need to be able to hire workers who have experience sharing ideas and viewpoints with diverse groups of people.

A 2017 research review found that SEL programs can promote academic success and increase positive behavior, while reducing misconduct, substance abuse, and emotional distress for elementary school students. In addition, effective SEL programs are enhanced when schools partner with families and when they are culturally and linguistically sensitive ( Dusenbury & Weissberg, 2017).
Continue to the next section of the SEL research review, Evidence-Based Programs.

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Social and Emotional Learning Research Review

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How do we define social and emotional learning (SEL)? Researchers generally agree upon five key competencies of SEL ( Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor & Schellinger, 2011; Weissberg, Durlak, Domitrovich, & Gullotta, 2016). These competencies provide the foundation for maintaining high-quality social relationships and for responding to the challenges of life.

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Summary

Traits and skills such as critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, persistence, and self-control-which are often collectively called noncognitive skills, or social and emotional skills-are vitally important to children's full development. They are linked to academic achievement, productivity and collegiality at work, positive health indicators, and civic participation, and are nurtured through life and school experiences. Developing these skills should thus be an explicit goal of public education. This can be achieved through research and policy initiatives involving better defining and measuring these skills; designing broader curricula to promote these skills; ensuring that teachers' preparation and professional support are geared toward developing these skills in their students; revisiting school disciplinary policies, which are often at odds with the nurturing of these skills; and broadening assessment and accountability practices to make the development of the whole child central to education policy.

Introduction and key points

The importance of so-called noncognitive skills-which include abilities and traits such as critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, social skills, persistence, creativity, and self-control-manifests itself in multiple ways throughout our lives. For example, having greater focus as a student improves the acquisition of skills, and creativity is widely associated with artistic abilities. Persistence and communication skills are critical to success at work, and respect and tolerance contribute to strong social and civic relationships.

But support for noncognitive skills-also commonly referred to as social and emotional skills-extends far beyond this casual recognition of their impact. Empirical research finds clear connections between various noncognitive skills and positive life outcomes. Indeed, researchers have focused on assessing which skills matter and why, how they are measured, and how and when these skills are developed, including the mutually reinforcing development of noncognitive and cognitive abilities during students' years in school. 1

At the same time, there are clear challenges inherent in this work, including those associated with data availability (in terms of measurement, validity, and reliability), the difficulty of establishing causality, and the need to bridge gaps across various areas of research. This points to the need to exercise caution when designing education policies and practices that aim to nurture noncognitive skills. Nonetheless, given the crucial role that noncognitive skills play in supporting the development of cognitive skills-as well as the importance of noncognitive skills in their own right-this is an issue of great importance for policymakers.

Moreover, there is increased recognition, both domestically and internationally, that noncognitive skills are integral to a wider conceptualization of what it means to be an educated person. Indeed, UNESCO's Incheon Declaration for Education 2030, which sets forth an international consensus on the new vision for education for the next 15 years, states, "Relevant learning outcomes must be well defined in cognitive and non-cognitive domains, and continually assessed as an integral part of the teaching and learning process. Quality education includes the development of those skills, values, attitudes and knowledge that enable citizens to lead healthy and fulfilled lives, make informed decisions and respond to local and global challenges." 2

This policy brief, which focuses on a set of skills that can and should be taught in schools, is based on a body of scholarly literature that tends to use the term "noncognitive skills" over others. James Heckman, a prominent, Nobel Prize-winning economist, has dubbed these skills "dark matter" in recognition of their varied nature and the challenge of accurately labeling them. Various fields and experts call them social and emotional skills, behavioral skills, inter- and intra-personal skills, and life skills, among other terms, but this brief does not aim to settle this issue. We therefore use noncognitive throughout in many places, as well as social and emotional skills and other terms.

This brief explains why it is so important that we incorporate these skills into the goals and components of public education, and lays out the steps necessary to make that happen.

Key points include:

There exist significant associations between noncognitive skills and outcomes such as productivity and collegiality at work, positive health indicators, and civic participation. There is likewise extensive evidence of the connections between noncognitive skills and academic achievement. And beyond their practical import, they are simply positive attributes.

Research on the development of noncognitive skills suggests these skills are malleable, rather than fixed, and that they are responsive to differences in school quality, children's environment, and various parental investments.

Since noncognitive skills matter and can be nurtured in schools, developing them should be an explicit goal of public education. In practice, however, mainstream K-12 education policy has not generally prioritized the development of these skills in the classroom, and neither education policies nor the organization of resources tend to be shaped to support or incentivize schools to do so.

As we seek to better understand how to incorporate noncognitive skills into policy and practice, pilot examples provide models from which to learn and adapt. These examples can help inform the research and policy initiatives, and the thinking about school design and culture, needed to make these skills a core component of education:

Better defining and measuring these skills: Integrating social emotional skills into the education policy agenda requires, first, the identification of a satisfactory and concrete list of these skills, and systems or scales to measure them. Measurement and methodological research are required to validate a complete and accurate list of education-related noncognitive skills, and to provide metrics that are both reliable and usable.

Broadening the curriculum: The identification of those noncognitive skills that play important roles in education should prompt a discussion of how to design broader curricula and specific instructional strategies to promote those skills, including promoting school and classroom environments conducive to them.

Enhancing teacher preparation, training, and support: Fully integrating noncognitive skills into the curriculum also requires that teachers' preparation and professional support are geared toward the development of these skills in their students, as well as an emphasis on the importance of relationships.

Revisiting school disciplinary policies: Many current disciplinary measures used to combat student misbehavior are at odds with the goal of nurturing noncognitive skills. Disciplinary measures should be rooted in schools' efforts to support and promote better behavior, and in the prevention of misbehavior, rather than simply or mainly in punishing wrongdoing.

Broadening assessment and accountability: Accountability practices and policies must be broadened to make explicit the expectation that schools and teachers contribute to the development of noncognitive skills and to make the development of the whole child central to the mission of education policy. Specifically, incentives promoted by an enhanced accountability system should be aligned with broadening the curriculum, cultivating the proper climate within the school, promoting teachers' investment in strong relationships with their students, and ensuring teaching time for strategies that are conducive to the development of both noncognitive and cognitive skills.

Noncognitive skills are important drivers of cognitive skills and of broader school and life outcomes

Noncognitive skills-the generic term that represents "patterns of thought, feelings and behavior that may develop throughout our lives (i.e., are not fixed traits of personality)" 3 -allow us to succeed in our public lives, workplaces, homes, and other societal contexts and to contribute meaningfully to society. A solid body of research demonstrates the significant associations between noncognitive skills and other adult outcomes, including productivity and collegiality at work, positive health indicators, and civic participation. There is likewise extensive evidence of the connections between noncognitive skills and academic achievement. And beyond their practical import, they are simply positive attributes. Here we briefly summarize what is known regarding the influence of noncognitive skills on cognitive skills and other school and life outcomes.

As noted above, however, the importance of noncognitive skills extends far beyond academic outcomes. Employers have long reported in surveys that they highly value a range of noncognitive skills in their search for good employees. Indeed, they place skills such as verbal communication, teamwork/collaboration, professionalism/work ethic, and critical thinking/problem-solving at the top of their list of traits that are critical for workplace success. 7 Positive relationships have been found between socio-emotional skills and social competence and employment outcomes (such as having stable employment or being employed full time), while weak noncognitive skills are associated with a variety of negative life outcomes. These include reliance on public assistance (e.g., being on a waiting list for public housing, receiving public assistance, or receiving unemployment compensation), criminal activity (e.g., being arrested for a severe offense, ever having been arrested, ever having made a court appearance, ever having had police contact, ever having stayed in a detention facility), substance use (e.g., alcohol dependence, drug dependence, having smoked regularly in the past month, number of days of binge drinking in the past month, number of days of marijuana use in the past month), and poor mental health (e.g., externalizing problems, internalizing problems, number of years on medications). 8

Finally, noncognitive skills are centrally important to a person's ability to live a full life, including active participation as a family member, neighbor, and engaged democratic citizen. Noncognitive skills increase trust and the probability of voting and decrease the probability of being divorced. 9 They also correlate with improved life satisfaction. 10 Being able to get along with others; to share, consider, and respect alternative points of view; and to prioritize broad societal goals are all related to noncognitive skills that are developed early in life and that distinguish strong parents, good neighbors, and engaged citizens from their less constructive and less successful peers.

Noncognitive skills are the result of multiple factors that emerge at various points in children's development

Research on the factors driving the development of social and emotional skills supports the premise that these skills are malleable, rather than fixed, and that they are responsive to differences in school quality, children's environment, and various parental investments. 11 There is less agreement, though, on whether they are more or less malleable than cognitive skills, on whether all noncognitive skills can be developed in school, and on the degree to which their capacity for development is constant across ages and grades. 12

What is known for certain is that these skills have their origins in the very earliest years of children's lives. Brain research conducted in recent decades increasingly affirms that the foundations for both types of skills-cognitive and noncognitive-are established starting at birth, and even before. One in particular, the ability to form strong and trusting relationships with others, has been extensively studied. As neurobiologist Jack Shonkoff and his colleagues at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child document, the "serve-and-return" interactions between infants and their parents and other caretakers play key roles in the development of this trait; when babies cry and mothers pick them up, or when they smile and their fathers smile back and reward them with a happy noise or play time, these interactions begin to lay the foundations for trust, confidence, and other relationship-building skills. 13

The years leading up to school entry and the first years of formal schooling are, thus, key windows of opportunity for the development of noncognitive skills. Unfortunately, we see the same divisions with respect to these opportunities as we do with cognitive skill development: Children who are disadvantaged by poverty and other factors develop noncognitive skills more slowly, and are less likely to have access to the supports to boost these skills. They thus begin school behind, putting themselves, their teachers, and their classmates at a disadvantage. Indeed, a recent study documents how large these early gaps are by the time of school entry. 14 While income-based gaps in reading and math are much larger than those in skills such as self-control and approaches to learning, as assessed by teachers (a full standard deviation versus about half of a standard deviation, respectively), both gaps are strongly statistically significant and of real practical importance.

With respect to family and school determinants of noncognitive skills, a recent study using OECD's 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data for Mexico finds that families' valuing of attitudes and behavior toward education are predictive of noncognitive performance. 15 Specifically, students whose parents are highly satisfied with the school environment and how discipline is handled, who believe that the school is educating their children well, who have high expectations for their children's educational attainment, and who provide those children with the educational resources they need, tend to have higher noncognitive skills. (The noncognitive factors included in the PISA 2012 data are perseverance, sense of belonging to school, engagement with teachers, and attitude toward school-particularly a belief in the long-term value of school and a belief that effort will be rewarded.) Importantly, this research also shows that the associations between family and school characteristics and noncognitive skills differ depending on which factors are assessed. For example, a family's wealth was statistically associated with all the noncognitive factors explored in the analysis aside from students' sense of belonging to the school, and the proportion of qualified teachers was not statistically associated with perseverance or engagement with teachers, though it was associated with sense of belonging and belief in the long-term value of school. Thus, when exploring strategies that can nurture noncognitive skills, it is important to keep in mind that there is likely not a single unique strategy, but rather a variety or combination of strategies that can enhance children's multiple cognitive capacities and behavioral characteristics. Moreover, this is true not only across skills, but also across ages and countries. 16

Moreover, although various skills are not often studied in an integrated way, the processes of socio-emotional development and cognitive development are intertwined. 20 An attempt to model this interrelationship finds that their interdependence is important across children's entire schooling career. 21 And while noncognitive skills' importance as a determinant of cognitive performance increases very little over the earlier grade levels, it steadily increases across the later grades. In comparison, cognitive skills' importance as a determinant of noncognitive skills significantly increases through the earlier grade levels (kindergarten through 3rd), and then decreases in later grade levels (5th through 8th). Although the author acknowledges the sensitivity of these patterns to the skills used to construct the indices, the strong simultaneous relationships point to the difficulty of trying to boost cognitive skills without actively nurturing noncognitive ones. Indeed, evidence increasingly suggests that social and emotional skills are foundational to the development of others. So increased attention to noncognitive skills in education policy would improve all children's opportunities and pathways to development.

Though noncognitive skills can be nurtured in schools, they remain a low education policy priority

While there are still many unknowns regarding noncognitive skills' impacts and how to best nurture them, what is known has significant implications for education policy. First and foremost, since noncognitive skills matter and can be nurtured in schools, developing them (or, at the very least, establishing structures that are conducive to their development) should be an explicit goal of public education. In practice, however, mainstream K-12 education policy has not generally prioritized the development of these skills in the classroom, and education policies are rarely shaped to support or incentivize schools to do so. 22 As discussed in more detail below, in the United States, the transition from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015 represents a definite shift to recognize the importance of the development of noncognitive skills. 23 Still, by far the greatest emphasis in policy-at the federal, state, and local levels-remains on traditional cognitive skills, with little alignment across the two areas.

This disconnect is attributable to several factors. First, some education policies established in recent decades have led schools to narrow their curriculum to focus on a small set of cognitive skills and to employ test preparation as a major instructional strategy (this emphasis on test preparation is sometimes called the "cognitive hypothesis"). 24 This same focus has meant that key factors in nurturing noncognitive skills, such as strong teacher-student relationships, and school and classroom environment, has been relegated to lower priorities. 25 A second factor is the relative difficulty of measuring children's abilities in noncognitive areas. We have long had instruments to assess skills in reading, math, and other cognitive skills such as knowledge of science and history. While they are far from perfect, they have provided teachers, parents, and policymakers with a decent sense of what students know and have supported substantial research on how these skills are produced. In contrast, the accurate assessment of noncognitive skills is challenged not only by a dearth of reliable tests or other instruments, but, more fundamentally, by our failure to agree on valid, accepted framework, definitions, and metrics for them. Attempting to create such a list and set of definitions requires, among other things, that we specify as a society for what purposes and for whom the skills listed matter. 26 Skills and corresponding measures "must [also] be culturally, educationally, age, and gender appropriate, and be sensitive enough to measure changes among program participants across regions and sectors of the world." 27

Here we briefly set forth some policy changes that will help make noncognitive skills a core component of children's education.

Making noncognitive skills a core component of education will require specific policy changes

While a broad range of social and emotional skills can be intentionally supported and developed, some are likely better suited to being nurtured in school settings, others at home, and yet others in multiple settings. It is thus important that researchers and practitioners work together to better identify these skills and to distinguish which belong in which of those categories. Indeed, one recent paper emphasizes the need for a distinct list of those that are best developed in schools and that should, thus, be higher priorities for education policies. 31 The suggested list, called the "education policy list of noncognitive skills," was intended to jumpstart the needed conversation about how to define and distinguish the various skills. The list includes critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, emotional health, work ethic, community responsibility, social skills (closeness, affection and open communication with both peers and teachers), self-control, self-regulation, persistence, academic confidence, teamwork, organizational skills, creativity, and communication skills. 32

Despite the numerous challenges noted above, social and emotional skills are beginning to occupy a more central role in discussions about education. This prompts the need for thoughtful and concerted attention from researchers, policymakers, and practitioners regarding education policy components that must be considered in order to effect changes in how noncognitive skills are nurtured and advanced in schools, and to make the development of the whole child central to the mission of education policy. 33 Some such attention is beginning to be evident. For example, the new requirement under ESSA that states report at least one new measure of student progress, beyond the traditional academic ones, is prompting states, districts, and schools to engage in discussions about which ones to use and how to measure and report them. In the best cases, it has sparked conversations about schools' role in ensuring the full development of children. It is also driving concerns among social-emotional learning (SEL) experts about the potential to settle too quickly on poor constructs and/or to use the data that are collected for counterproductive purposes.

Targeted research can help us take several key steps to increase schools' capacity to nurture and support the skills relevant to them. These include accurately measuring and assessing these skills as part of testing; integrating their development within curricula across all subjects; better training and supporting teachers to nurture them in their everyday instruction and classroom activities, including through a focus on building strong relationships; and reshaping our accountability framework at each level of government. 34

Better defining and measuring skills

Broadening the curriculum

Enhancing teacher preparation, training, and support

Fully integrating noncognitive skills into the curriculum also requires that teachers' preparation and professional support are geared toward the development of these skills in their students and the nurturing of strong, understanding relationships with those students. Through the provision of pedagogic, leadership, and organizational skills training, this professional development could complement existing training designed to improve teachers' effectiveness as instructors in cognitive areas by incorporating new components that focus explicitly on the child's full development, and that provide teachers with awareness of the principles of child development, as well as the tools to apply them. 41

Education policy thus must be enhanced to ensure that teachers are appropriately supported and trained, and that they receive instruction in both the subject matter and in learning how to teach it. For example, in their research on student-centered learning approaches, Diane Friedlaender and her colleagues list a number of supports for teachers, from higher-quality preparation and induction to increased time for planning and collaboration. 42 One interesting example in practice is Construye-T, a Mexican program that provides secondary school teachers and principals nationwide with professional development that trains them to nurture students' "integral development" and socioemotional skills. 43 School leaders are also key to this. In Austin, one of the strongest of the eight districts that are the focus of a CASEL-led initiative to embed SEL in every aspect of school policy and practice, those assessing the impacts of SEL implementation found that the principal's level of commitment to social and emotional learning as core to the school's operations was a strong determinant of the degree to which SEL was fully implemented, and to which teachers received proper training and support.

Revisiting school disciplinary policies

Many current disciplinary measures used to combat student misbehavior are at odds with the goal of nurturing noncognitive skills. Harsh measures, in particular in-school and out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, referrals to law enforcement, and even arrests (often called, collectively, zero-tolerance policies), are increasingly used to punish low-level infractions. 44 Such responses to uncooperative, disorderly, or disruptive behaviors not only are unlikely to prevent such behaviors in the future, but have been found to be harmful to students' development. They also correlate negatively with school achievement and school climate, and positively with dropouts. 45

Disciplinary measures should be rooted in schools' ability to support and promote better behavior, and to prevent misbehavior, rather than simply in punishing wrongdoing. Indeed, evidence points to the increased efficacy of shifting from zero-tolerance to preventive and supportive policies-"restorative" approaches such as peer mediation, group responsibility, and counseling that support and promote safe learning environments. 46

Broadening assessment and accountability

If individuals' full development is the ultimate goal of education, assessments and accountability should be tools that reflect learning and development and inform teaching. In light of the critical importance of noncognitive skills, exploring some of the challenges associated with the assessment of cognitive skills provides an opportunity to improve current accountability systems by rethinking how we conceive of and use these systems, and by building comprehensive assessment and accountability systems that use both quantitative and qualitative information to improve teaching and learning and, ultimately, student performance.

Accountability practices and policies must be broadened to make explicit the expectation that schools and teachers contribute to the development of noncognitive skills and to make the development of the whole child central to the mission of education policy. Specifically, incentives promoted by an enhanced accountability system should be aligned with broadening the curriculum, cultivating the proper climate within the school, promoting teachers' investment in strong relationships with their students, and ensuring teaching time for strategies that are conducive to the development of both noncognitive and cognitive skills.

Designing such a system requires ensuring that new policies avoid replicating the mistakes of current accountability systems focused on cognitive skills, which have turned out to be overly rigid and narrow. 47 As Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues emphasize in their recent report on developing a new accountability paradigm, given that actors in many areas of policy and at all levels of government affect children's development, it is also critical that accountability be reciprocal: "Each level of the system - from federal and state governments to districts and schools - should be accountable for the contributions it must make to produce high-quality learning opportunities for each and every child." 48 Indeed, such a broader education policy agenda could reverse some of the dysfunctional aspects of current systems, leading to fairer and more realistic education policies generally.

Build on growing momentum to advance policies to support noncognitive skills

Despite the low priority assigned to noncognitive skills in U.S. education policies generally, there is significant momentum growing at the local, state, and federal levels to change that. This energy is reflected in multiple examples that demonstrate the potential to implement and scale up practices to nurture noncognitive skills in the education system. And these examples can help guide and disseminate strategies that would more fully educate our children.

In exploring a few of these district-level initiatives, it is important to acknowledge the pioneering efforts that not only contributed to these efforts, but that have helped advance state and federal legislation geared toward supporting the development of noncognitive skills. Several national organizations in the United States, including ASCD and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), have long supported work to nurture noncognitive skills. More recently, organizations like the Learning Policy Institute and the Aspen Institute's National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development have emerged to enhance that work.

Due in part to these efforts, a growing minority of school districts in the United States have already made noncognitive skills a goal and a core component of their education systems. These districts that have taken a holistic or "whole-child" approach to education in structuring their schools, from preschool through high school, to support these traits. These districts' focus on a broader set of outcome goals and grounding in relationships with families and partnerships with many other institutions has laid a strong foundation for nurturing SEL. These districts have embedded support for students' physical and mental health care in school policies and strategies. Organized sports, music and arts, yoga, and mediation, which many scholars tie to the development of social and emotional skills, are built in as core parts of the school day and year. Teacher training includes support to build the development of noncognitive skills into daily classroom routines and to gauge the need for targeted support to enhance these skills' growth. These districts often assess schools' progress based on a broader set of metrics, and they use the data gathered to target supports to students and improve practices.

Examples include the Children's Aid Society in New York City, and Vancouver, Washington, both of which have been cultivating a full-service community schools strategy for a decade or more, and which have won national-level recognition for that work to make wrap-around supports for students and families and a focus on social and emotional learning core components of their education systems. Another, City Connects in Boston, which does not identify primarily as a community schools district but collaborates with the Coalition for Community Schools, infuses art, music, and other physical, social, and behavioral health promotion into daily activities in order to make schools' development of these skills central. 49 Eight urban districts have been the focus of the aforementioned CASEL-led initiative to embed SEL in every aspect of school policy and practice. Austin USD, one of those districts, has become a pioneer in making SEL core to academic standards, curriculum, teacher training and support, and even metrics for assessing student progress, and has seen widespread benefits for students as a result. 50 And dozens of communities across the South and Midwest that are working with the Bright Futures USA initiative seek to address a broad range of children's needs and strengthen their skills-both traditional academic and other-by growing community leadership from the ground up and incorporating service learning into the curriculum.

Larger-scale, systemic efforts demonstrate both the promise and limitations of embedding SEL in school policy and practice. The California Office to Reform Education (CORE), a collaborative of nine of the state's districts that received a waiver from requirements under No Child Left Behind to design new school accountability systems, has been making strides toward embedding SEL as a key component of their schools' policies and practices. And research on CORE districts has found strong relationships between skills like perseverance, confidence, and ability to collaborate, as self-reported by students, and those students' academic achievement. 51 A second large-scale effort, by charter schools that are part of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) network, however, has shown less promising results: Of the character skills advanced, only student self-reported collaboration with other students improved in a rigorous 2015 study by Mathematica. 52 Both point, in particular, to the need to further explore how self-reported measures compare with others, and to examine potential biases or other problems with them.

A handful of pioneering states-Illinois, New York, and Ohio among them-have taken steps to embed noncognitive skills in schools through state-level legislative measures. 53 And the new federal legislation discussed above makes schools' development of social and behavioral skills a national issue. Finally, countries as diverse as the United Kingdom, Finland, Mexico, and Japan have undertaken actions-ranging from pilot programs to large-scale efforts-to build a framework for students' full development.

These examples, which are scattered but increasing in number, can serve as models not only of how noncognitive skills can be better nurtured in schools, but of ways to build systems and structures to develop them beyond schools. While most are too preliminary at this stage to surface best practices, exploration of their progress as they mature can, along with rigorous research, help identify those. 54 These examples also remind us that education should be defined much more broadly than it often is; that public education has larger civic and societal ambitions beyond preparing children to succeed in college and careers, important as those goals are; and that our schools today are tasked with preparing children for a more complex world than ever before. In looking toward that future, we should seize this opportunity to ensure that noncognitive skills finally take their rightful place in education policy and practice.

- This policy brief extensively builds on a more detailed and comprehensive research paper published by the Economic Policy Institute (see The Need to Incorporate Noncognitive Skills in the Education Policy Agenda). The excellent guidance provided by Jane Quinn in that paper is greatly appreciated in this version. The authors are also grateful to Brooke Stafford Brizard, Shirley Brandman, and Blanca Heredia for their helpful advice generally and specific pointers throughout. They also thank Michael McCarthy for his edits.

About the authors

Emma García is an education economist at the Economic Policy Institute, where she specializes in the economics of education and education policy. Her areas of research include analysis of the production of education, returns to education, program evaluation, international comparative education, human development, and cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis in education. Prior to joining EPI, García conducted research for the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education and other research centers at Teachers College, Columbia University, and did consulting work for MDRC, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the National Institute for Early Education Research. García has a Ph.D. in Economics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Elaine Weiss has served as the national coordinator for the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education (BBA) since 2011, in which capacity she works with four co-chairs, a high-level task force, and multiple coalition partners to promote a comprehensive, evidence-based set of policies to allow all children to thrive. Elaine came to BBA from the Pew Charitable Trusts, where she served as project manager for Pew's Partnership for America's Economic Success campaign. Ms. Weiss was previously a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's task force on child abuse, and served as volunteer counsel for clients at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. She holds a Ph.D. in public policy from The George Washington University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

References

1. Angela L. Duckworth and David Scott Yeager, "Measurement Matters: Assessing Personal Qualities Other Than Cognitive Ability for Educational Purposes," Educational Researcher 44, no. 4 (2015), 237-251; Flavio Cunha and James J. Heckman, "The Technology of Skill Formation," The American Economic Review 97, no. 2 (2007), 31-47; Emma García, What We Learn in School: Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills in the Educational Production Function, Columbia University, 2013.

2. Incheon Declaration for Education 2030, Education 2030: Towards Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education and Lifelong Learning for All, UNESCO, the World Bank, UNFPA, UNDP, UN Women and UNHCR, 2016.

3. See Lex Borghans, Angela L. Duckworth, James J. Heckman, and Bas ter Weel, "The Economics and Psychology of Personality Traits," Journal of Human Resources 43, no. 4 (2008), 972-1059; Benjamin S. Bloom, Stability and Change in Human Characteristics (New York: Wiley, 1964).

4. J. A. Durlak, R. P. Weissberg, A. B. Dymnicki, R. D. Taylor, and K. B. Schellinger, "The Impact of Enhancing Students' Social and Emotional Learning: A Meta-Analysis of School-Based Universal Interventions," Child Development 82, no. 1 (2011), 405-432.

5. Angela L. Duckworth, Patrick D. Quinn, and Eli Tsukayama, "What No Child Left Behind Leaves Behind: The Roles of IQ and Self-Control in Predicting Standardized Achievement Test Scores and Report Card Grades," Journal of Educational Psychology 104, no. 2 (2012), 439-451; Angela L. Duckworth and Martin E. P. Seligman, "Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents," Psychological Science 16, no. 12 (2005), 939-944. For work in the self-regulation field, particularly concerning self-regulation's importance at earlier stages in children's development, see, for example, Karen L. Bierman, Celene E. Domitrovich, Robert L. Nix, Scott D. Gest, Janet A. Welsh, Mark T. Greenberg, Clancy Blair, Keith E. Nelson, and Sukhdeep Gill, "Promoting Academic and Social‐Emotional School Readiness: The Head Start REDI Program," Child Development 79, no. 6 (2008), 1802-1817; and Karen L. Bierman, Marcela M. Torres, Celene E. Domitrovich, Janet A. Welsh, and Scott D. Gest, "Behavioral and Cognitive Readiness for School: Cross‐Domain Associations for Children Attending Head Start," Social Development 18, no. 2 (2009), 305-323.

6. D. E. Jones, M. Greenberg, and M. Crowley, "Early Social-Emotional Functioning and Public Health: The Relationship Between Kindergarten Social Competence and Future Wellness," American Journal of Public Health 105, no. 11 (2015), 2283-2290.

7. J. Casner-Lotto and L. Barrington, Are They Really Ready to Work? Employers' Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st Century U.S. Workforce, The Conference Board, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Corporate Voices for Working Families, and the Society for Human Resource Management, 2006. In contrast, the cognitive skills that are measured and by which the success of students, educators, schools, and even states are judged are far down on the list. In the same ranking, writing, mathematics, science, and history/geography were ranked 6th, 15th, 16th, and 19th, respectively, out of 20 skills.

8. D. E. Jones, M. Greenberg, and M. Crowley, "Early Social-Emotional Functioning and Public Health: The Relationship Between Kindergarten Social Competence and Future Wellness," American Journal of Public Health 105, no. 11 (2015), 2283-2290.

9. James J. Heckman, John Eric Humphries, Sergio Urzua, and Gregory Veramendi, The Effects of Educational Choices on Labor Market, Health, and Social Outcomes, unpublished manuscript, University of Chicago Department of Economics, 2011.

10. W. Hofmann, M. Luhmann, R. R. Fisher, K. D. Vohs, and R. F. Baumeister, "Yes, But Are They Happy? Effects of Trait Self‐Control on Affective Well‐Being and Life Satisfaction," Journal of Personality 82, no. 4 (2014), 265-277.

11. Flavio Cunha and James J. Heckman, "Formulating, Identifying and Estimating the Technology of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skill Formation," Journal of Human Resources 43, no. 4 (2008), 738-782; Flavio Cunha, James J. Heckman, and S. M. Schennach, "Estimating the Technology of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skill Formation," Econometrica 78, no. 3 (2010), 883-931.

13. Center on the Developing Child, Core Concepts in the Science of Early Childhood Development: Healthy Development Builds a Strong Foundation - For Kids and For Society, 2015.

15. Emma García, Idalia Rodríguez, and Christopher C. Weiss, The Determinants of Noncognitive Skills in Mexico: How Do Families and Schools Matter?, CIDE, 2015.

17. J. A. Durlak, C. E. Domitrovich, R. P. Weissberg, and T. P. Gullotta (eds.), Handbook of Social and Emotional Learning: Research and Practice (New York: Guilford Publications, 2015).

18. See J. A. Durlak, C. E. Domitrovich, R. P. Weissberg, and T. P. Gullotta (eds.), Handbook of Social and Emotional Learning: Research and Practice (New York: Guilford Publications, 2015); and websites of these institutions: CASEL.org, CollaborativeClassroom.org.

19. K. Brooke Stafford-Brizard, Building Blocks for Learning: A Framework for Comprehensive Student Development, Turnaround for Children, 2015.

20. H. M. Levin, "A New Model of School Effectiveness," in Do Teachers Make a Difference?, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Education, 55-78, 1970; Cunha, Flavio, James J. Heckman, L. Lochner, and D. V. Masterov, "Interpreting the Evidence on Life Cycle Skill Formation," Handbook of the Economics of Education 1 (2006), 697-812; Flavio Cunha, James J. Heckman, and S. M. Schennach, "Estimating the Technology of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skill Formation," Econometrica 78, no. 3 (2010), 883-931; S. Olson, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: An Update: Workshop Summary (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2012); Timothy P. Shriver, and Roger P. Weissberg, "No Emotion Left Behind," New York Times, August 16, 2005; K. Brooke Stafford-Brizard, Building Blocks for Learning: A Framework for Comprehensive Student Development, Turnaround for Children, 2015.

21. Emma García, What We Learn in School: Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills in the Educational Production Function, Columbia University, 2013.

22. Emma García, The Need to Address Noncognitive Skills in the Education Policy Agenda, Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper No. 386, 2014.

24. See Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Tamara Wilder, Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College Press, 2008); and Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (New York: Mariner Books, 2012).

26. Angela L. Duckworth and David Scott Yeager, "Measurement Matters: Assessing Personal Qualities Other Than Cognitive Ability for Educational Purposes," Educational Researcher 44, no. 4 (2015), 237-251.

27. L. H. Lippman, R. Ryberg, R. Carney, and K. A. Moore, Key "Soft Skills" that Foster Youth Workforce Success: Toward a Consensus Across Fields, Child Trends, FHI360, and USAID, 2015.

28. Emma García and Elaine Weiss, Early Education Gaps by Social Class and Race Start U.S. Children Out on Unequal Footing: A Summary of the Major Findings in Inequalities at the Starting Gate, Economic Policy Institute report, 2015.

31. Emma García, The Need to Address Noncognitive Skills in the Education Policy Agenda, Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper No. 386, 2014.

32. It is not clear that all of these belong in the noncognitive camp; some might be skills that fall between cognitive and noncognitive extremes. Also, some skills may be more static or fixed, while some may be more adaptable and learnable, depending on each individual. Additionally, some degree of overlap can be detected among some of the skills included in the list.

33. James P. Comer, "Child and Adolescent Development: The Critical Missing Focus in School Reform," Phi Delta Kappan 86, no. 10 (2005), 757-763.

34. It is also critical to ensure that schools are appropriately staffed with experts on mental and emotional health; i.e., teachers cannot and should not supplant the role of counselors or psychologists (or others). As set out above, education is not confined to what happens within school walls, nor can the nurturing of cognitive or noncognitive skills be the sole responsibility of teachers. It takes the whole school, family, and community to do so effectively.

35. Karen M. La Paro, and Robert C. Pianta, CLASS: Classroom Assessment Scoring System (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2003); Karen M. La Paro, Robert C. Pianta, and Megan Stuhlman, "The Classroom Assessment Scoring System: Findings from the Prekindergarten Year," The Elementary School Journal 104, no. 5 (2004), 409-426. The CLASS system has grown from a child development tool that assesses interactions between early childhood teachers and students and offers resources to strengthen them into a K-12 tool that is designed to capture teacher behaviors linked to student gains. As such, states looking for valid metrics under the new ESSA requirement may find CLASS useful. http://curry.virginia.edu/about/directory/robert-c.-pianta/measures

36. Patrick C. Kyllonen, "The Case for Noncognitive Assessments," R&D Connections, 2005.

37. For example, see BBA's case studies of communities focused on social and emotional learning at http://www.boldapproach.org/case-studies/.

38. See Richard E. Nisbett, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009); C. A. Kusche and M. T. Greenberg, The PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) Curriculum (South Deerfield, Mass.: Channing-Bete, 1994).

39. S. Olson, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: An Update: Workshop Summary (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2012).

40. Diane Friedlaender, Dion Burns, Heather Lewis-Charp, Channa Mae Cook-Harvey, and Linda Darling-Hammond, Student-Centered Schools: Closing the Opportunity Gap, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, 2014.

41. James P. Comer, "Child and Adolescent Development: The Critical Missing Focus in School Reform," Phi Delta Kappan 86, no. 10 (2005), 757-763.

42. Diane Friedlaender, Dion Burns, Heather Lewis-Charp, Channa Mae Cook-Harvey, and Linda Darling-Hammond, Student-Centered Schools: Closing the Opportunity Gap, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, 2014.

43. Skills targeted by the program include self-regulation, interpersonal relationships, or perseverance.

44. Pedro Noguera, "Texas-Style Discipline Puts Suspension First," Huffington Post, August 5, 2011. These practices and policies vary widely from state to state and, within states, across districts. As such, the first step is to examine current policies and to determine how changes to state and district laws factor in. For example, only 3 percent of the disciplinary actions for students in middle and high schools in Texas were for conduct for which state law mandates suspensions and expulsions, and the remainder of disciplinary actions were made at the discretion of school officials (primarily in response to violations of local schools' conduct codes). See Antonio Fabelo, Breaking Schools' Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students' Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement, Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2011.

45. Edmund Emmer, Edward Sabornie, Carolyn M. Evertson, and Carol S. Weinstein, Handbook of Classroom Management: Research, Practice, and Contemporary Issues (London: Routledge, 2013).

46. Christopher Boccanfuso and Megan Kuhfeld, Multiple Responses, Promising Results: Evidence-Based, Nonpunitive Alternatives to Zero Tolerance, Child Trends, 2011; Russell Skiba, "Zero Tolerance and Alternative Discipline Strategies," National Association of School Psychologists Communique 39, no. 1 (2010); Russell Skiba and K. Knesting, "Zero Tolerance, Zero Evidence: An Analysis of School Disciplinary Practice," New Directions for Youth Development 92 (2002), 17-43.

47. Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (New York: Random House, 2013).

48. Linda Darling-Hammond, Gene Wilhoit, and Linda Pittenger, "Accountability for College and Career Readiness: Developing a New Paradigm," Education Policy Analysis Archives 22, no. 86 (2014), 1.

49. Case studies of these three districts can be found at http://www.boldapproach.org/case-studies/.

50. The Austin Independent School District has been conducting rigorous evaluations of the impacts of intensive SEL focus on a broad set of outcomes. The most recent report on these findings, by Lindsey M. Lamb, is from the 2013-2014 school year.

51. M. R. West, E. Scherer, and A. Dow, Measuring Social-Emotional Skills at Scale: Evidence from California's CORE Districts, paper presented at the American Education Finance and Policy Annual Conference, 2016.

53. See standards at the K-12 level in other states, and some examples corresponding to federal, and international initiatives, in chapters 35-37 of J. A. Durlak, C. E. Domitrovich, R. P. Weissberg, and T. P. Gullotta (eds.), Handbook of Social and Emotional Learning: Research and Practice (New York: Guilford Publications, 2015).

54. In addition to looking at these varied examples of how schools and education systems can better integrate SEL into their policies and practices, we can learn from other education arenas. In particular, the early childhood education field has much to offer in terms of structures and systems. Its inherent whole-child perspective, and foundational understanding that multiple domains of child development grow in closely intertwined ways, offer lessons across the range of policy areas for those shaping K-12 policies and practices.

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Making whole-child education the norm: How research and policy initiatives can make social and emotional skills a focal point of children's education

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Traits and skills such as critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, persistence, and self-control-which are often collectively called noncognitive skills, or social and emotional skills-are vitally important to children's full development. Developing these skills should thus be an explicit goal of public education.

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What is the key to a high-quality social-emotional learning program that makes a lasting impact? It has to be a whole-school effort, according to developmental psychologist Stephanie Jones and her research team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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As the benefits of social-emotional learning (SEL) have become clear, schools have seen a blossoming of programs that aim to equip students with fundamental executive function, emotional, and interpersonal skills. But with so many areas of focus under the SEL umbrella, how can system leaders choose which program will be effective in their specific settings?

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Educating for the Future

Elon Musk seems to be making headlines every day with his spaceships and solar panels and gigafactories and colonies on mars and secret tunnels and AI labs and self-driving cars. However, there is one thing he did that might be even more noteworthy yet did not draw nearly as much attention. He didn't like the way his kids were being educated so he pulled them out of their fancy private school and started his own.

The school's name is Ad Astra, meaning 'to the stars', and seems to be based around Musk's belief that schools should "teach to the problem, not to the tools." 'Let's say you're trying to teach people how engines work. A traditional approach would be to give you courses on screwdrivers and wrenches. A much better way would be, here is an engine, now how are we going to take it apart? Well, you need a screwdriver. And then a very important thing happens, the relevance of the tool becomes apparent.'

Musk's decision highlights a bigger issue, how we educate people needs to change. Education today really isn't that much different from what it was a hundred years ago. It's still classrooms crammed full of students all learning the same thing at the same pace from overworked, underpaid and under-appreciated teachers who spend thirty years teaching more or less the same thing.

Parents should be the most concerned. From the time kids are old enough to start school until they are independent enough to make their own decisions, parents consume themselves worrying about their child's education. It made sense, after all getting your kids a good education was always thought to be the best thing you could do to assure them a bright future. And parents all around the world go to crazy lengths to do whatever they can to make sure their kids get the education they need. They'll move houses to be in a better school district, spend thousands of dollars a year on after-school and summer programs, and hire tutors, all to make sure little Jimmy or Sally are prepared to face the world of tomorrow.

However for parents today things have gotten even more complicated. The world that the next generation will grow up in will be radically different from anything we have seen in the past. A world filled with artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, automation, virtual reality, personalized medicine, self-driving cars, and people on Mars. A world where people might not even have jobs and where society itself may be arranged in fundamentally different ways. How are parents, and society for that matter, supposed to know how to prepare them to succeed in a world that we cannot predict?

It starts by rethinking what a school is. Schools used to be the storehouses of human knowledge and going to school was the best way to learn anything. Now that is no longer the case, knowledge is no longer confined to dusty classrooms or old books. Thanks to the internet it is now accessible to anybody who wants it. All schools have to do is get them to want it.

The role of school should no longer be to fill heads with information, rather it should be a place that inspires students to be curious about the world they live in. Kids are born explorers, when they are young all they want to do is push boundaries and explore the limits of what they can do. Let's not suffocate that curiosity by making them spend their childhoods preparing for one test after another while adhering to rigid school policies that stifle creativity and independent thought.

The ability to adapt and learn something new should be valued above all else. Gone are the days where you pick a profession and just do that one thing for the rest of your life. People will need to know how to learn something new multiple times over in their lives. Not only because it will be the only way you'll still be able to contribute to society, but also because our knowledge of the world and who we are is progressing incredibly quickly. If the last time you learned anything new was when you were in school then you will be missing out on the new ways of understandings the world that are constantly opening up.

And this is not just something that we have to worry about for the younger generation, adults will also need to be re-educated as most of the skills they acquired in school will soon be obsolete.

Blueprint For Education In The 21st Century:

Gone should be the days when kids are arbitrarily lumped together into classrooms full of students all forced to learn the same thing at the same pace. We have the ability to customize learning to fit each individual's needs and desires and should do everything we can to take advantage of that ability. There already exist multiple online learning platforms, such as crash course, that teach a variety of subjects better than just about any teacher could.

All active learning should be task driven. No more lessons where you jot down notes off a blackboard, rather students are assigned tasks to complete and given all the tools they might need to figure out how to solve the problem. (3d printers, virtual learning environments, interactive displays, a connection to labs and research facilities all around the world, etc.)

Passive learning should not be rigidly structured. Students should be given a topic to learn about and a variety of educational materials to pick from to help them learn, it should then be up to them which they want to use. (podcasts, videos, books, virtual tours, etc.)

Teachers become facilitators of learning. Rather than lecturing everyone, they go from student to student or group to group helping them figure out how to learn what they need to know. Teachers no longer need a deep understanding of the given topic but they should know how to learn about it. Students eventually should also be supplied with their own virtual learning assistant to answer any question they may have and help them stay on task.

Classrooms themselves will need to be redesigned. No more square boxes with rows of desks, the classrooms of the future should be innovative spaces that promote curiosity while fostering creative social interaction with peers.

The goal of education should never be to get an A or pass a test. Making students and parents obsess about grades and scores sucks away all the joy of learning. The goal should be to make students literate in all core subjects and fluent at a select few. Being able to do something that you couldn't do before or finding a new way of understanding the world is far more rewarding than any score on a piece of paper ever could be.

In addition, education should give people an understanding that the world is not divided up into discreet subjects. Separating knowledge into columns labeled science or history or Chinese is at times pedagogically useful but everyone should realize that the world is not made up of independent subjects, they bleed into each other and none can be fully understood in isolation. Subjects are simply tools to help you understand the world.

Students should also know that no subject is beyond them. We are told lies that some people just can't do math or can't draw. Other subjects like physics are presented to us as too dry or too complex for most people to grasp. What should be taught is that a certain level of literacy in any subject is not only attainable by everybody but is necessary to be able to appreciate the world we live in.

Much of this may seem idealistic or unrealistic, but radical change is needed if we are going to figure out how to live in the future we are creating.

" Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." - William Butler Yeats

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It's Time to Rethink How We Are Educating Our Children

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Elon Musk seems to be making headlines every day with his spaceships and solar panels and gigafactories and colonies on mars and secret tunnels and AI labs and self-driving cars. However, there is one thing he did that might be even more noteworthy yet did not draw nearly as much attention.

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The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning is helping make evidence-based social and emotional learning an integral part of education from preschool through high school.

Learn about the Fundamentals of SEL Learn more about SEL

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Advancing Social and Emotional Learning - CASEL

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The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning is helping make evidence-based social and emotional learning an integral part of education from preschool through high school. Learn about the Fundamentals of SEL Learn more about SEL Getting started with systemic implementation Our platform is made possible by: This site uses cookies to improve your experience and help CASEL understand how our site is being used.

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The North Carolina morning sunlight is peeking through the classroom window as the students assemble. It's the beginning of the school day at Bruns Academy in Charlotte, and the children are gathering on a rug, just as they always do at 9:15 a.m. They sit in a circle and begin taking turns talking, their carry-on baggage of thoughts and feelings coaxed out of them by receptive ears. Observing this scene might harken you back to your kindergarten days, but these are not 5-year-olds. This is Morning Meeting in an eighth-grade classroom.

"The value of taking this time at the start of the middle school day is no different than for a kindergarten," says Jordy Sparks, who served as principal at Bruns, which encompasses preK through grade 8, as well as elsewhere in the Charlotte- Mecklenburg school district, before entering the Ed School's Doctor of Education Leadership Program this year. "The matters brought to the circle might sound different, depending on the ages of the students, but for all of them it's an opportunity to learn how to manage an emotion that could be an impediment to what they're trying to accomplish during the school day."

You'll notice that Sparks used the word "learn" there. These top-of-the-morning meetings, which under his initiative came to take up the first 45 minutes of each school day at Bruns and later at Newell Elementary, are a central feature of a revamped curriculum that puts an emphasis on social-emotional learning - that is, development of character, empathy, selfmanagement, and other life skills that lie outside the domain of the three R's. In a time when standardized tests are being criticized by some for being educational cookie cutters, there's growing interest in this individualized and broadened approach to preparing children for challenges that their textbooks don't address.

At Newell, for instance, the stated mission is "to develop young people to know their potential, grow their appreciation of learning, hard work, and effort, and empower them to go into the world and lead lives of impact." To that end, the K-5 school's website quotes an influential educator as saying, "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And you are the one who'll decide where to go." Those words might sound familiar if you have young children or remember your childhood. They're from Oh, the Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss.

That children's classic was published in 1990, the last book of the whimsical author's lifetime, but Seuss was spreading the message long before that. Likewise, educators have known for decades that skills not measured by standardized testing are important to children's development.

"Tests do provide us with important information about how schools are doing and how well-prepared students will be for what comes next, but they certainly don't tell us everything that we need to know," says Associate Professor Martin West, who has written extensively on the issue, including a recent paper with Brookings on measuring students' related skills. "A lot of the current interest among researchers in the policymaking community, and among practitioners, is centered on an attempt to be more specific about what it is that is not directly captured by standardized tests yet contributes to students' success. Which are the important skills? How do we measure them?"

He could very well have added one other fundamental question: Once we've identified these essential skills, what do we call them? Research is under way in various disciplines, each operating in its own silo, each group speaking its own language.

"I am a developmental psychologist, and we tend to talk about social and emotional skills," Associate Professor Stephanie Jones says. "But economists talk about noncognitive skills, and neuroscientists talk about executive function and sometimes self-regulation." So there's term confusion - a lot of sameness using different words and a lot of differentness using the same words. That complicates matters when you're talking about policy and putting research findings into practice.

Jones views this not so much as an impediment, however, as an opportunity. That there's such broad interest, so much research in so many different sectors, is a good thing, she says, "representing an important moment in the field." (Among the burgeoning initiatives out there is Making Caring Common, an Ed School project co-directed by Jones and Richard Weissbourd, Ed.D.'87, a psychologist and senior lecturer at the Ed School. It promotes kindness in children, which among other personal and community benefits helps make their schools positive learning environments.) Jones doesn't envision the field organizing around a single concept or set of terms but says, "Still, we now have a huge opportunity to build coordination."

To that end, last spring Jones launched a course, Beyond Grit: Noncognitive Factors in School Success, which seeks to synthesize the varied research and practices. "I didn't want to teach a course in my own wheelhouse," she says. "I could have taught about social-emotional learning, which is the term we developmentalists use, typically. But the course would have missed a lot of important and interesting stuff that's coming out of the world of character and personality, out of the world of social psychology." So the course is designed to take a crossdisciplinary view at high-quality, rigorous research from all of these disciplines. "How can we bring it together," she asks, "in a way that tells a cohesive story over the course of a semester?"

A vital element of that story involves an area of study that might seem far afield from child development: economics. But economics is integral to any shift in approaches to education. "It's expensive to educate people in a way that relies on more interaction," says economist and Associate Professor David Deming, who recently published a paper, " The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market." "You need smaller class sizes. You need more faculty time with students. And the cost pressures we see in higher education push against making changes even when we believe they would be beneficial."

The fact that stacks of rigorous research do not yet back the effectiveness of social-emotional learning also plays a role in stagnation. "There's a bias toward things we can measure and understand better, so the fact that IQ tests and achievement tests have been psychometrically evaluated, systematically, for years means we have a pretty good way to measure developments related to academic skill," Deming says. "We don't yet have as many high-quality measures for social-emotional skills. We just intuitively understand that they're important."

That isn't enough for some with sway over school policy and budgets. When Sparks and his team in Charlotte were revamping their curriculum to focus more deeply on socialemotional learning, abandoning lip-service measures such as the Character Trait Word of the Month and other window dressing in favor of devoting a full 45 minutes to Morning Meeting, they were questioned by some in the school district. Can you afford that much time each day? Will you still be able to turn around proficiency test results? "I had to do some convincing," Sparks says. "My theory was, if we get the student culture right, then academic achievement will be a byproduct."

Student culture at Bruns took a noticeable upswing, but what really turned heads came two years later, after Sparks had moved on to take over Newell Elementary, a school facing significant disciplinary concerns. In the very first year on his watch, with a social-emotional curriculum in place, suspensions dropped by 45 percent schoolwide and overall discipline referrals went down by 32 percent. Sparks attributes that to a change in culture not simply among students but also among teachers. For the high-poverty population of students, having three-quarters of an hour to unload whatever baggage they brought into the classroom and leave it at the circle "allowed them to go about their business of being a student for the rest of the day." And for teachers, Sparks adds, "being able to spend some protected time making intentional connections with the students was invaluable to their understanding of these young people." Plus, the lessons taught during these meetings - on problem solving, on self-management, on responsible decision-making - would frame the school day and be referenced throughout.

Still, there's resistance everywhere, from financially strapped public school districts to the most storied educational outposts for the affluent. In the case of the latter, asking parents to pay big bucks for tuition can lead them to have tunnel vision about what's important. If the only reasonable return on their hefty investment is an acceptance letter addressed to their child from an elite university's admissions department, they're going to question any veering away from a proven road map for academic success.

At the Shipley School in Philadelphia, where yearly tuition for the upper grades amounts to around $35,000, head of school Steven Piltch, Ed.M.'84, Ed.M.'88, Ed.D.'91, acknowledges having to do some parental persuading. "If they're invested in their children going to a certain university, they sometimes think only the numbers and grades are what matter," he says. "I have to convince them that the nonacademic skills we teach are no less important. Those are the skills that allow someone to function as a person."

Piltch has been in his position for 23 years. Back when he first started, "we used to talk about education of the whole person. We use different language today, but we're still talking about the same thing. The difference is that we've made it a higher priority."

One thing that hasn't changed is the amount of effort that goes into approaching a student as a whole person. "The easier part of our job is preparing students academically," Piltch says. "No one leaves Shipley for college and reports back to us, saying, 'Couldn't read. Couldn't write. Couldn't do the math.' They leave here prepared for the academic challenges ahead." But the social challenges? And the integration of the two? "We're committed to working hard at that," he says. "You want your students to know who they are. You want them to be willing to take risks, to slip, to fall, to get back up. If they can develop resilience and compassion and understanding, and can combine that with the ability to think in a critical fashion and express themselves in spoken and written word, I think they're going to do pretty well."

Senior Lecturer Mandy Savitz-Romer, co-author of the book Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success, believes the conversation with traditional educators and those who hold the purse strings - from public school district officials to private school parents - needs to be reframed. For one thing, she shudders whenever she hears someone lump together all of what a student gains via social-emotional learning under the leaky umbrella term "soft skills." She's not alone there. Everyone interviewed for this article expressed some degree of disdain for a term that seems to relegate the skills it's describing to the backseat. On the contrary, Savitz-Romer insists, these are skills that drive education. "They're foundational," she says. "They are the building blocks for more academic skills."

For example, a student's ability to do well in math class, Savitz-Romer argues, is based in part on the degree to which that student believes he or she can do well. Beyond self-belief, she says, another factor is the student's desire to do well in math, also known as motivational disposition. Then there is the student's ability to self-regulate - that is, to remain focused, follow through with homework, and prepare for tests. In this view, social-emotional learning is not a detour from a pursuit of academics. It's an on-ramp.

When the conversation turns to the future, specifically college, the message to kids often is misdirected. This is especially true for lower-income children. "Often they're told the reason they should go to college is so they can make more money and better their standing in life," says Savitz-Romer. "But if you look at developmental psychology, at the concepts of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators, you'll find that using money as a motivator is not a very successful strategy, especially for kids who face formidable obstacles - financial, academic, social, or emotional." What would be a better way to convey that same message? "Well, you could ask a student, who do you want to be? What kind of footprint do you want to leave in this world?" she says. "Identity development is a better first step toward supporting motivation. With some students, we have to spend time helping them believe that it's even possible for them to go to college."

Teachers benefit from the social-emotional focus as well. When they participate in direct professional development, they add new tools to their classroom toolbox. And when they participate in class activities that are aimed at developing skills in students, they doubly benefit. They learn those skills themselves, and they see their students in a new light. That's especially helpful when teachers are working with students far different from themselves.

"If you're a teacher and you're going through your class' exercise in empathy, it's less about determining how much empathy you have and more about seeing whom you have empathy for," says Weissbourd. "If you're a teacher who is at all mindful and self-aware, you ask yourself who is in your circle of concern. You think more deeply, and more individually, about the students in your class. And good data supports that teacher-student relationships matter. When students are connected to their teacher, they learn more. And when teachers develop social-emotional skills, the chances are higher that students are going to learn them as well."

Teachers also use these skills for their own well-being. "It's hard to be an effective teacher when you're as frantic and stressed as many are right now," says Weissbourd, noting significant rates of low-level depression among childcare providers and teachers, a feeling of being helpless and hopeless owing to increasing demands and diminishing resources. "When you're feeling like that," he says, "it's hard to express empathy. It's hard to be self-aware. It's hard to self-regulate. We have to relieve the stresses on teachers if we want them to help our students develop these skills. You can't make progress with kids if you're not simultaneously making progress with the adults around them."

Once students have made their way through the educational system and have entered the workforce, social-emotional skills become paramount. Anyone who has ever spent 9 to 5 in an office environment understands the importance of being able to fit in, to work as part of a team, to listen actively, to navigate through that culture. These are not skills taught in math class. And even in today's high-tech work world, with more people than ever before telecommuting and seldom experiencing faceto- face contact with co-workers, social-emotional skills are still front and center. A study of collective intelligence published last year found that when undergoing the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, which tests one's ability to read another person's mental state by looking at his or her eyes, the subjects' scores on the test predict their ability to work in a group - even when that group is online, working remotely.

"It's an interesting puzzle," Deming says. "How can it be that as technology allows us to work remotely more easily, social skills are becoming more important rather than less? I think the answer is that you don't necessarily need to be in person with people for these skills to matter. For example, think about the way people communicate by email or by text. Think about all the subtle cues people send. So yes, my ability to read emotions in someone's eyes makes me a better collaborator even when I don't see the people I'm working with. It has to do with the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes."

And this isn't necessarily new. "People have always known that there are things other than academics that matter," West says. "Many schools have given kids grades for academic performance and grades for effort, and there are lots of practices that reflect a recognition of the importance of skills not directly measured by tests. But I think what's happening now is that people are trying to be more specific about what exactly those skills are."

That's a first step, which logically would be followed by developing ways of measuring skills and their effectiveness. West believes we're still at a very early stage of that, and he's not disappointed that we're not further along. "When you think about it," he says, "we've had essentially a century worth of experience in developing tests to measure basic literacy and numeracy skills, and at this point we have a solid understanding how best to do that. I think we're decades behind when it comes to approaching these soft skills with the same degree of rigor."

- Jeff Wagenheim is a columnist at Sports Illustrated, founding editor of Wondertime magazine, and a former editor at The Boston Globe. In school, he says, his social-emotional skills veered between underappreciated and undeveloped.

@jeffwagenheim, jeffwagenheim.com

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The North Carolina morning sunlight is peeking through the classroom window as the students assemble. It's the beginning of the school day at Bruns Academy in Charlotte, and the children are gathering on a rug, just as they always do at 9:15 a.m.

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Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, “They don’t pay me to like the kids.” Her response: “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.’” A rousing call to educators to believe in their students and actually connect with them on a real, human, personal level.

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How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime

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Childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain. This unfolds across a lifetime, to the point where those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer. An impassioned plea for pediatric medicine to confront the prevention and treatment of trauma, head-on.

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Dean James Ryan's 5 Essential Questions In Life

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Daniel Goleman Introduces Emotional Intelligence | Big Think

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The Surprising Truth About Learning in Schools | Will Richardson | TEDxWestVancouverED

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Capitol Hill Briefing on Social-Emotional Learning with Tim Shriver

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This video segment, filmed April 30, 2014, features Timothy P. Shriver (see bio below) speaking at a briefing on Capitol Hill called "Social and Emotional Learning: Essential Skills for Success in School and Life."

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The CASEL Program Guide is designed to help educators and school administrators select an evidence-based SEL program that best meets the needs of their community.

Determine your SEL team and goals

Align your team

This helps ensure you select a program that reflects the hopes and needs of your school community as well as matching the school and or district's priorities.

Connect your needs to our metrics

Connect your criteria

CASEL showcases a variety of features for each program, here you will find descriptions of each feature within our review process.

Familiarize yourself with the program designations

Each program included in CASEL's guide receives a designation. Here you will find the criteria for SELect, Promising, and SEL-Supportive programming.

Identify and compare SEL programs

View the program list

The program list includes all CASEL-designated SEL programs that you can view and filter to best align with your goals.

The comparison tool provides a side-by-side view of the programs you select that align with your priorities.

How to get started

Research shows that well-implemented, evidence-based SEL programs are the most effective way to support young people's success and well-being in school and beyond. If you are a school leader, educator, or policy maker, this consumer report-style guide will support your organization in researching and selecting high-quality SEL programs that align with your goals and aspirations for students and adults. Access our Quick Guide for more on how to use the Program Guide.

The Program Guide was instrumental because we needed several programs to compare and needed them to be research-based.

District Administrator
Washington

The Program Guide was very helpful in deciding what program best met our needs and objectives.

Special Ed Teacher
Michigan

Submit your SEL program to CASEL

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Help your team choose a high-quality SEL program to meet your community's needs.

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Bring an urgent conversation about education to your home and community. Race to Nowhere Home & Educational DVDs now available. Join the nationwide campaign for healthy children and thriving students.

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Brené Brown studies human connection -- our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. A talk to share.

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Hackschooling makes me happy | Logan LaPlante | TEDxUniversityofNevada

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Servant Leadership: Chris Hintz at TEDxYouth@FHS

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Senior Chris Hintz lives by Gandhi's words: "Be the change you want to see in the world." Dedicated to make his mark as a leader, Chris believes that true leadership cannot exclude empathy and service.

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Most Likely To Succeed is a thought-provoking documentary feature film that reveals the growing shortcomings of conventional education methods in today's innovative world. The film explores compelling new approaches that aim to revolutionize education as we know it, inspiring school communities to reimagine what students and teachers are capable of doing. To date, MLTS has screened for thousands of audiences around the world, igniting conversations and empowering change along the way. Share the film with your community to activate change now.

From Director Greg Whiteley (Last Chance U, Mitt,) and Executive Producer Ted Dintersmith (author, Most Likely to Succeed).

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Most Likely To Succeed - Ted Dintersmith

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Most Likely To Succeed is a thought-provoking documentary feature film that reveals the growing shortcomings of conventional education methods in today's innovative world. The film explores compelling new approaches that aim to revolutionize education as we know it, inspiring school communities to reimagine what students and teachers are capable of doing.

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Changing the Game in Youth Sports - Changing the Game Project

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On April 26, 2014 I had the honor of presenting a talk at TEDx Bend Oregon entitled "Changing the Game in Youth Sports."

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Why Aren't We Teaching You Mindfulness | AnneMarie Rossi | TEDxYouth@MileHigh

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In this powerful talk, an instructor bringing mindfulness to shelters shares her research into how mindfulness can set us up for success and break cycles of transgenerational trauma. AnneMarie Rossi is the founder and director of Be Mindful, a non-profit association of mindfulness instructors dedicated to making the practice accessible to all.

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A Project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child Model | Adolescent and School Health | CDC

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The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model is an expansion and update of the Coordinated School Health (CSH) approach. The WSCC incorporates the components of CSH and the tenets of the ASCD's* whole child approach to strengthen a unified and collaborative approach to learning and health.

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The Launch of the Turning the Tide Report Marks the First Step in Efforts of Coalition to Inspire Concern for Others in High School Students, Reduce Achievement Pressure, and Create Greater Equity for Economically Diverse Students

New York, NY - Today, admissions deans and other leaders from the nation's top colleges and universities joined together to announce the launch of Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions, a report with concrete recommendations to reshape the college admissions process and promote greater ethical engagement among aspiring students, reduce excessive achievement pressure, and level the playing field for economically disadvantaged students.

"Too often, today's culture sends young people messages that emphasize personal success rather than concern for others and the common good," said Richard Weissbourd, senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-director of the Making Caring Common Project. "As a rite of passage, college admissions plays a powerful role in shaping student attitudes and behaviors. Admissions deans are stepping up collectively to underscore the importance of meaningful engagement in communities and greater equity for economically diverse students."

Turning the Tide is the first step in a two-year campaign that seeks to substantially reshape the existing college admissions process. The report stems from an exploratory meeting at the Harvard Graduate School of Education hosted by Making Caring Common (MCC), a project that helps educators, parents, and communities raise children who are caring, responsible to their communities, and committed to justice. It was written by Richard Weissbourd in collaboration with Lloyd Thacker, Director of The Education Conservancy, and based on a meeting of college admissions deans and other stakeholders in the college admissions process. The goals of the report are to harness the collective influence of college admissions to send a unified message that both ethical engagement and intellectual engagement are highly important and to more fairly capture the strengths of students across race, class and culture.

"Escalating achievement pressure is not healthy for our youth. Young people are suffering from higher rates of depression, anxiety and substance abuse as they juggle the demands of their lives. Many students, especially those from low-income families, are often discouraged due to limited access to the resources perceived as necessary for selective college admissions. It's a double-edged sword," said Kedra Ishop, associate vice president for enrollment management at the University of Michigan. " Turing the Tide offers recommendations to tackle both of these issues simultaneously by promoting the quality of academic engagement over the quantity of achievements in college admissions."

As of today, Turning the Tide has been endorsed by a growing list of 85 stakeholders across college admissions and education. Many endorsers have already committed to implementing changes consistent with the report recommendations - from revised essay questions and marketing materials, to the development of entirely new recruitment, scholarship and high school programs focused on community engagement and caring for others.

" Turning the Tide does a tremendous job articulating many of the things we have looked at for a long time at Yale," said Jeremiah Quinlan, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale University. "In response to the report, Yale has agreed to add a question on next year's application asking students to reflect on their contribution to family, community, and/or the public good. We will also advocate for more flexibility in the extracurricular forms on both the Common Application and Coalition Application so that schools can more easily control how they ask students to list and reflect on their extracurricular involvement."

"This report communicates our expectations much more clearly to applicants. We don't want students who do things just because they think they have to in order to get into college. To the contrary: we want students who lead balanced lives, who pursue their interests with energy and enthusiasm, and who work cooperatively with others, all of which will help them be successful in and after college," said Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions, interim executive director of student financial services, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

" Turning the Tide is the kind of essential collaborative effort that I dreamed about while establishing The Education Conservancy. Not only will it help students, but it will enable colleges to align practices with the values they espouse and demonstrate how collaboration among colleges can help them serve their common public interest charge," said Lloyd Thacker, founder and executive director, The Education Conservancy.

"With this initiative, we are turning our attention to a critical developmental time in our children's lives. Clearly, our current admissions landscape emphasizes extremely important traits, aptitudes, and achievements. And yet we owe our students a paradigm that goes beyond our current schema," said Diane Anci, vice president for enrollment - dean of admission and financial aid, Kenyon College. "In Turning the Tide, we are granting our children permission, space, and time to develop their analytical strength, their empathic and generative selves, and their inner lives of reflection, values, and aspirations. We will reward them by emphasizing depth of commitment over breadth of resume, strength of purpose over multiple application fillers. In shifting our focus, we hope to inspire students to use their high school years as truly formative. We aspire to the goal of matriculating students who have an internal clarity and drive that will propel them forward through their college years and beyond."

Making Caring Common will host a summit in summer 2016 convening admissions leaders and high school and parent representatives from across the country with the goal of developing a two-year plan to implement key elements of Turning the Tide nationwide.

For the full report and additional information, visit Making Caring Common online: www.makingcaringcommon.org.

Media Coverage

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Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions

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The Launch of the Turning the Tide Report Marks the First Step in Efforts of Coalition to Inspire Concern for Others in High School Students, Reduce Achievement Pressure, and Create Greater Equity for Economically Diverse Students New York, NY - Today, admissions deans and other leaders from the nation's top

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It also revealed curious logic at the pinnacles of higher education.

Unlike many of this new coalition's harshest critics, I trust that the schools involved really do want to diversify their student bodies, which don't reflect American society.

But like those critics, I wonder how the new application process will accomplish this and whether it would be more effective to adopt less complicated, confusing strategies.

First, some context, along with details about what the coalition is proposing:

As it stands now, the country's most selective colleges are dominated by students from affluent backgrounds. As my Times colleague David Leonhardt noted in a recent article: "For every student from the entire bottom half of the nation's income distribution at Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, Yale and more than a few other colleges, there appear to be roughly two students from just the top 5 percent (which means they come from families making at least $200,000)."

During the 2013-14 academic year, the most recent time period for which figures were available, 38 percent of undergraduates nationally received federal Pell grants, reserved for students from low-income families.

In the Ivy League, the percentage ranged from 12 (Yale) to 21 (Columbia), according to the National Center for Education Statistics. While 31 percent of students at the University of California, Berkeley, received Pell grants, just 13 percent at the University of Virginia did.

Such low percentages largely reflect the flawed education and support systems that too many underprivileged kids in this country encounter. These children don't have the academic grounding, transcripts and test scores that their wealthier counterparts do, frequently because they haven't attended schools of commensurate quality.

From preschool through 12th grade, we've failed them. We can hardly expect higher education to rush in belatedly and save the day.

At the same time, there's evidence that talented kids from low-income families who could handle the work at leading colleges and get ample financial aid often don't realize it. And there are aspects of those colleges' admissions processes that work against them.

Members of the new coalition say that they are trying to change that and to "unlock some of the mystery of what it means to apply to any institution," in the words of Zina Evans, the vice president for enrollment management and associate provost at the University of Florida, whom I spoke with last week. I spoke as well with admissions officials at Yale and at Smith College, which, like Florida, belong to the coalition.

They said that the new online tools are meant to be one-stop shopping for information about financial aid, application requirements and more. Students could also use this online platform to interact with top schools, sending inquiries and receiving answers.

The platform would include a so-called "locker" for creative work - essays, videos, drawings - that students would be encouraged to begin filling in the ninth grade, as a reminder that college is on the horizon.

They could share those lockers with mentors. And come application time, they could upload its contents for admissions officers.

The platform would additionally serve as an application portal to colleges in the coalition, which would be able to customize their individual demands more easily than they do with any supplements to the Common App that they currently require.

If you're asking how this makes applying to college easier for poor kids, you're right to, and you're in a mind meld with many confused and skeptical college counselors and higher-education experts.

They predicted that privileged kids with hovering parents would interpret the coalition's suggestion about beginning to fill a locker in the ninth grade as yet another reason to turn the entire high school experience into a calculated, pragmatic audition for college admissions officers.

Meanwhile, underprivileged kids, lacking the necessary guidance and awareness, might never take advantage of the platform.

"We have to make sure we give them the resources," said Emmanuel Moses, the senior manager of college guidance at the Opportunity Network, which nurtures underprivileged kids to and through college. In other words, a set of online tools to be used with mentors won't do much good if there aren't mentors to use them with.

Coalition members conceded that they hadn't fully figured out that part but said they were determined to. "That's the core challenge," Audrey Smith, the vice president for enrollment at Smith College, told me.

The coalition's composition also contradicts its message of unimpeded, universal access. Partly because the coalition is limited to schools with six-year graduation rates of at least 70 percent, it's a league mostly of exclusive schools that seem to be distinguishing themselves from the pack. That has led some critics to question its stated motives.

"A group of America's most high-profile private colleges, already obsessed with prestige, are attempting to grab more," wrote Jon Boeckenstedt, the associate vice president of enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University in Chicago, in The Washington Post. DePaul does not belong to the coalition.

He added that they were "making hollow promises to low-income kids they could already serve if they really wanted to."

When I spoke with him last week, he went even further.

"I think the Common App has become much too common for some of these people," he said, referring to coalition members. "I think it completely offends their vanity."

Whatever the case, there's much about their admissions criteria that runs counter to the enrollment of underprivileged children, and it's unclear if the new online platform and application process would really fix that.

High scores on the SAT or ACT correlate with high family income, in part because performance on these tests can be improved with the special classes and private tutoring that money buys. That was one reason cited by Hampshire College when it announced last year that it would stop collecting applicants' scores and would go unranked by U.S. News & World Report, which factors in those numbers.

A transcript brimming with Advanced Placement classes is a testament to the applicant, yes - but also to the resources of the secondary school that offered a broad menu of such classes. And students from certain backgrounds and school districts are more likely than those from others to have hands-on help rounding up the perfect letters of recommendation, orchestrating an attention-getting extracurricular dossier and even writing impressive essays.

Regarding essays, Jeremiah Quinlan, the dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, conceded his concern that "there's a lot of work being done on personal statements that's decreasing their value in the admissions process."

If the locker and other features of the new platform wind up giving disadvantaged kids additional, untraditional ways to show their mettle, it may turn out to be a step in the right direction. But the schools in the coalition need a more detailed plan than they've articulated for making sure that those kids know about the platform and how it can benefit them.

Any rethinking of the status quo of admissions is terrific. The same goes for any spotlight on the dearth of diversity at many exclusive schools. I just hope the members of the coalition accomplish more, in the end, than merely illuminating education's inequities.

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coalition for access  affordability and success

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Opinion | An Admissions Surprise From the Ivy League

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It also revealed curious logic at the pinnacles of higher education. Unlike many of this new coalition's harshest critics, I trust that the schools involved really do want to diversify their student bodies, which don't reflect American society.

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Understanding the Whole Child Approach with Tenets, Indicators, and Components

All educators want to improve the work they do for students, their families, and the community. Whether it's instruction, school climate, leadership, family engagement, or any of the other issues schools face on a daily basis, all educators need tools to help them improve their actions and methods. A whole child approach sets the standard for comprehensive, sustainable school improvement and provides for long-term student success.

Launched in 2007, ASCD's Whole Child Initiative is an effort to change the conversation about education from a focus on narrowly defined academic achievement to one that promotes the long-term development and success of children. Based on the common language of the Commission on the Whole Child (PDF), the initiative began with five tenets of a whole child education-, , , , and challenged-to provide a framework and understanding of what a whole child approach to education means. In 2011, ASCD released a set of ten indicators for each of these tenets, and added the overarching concept that the work is sustainable (also with its own ten indicators).

So, why did we introduce the indicators?

It was a strategic step to provide a scaffold that underpins and provides more detail to each of the tenets. We may all assume we know what being healthy or engaged or challenged means, but do we all know what it looks like in a school? Do we all know what facets make up or lead a school toward being safer or more supportive? The indicators provide an added level of detail so that we all can delve a little deeper into a whole child approach to education.

In 2012 we went further. We developed and launched the ASCD School Improvement Tool. This free tool guides schools through an assessment of the tenets and indicators, but also cross-references those same indicators to components of effective school improvement-school climate and culture, curriculum and instruction, leadership, assessment, family and community engagement, and staff capacity and professional development. In combination, schools are able to receive a personalized summary of data results in regard to how they are performing compared both to the tenets and the components.

Here is an example from each tenet and sustainability:

Download the indicators (PDF) of a whole child approach to education and community engagement and use the ASCD School Improvement Tool to assess your performance on those indicators. Join ASCD and our partners, and together we'll change the face of education policy and practice.

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Understanding the Whole Child Approach with Tenets, Indicators, and Components - Whole Child Education

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All educators want to improve the work they do for students, their families, and the community. Whether it's instruction, school climate, leadership, family engagement, or any of the other issues schools face on a daily basis, all educators need tools to help them improve their actions and methods.

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In Palo Alto, Calif., the shrill horn of incoming trains bring a constant reminder of young lives lost too soon. In the past seven years, several teenagers have stepped in front of Caltrains in the Silicon Valley city, where the adolescent suicide rate has soared to five times the national average.

It was in this way that a bright, popular, goofy kid named Cameron Lee ended his life in November 2014. By then, his classmates at Henry M. Gunn High School were all too accustomed to this sort of inexplicable tragedy. They hailed, after all, from a part of the country that had become known for its affluence, technical ingenuity and the number of kids that had been pushed to the brink.

"I am 15 years old and I just organized a memorial," Isabelle Blanchard, the sister of one suicide victim, told the Atlantic magazine.

It is an eerie refrain that has played out again and again.

Over the course of nine months in 2009 and 2010, six Palo Alto teenagers committed suicide. Between 2010 and 2014, an average of 20 children and young adults killed themselves annually in Santa Clara County, where Palo Alto is located.

The deaths in the city constitute two recent "suicide clusters" (multiple suicides within a short time frame); there are an average of five in the entire country each year. Having two in the same city in less than a decade is extremely rare.

The students died on the tracks, but also by hanging and jumping off a roof or overpass. Each time it happened, their classmates mourned them, and their distraught parents sought answers.

In response to what Santa Clara County officials have called an urgent public health problem, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is launching an epidemiological study on teen suicide in the area. A team of suicide prevention specialists is arriving in Santa Clara on Tuesday for a two-week site visit.

While these federal teams generally act on infectious-disease outbreaks, the San Jose Mercury News reported, this investigation signals a rare instance of the CDC dispatching a unit for a chronic health issue.

In November 2014, the CDC conducted similar research in Fairfax, Va., and found "multiple risk factors," including high expectations for students, parental pressure on students for success and parental denial of mental health issues among their children. It found that 72 percent of youth suicides exhibited mental health problems.

Community members hope that the study will yield responses to the question that has plagued them for the past seven years, when the first suicides began: If these kids had everything they needed to succeed, why were so many choosing to or contemplating giving up on life altogether?

In the note that Lee left behind, he wrote that no one was to blame. Not school, not family or friends. He said he felt simply that he had no future in the world, despite his good grades the people who loved him.

As the Atlantic's Hanna Rosin noted in her cover story in December, 74 percent of Gunn students have at least one graduate-degree-holding parent. The high school has been ranked among the nation's top five in science education. About 20 students get into Stanford University every year.

At the same time, when Rosin attended a school meeting halfway through the academic year in 2015, it was announced that 42 Gunn students had been hospitalized and treated for having suicidal thoughts since the fall.

The city's other public high school, Palo Alto High School, has a similarly accomplished record, with SAT scores surpassing state averages by nearly 200 points.

The median household income in Palo Alto is $121,465 (double California's median).

In "The Problem With Rich Kids," published by Psychology Today in November 2013, former Yale psychologist Suniya Luthar noted that social, emotional and behavioral issues are as prevalent in the wealthy end of the socioeconomic spectrum as they are on the poor end.

She said that, on average, rich offspring experience serious levels of depression and anxiety at twice the national rates.

"The evidence all points to one cause underlying the different disturbances documented: pressure for high-octane achievement," Luthar wrote. "The children of affluent parents expect to excel at school and in multiple extracurriculars and also in their social lives. ... It plays out in crippling anxiety and depression, about anticipated or perceived achievement 'failures.'"

Shortly after Lee's death, a 16-year-old Gunn classmate named Martha Cabot uploaded a YouTube video urging Palo Alto parents to change their attitudes.

"Students feel the constant need at our school of having to keep up with all the achievements," she said. "I'm trying to raise awareness - especially for the parents. We love our moms and we love our dads, but calm down."

Students and alumni of Gunn and Palo Alto high schools have rallied around the cause of suicide prevention and awareness, eager to help their schools shed the reputation they have gained in recent years.

A website called "Henry M. Gunn Gives Me Hope" collects pearls of optimism related to the school.

One senior wrote: "Gunn gives me hope because even though we are an entirely new group of students, we are still able to react to our tragedies in supportive and caring ways. Although I certainly have not yet fully processed what has happened, our school has already gone to the ends of the earth to help students that are reeling."
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centers for disease control and prevention

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CDC investigates why so many students in wealthy Palo Alto, Calif., commit suicide

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In Palo Alto, Calif., the shrill horn of incoming trains bring a constant reminder of young lives lost too soon. In the past seven years, several teenagers have stepped in front of Caltrains in the Silicon Valley city, where the adolescent suicide rate has soared to five times the national average.

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Promotes a broader notion of youth success. Combats undue performance pressure on kids. Offers programs to youth, parents, and schools.

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Fostering Resilience, Building Resilience in Children and Teens--Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg

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A tiger running at you is a real crisis. If you believe a mild stress (like a math test) is an emergency, you will not be able to study. Your body will be preparing to deal with a real tiger, and you won't be able to concentrate on anything but escaping.

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Uploaded by Academy for SELinSchools on 2016-07-12.

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You might call it a silent epidemic.

Up to one in five kids living in the U.S. shows signs or symptoms of a mental health disorder in a given year.

So in a school classroom of 25 students, five of them may be struggling with the same issues many adults deal with: depression, anxiety, substance abuse.

And yet most children - nearly 80 percent - who need mental health services won't get them.

Whether treated or not, the children do go to school. And the problems they face can tie into major problems found in schools: chronic absence, low achievement, disruptive behavior and dropping out.

Experts say schools could play a role in identifying students with problems and helping them succeed. Yet it's a role many schools are not prepared for.

Educators face the simple fact that, often because of a lack of resources, there just aren't enough people to tackle the job. And the ones who are working on it are often drowning in huge caseloads. Kids in need can fall through the cracks.
"No one ever asked me"
Katie is one of those kids.

She's 18 now. Back when she was 8, she had to transfer to a different school in Prince George's County, Md., in the middle of the year.

"At recess, I didn't have friends to play with," she recalls. "I would make an excuse to stay inside with the teachers and finish extra work or do extra credit."

We're not using Katie's last name to protect her privacy. She's been diagnosed with bulimia and depression.

She says that in the span of a few months, she went from honor roll to failing. She put on weight; other kids called her "fat." She began cutting herself with a razor every day. And she missed a ton of school.

"I felt like every single day was a bad day," she says. "I felt like nobody wanted to help me."

Katie says teachers acted like she didn't care about her schoolwork. "I was so invisible to them."

Every year of high school, she says, was "horrible." She told her therapist she wanted to die and was admitted into the hospital.

During all this time, she says, not a single principal or teacher or counselor ever asked her one simple question: "What's wrong?"

If someone had asked, she says, she would have told them.
Who should have asked?
We talked to educators, advocates, teachers and parents across the country. Here's what they say a comprehensive approach to mental health and education would look like.
The family
The role: The first place to spot trouble is in the home, whether that trouble is substance abuse, slipping grades or a child who sleeps too much. Adults at home - parents, siblings, other relatives - are often the first to notice something going on.

The reality: Many families do not know what to look for. Sometimes a serious problem can be overlooked as "just a phase." But it's those sudden changes - angry outbursts, declining grades, changes in sleeping or eating - that can signal problems. When something unusual crops up, families can keep in close touch with the school.
The teacher
The role: During the week, many students see their teachers even more than their own families. Teachers are in a prime spot to notice changes in behavior. They read essays, see how students relate with other kids and notice when they aren't paying attention.

The reality: Teachers already have a ton on their plates. They're pressured to get test scores up, on top of preparing lessons and grading assignments. Plus, many teachers receive minimal training in mental health issues. But when they do see something concerning, they can raise a flag.
The social worker
The role: Social workers act like a bridge. If teachers come to them with a concern - maybe a child is acting withdrawn - one of the first things they'll do is call home. They see each child through the lens of their family, school and community. They might learn that a family is going through a divorce or homelessness.

The reality: There aren't enough of them. According to one model, every school should have one social worker for every 250 students. The reality is that in some schools, social workers are responsible for many more.
The counselor
The role: In some schools, counselors focus solely on academics: helping students pick classes and apply to college. But in others, they also act a lot like social workers, serving as a link to families and working with students who need support.

The reality: Like school social workers, there just aren't enough counselors. On average nationwide, each counselor is responsible for nearly 500 students. The American School Counselor Association recommends a caseload nearly half that size.
The special education teacher
The Role: Special education teachers may start working with students when a mental health problem affects the ability to do school work. They are primarily responsible for working on academic skills.

The reality: Again, there aren't enough of them. Nearly every state has reported a shortage of special education teachers. Half of all school districts say they have trouble recruiting highly qualified candidates.
The school psychologist
The Role: Here's one job that, on paper, is truly dedicated to student mental health. School psychologists are key players when it comes to crisis intervention and can refer students to outside help, such as a psychiatrist.

The reality: If you sense a pattern here, you're right. In the U.S., there is just one school psychologist for every 1,400 students, according to the most recent data available from the National Association of School Psychologists.
The school nurse
The role: Most any school nurse will tell you, physical and mental health are tough to separate. That puts nurses in a prime spot to catch problems early. For example: A kid who comes into the nurse's office a lot, complaining of headaches or stomach problems? That could be a sign of anxiety, a strategy to avoid a bully, or a sign of troubles at home.

The reality: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends at least one nurse for every 750 students, but the actual ratio across the country can be much higher.
The principal
The role: As the top dogs in schools, principals make the big decisions about priorities. They can bring in social-emotional, anti-bullying and suicide-prevention programs.

The reality: Principals also have a lot on their plates: the day-to-day management of student behavior, school culture and teacher support.
Getting help, and "excited for life"
Katie says things started to turn around for her when she met a nurse at the Children's National Health System in Washington, D.C., who finally showed interest in what was wrong.

Now, she's begun college and wants to be a pediatric nurse.

"I'm doing a lot better now" she says. " Obviously, I mean, I'm a lot happier. I'm excited for school. I'm excited to graduate. I'm excited for life."

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Mental Health In Schools: A Hidden Crisis Affecting Millions Of Students

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You might call it a silent epidemic. Up to one in five kids living in the U.S. shows signs or symptoms of a mental health disorder in a given year. So in a school classroom of 25 students, five of them may be struggling with the same issues many adults deal with: depression, anxiety, substance abuse.

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Studies suggest that the amount of stress matters, and can impact student academic performance as well. While low levels of stress can boost memory formation, moderate and high levels of stress can impair a student's ability to retrieve memories, making it more challenging to pass tests, write papers, or make a presentation in class.

Can mindfulness-a nonreligious form of meditation that teaches students to breathe, focus, and center themselves in the present moment-help reduce any of the detrimental effects of classroom stress or hectic student schedules? Can it help students learn, leading to gains in academic achievement? Many schools are betting on it, integrating relatively simple mindfulness techniques into the school day.

Mindfulness Reduces Stress

For Rebecca McLelland-Crawley's middle school students, stress was becoming a major problem. When the school district surveyed students a few years ago on their stress levels, the responses were staggering.

"More than 80 percent of the kids at our school feel stressed, most or all of it bad. It's normal to feel stressed-but it's not normal for an 11-, 12-, and 13-year-old to feel toxic levels of stress. So that was how classroom mindfulness came about," said McLelland-Crawley.

To address the problem, her students created their own mindfulness group, NüYü, to learn more about stress and to share healthy coping strategies with their school. Every week, they encourage other students to participate in the Panther "Pause" Challenge, a series of stress-reducing lessons and activities. NüYü students recently held a wellness fair for over 200 parents, students, and community members, at which they introduced yoga stations, stress balls, and glitter jars to participants. They also held workshops on mindful eating and explained the science behind mindfulness.

Now in its second year, the program is expanding to include sixth- and seventh-grade students at the school.

The research suggests that McLelland-Crawley's students are on the right path-mindfulness can be an effective strategy to help students deal with stress. In 2014, a Dutch study found that elementary school students who participated in 30-minute mindfulness sessions twice a week for six weeks exhibited lower levels of stress, higher levels of well-being, and better behavior than their peers.

Mindfulness can be especially helpful for children who experience stress resulting from community violence, poverty, substance use, and trauma. In a 2015 study, students from two low-income, urban middle schools participated in a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program and experienced a range of mental and behavioral benefits, from lower levels of stress and depression to a more positive mood and better ability to cope with challenging situations.

Mindfulness Boosts Academic Performance

In addition to boosting students' emotional and psychological well-being, mindfulness can yield academic benefits by increasing students' ability to self-regulate and focus.

Annie O'Shaughnessy, a high school English teacher in Vermont, spends 10 minutes at the start of class every Monday practicing mindfulness with her students. Using a combination of mindfulness videos and breathing techniques, she helps students handle the stress and anxiety they typically experience during school.

"I teach mindfulness every single year in English class. After teaching it, I can go up to a kid who is about to give a presentation, and I can see that he's in amygdala hijack mode. He's forgotten what he's going to say, and he wants to leave. So I tell him, 'So now it's time to do the breathing.' So he does the square breathing exercise, where he breathes in, holds for four [seconds], breathes out, holds for four. And he's then able to give his presentation," she said.

As improbable as it sounds, taking a few seconds to breathe and focus can translate into academic benefits. In 2015, researchers at the University of British Columbia found that fourth- and fifth-grade students that participated in a 12-week mindfulness program had higher levels of attention, better retention, and 15 percent higher math grades than their peers. This was on top of psychological benefits such as lower levels of depression and increased feelings of optimism.

A 2016 study further explored the connection between mindfulness and cognitive benefits, looking at middle school students in a four-week mindfulness program. Compared with their peers, these students showed significant improvements in working memory capacity. "These results are consistent with the notion that the practice of meditation-which requires sustained attention while simultaneously redirecting attention back to the current experience-is closely related to the function of working memory," researchers wrote in their study.

Academic benefits have been found for children as early as preschool. A 2015 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined a 12-week Kindness Curriculum program that included mindfulness exercises in addition to kindness practices such as empathy, gratitude, and sharing. Compared with their peers, the preschoolers participating in the program earned higher report card grades, in addition to showing more empathy, kindness, and willingness to share.

"Mindfulness is a great tool for learning," explained O'Shaughnessy. "If I want my students to learn, I need their prefrontal cortex, I need their neocortex. I need those parts of their brain online, and in most grades, those parts of their brain aren't going to be online until they've relaxed and done some mindful activities."

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Mindfulness Is All the Rage-But Does It Work?

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Studies suggest that the amount of stress matters, and can impact student academic performance as well. While low levels of stress can boost memory formation, moderate and high levels of stress can impair a student's ability to retrieve memories, making it more challenging to pass tests, write papers, or make a presentation in class.

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A group of middle school students stood in the front of the room.

They stood before a great number of adults, and talked about how stressed they were.

They talked about the pressures that they felt each day.

They talked about the impact that this sort of pressure could have.

I had joined the Edcamp session a few minutes late, and had missed the introduction.

I later learned that this group of extraordinary students was Team NüYü, a group of 8th grade students in New Jersey, who are trying to reduce student stress using mindfulness techniques.

I was hooked. I learned a great deal from this group of students on that day, and today, I'm proud to share a resource created by Team NüYü.

Try using these mindfulness techniques in your classroom!

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A group of middle school students stood in the front of the room. They stood before a great number of adults, and talked about how stressed they were. They talked about the pressures that they felt each day. They talked about the impact that this sort of pressure could have.

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Uploaded by Rebecca McLelland-Crawley on 2016-09-24.

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But instead of bringing families together, Dr. Aderhold's letter revealed a fissure in the district, which has 9,700 students, and one that broke down roughly along racial lines. On one side are white parents like Catherine Foley, a former president of the Parent Teacher Student Association at her daughter's middle school, who has come to see the district's increasingly pressured atmosphere as antithetical to learning.

"My son was in fourth grade and told me, 'I'm not going to amount to anything because I have nothing to put on my résumé,' " Ms. Foley said.

On the other side are parents like Mike Jia, one of the thousands of Asian-American professionals who have moved to the district in the past decade, who said Dr. Aderhold's reforms would amount to a "dumbing down" of his children's education.

"What is happening here reflects a national anti-intellectual trend that will not prepare our children for the future," Mr. Jia said.

About 10 minutes from Princeton and an hour and a half from New York City, West Windsor and Plainsboro have become popular bedroom communities for technology entrepreneurs, pharmaceutical researchers and engineers, drawn in large part by the public schools. From the last three graduating classes, 16 seniors were admitted to M.I.T. It churns out Science Olympiad winners, classically trained musicians and students with perfect SAT scores.

The district has become increasingly popular with immigrant families from China, India and Korea. This year, 65 percent of its students are Asian-American, compared with 44 percent in 2007. Many of them are the first in their families born in the United States.

They have had a growing influence on the district. Asian-American parents are enthusiastic supporters of the competitive instrumental music program. They have been huge supporters of the district's advanced mathematics program, which once began in the fourth grade but will now start in the sixth. The change to the program, in which 90 percent of the participating students are Asian-American, is one of Dr. Aderhold's reforms.

Asian-American students have been avid participants in a state program that permits them to take summer classes off campus for high school credit, allowing them to maximize the number of honors and Advanced Placement classes they can take, another practice that Dr. Aderhold is limiting this school year.

With many Asian-American children attending supplemental instructional programs, there is a perception among some white families that the elementary school curriculum is being sped up to accommodate them.

Both Asian-American and white families say the tension between the two groups has grown steadily over the past few years, as the number of Asian families has risen. But the division has become more obvious in recent months as Dr. Aderhold has made changes, including no-homework nights, an end to high school midterms and finals, and a "right to squeak" initiative that made it easier to participate in the music program.

At a packed meeting of the school district's Board of Education held shortly before the winter break, a middle school cafeteria was filled with parents, with Asian-Americans sitting on one side and white families on the other. Some parents and students described rampant cheating, grade fixation and days so stressful that some students could not wait for them to end. But other parents, primarily Asian-American ones, described a different picture, one in which their values were being ignored.

Helen Yin, the mother of an eighth grader and a kindergartner, told the crowd that Dr. Aderhold was attempting to hold her and her children back. At one point, a visibly upset Ms. Yin, who moved from Chengdu, China, to pursue a master's degree in chemistry, shouted to the room filled with parents, "Who can I trust?"

"I don't think limitations can help," she said later, in an interview. "If children are to learn and grow, they need experiences."

Jennifer Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and an author of "The Asian American Achievement Paradox," says misunderstandings between first-generation Asian-American parents and those who have been in this country longer are common. What white middle-class parents do not always understand, she said, is how much pressure recent immigrants feel to boost their children into the middle class.

"They don't have the same chances to get their children internships or jobs at law firms," Professor Lee said. "So what they believe is that their children must excel beyond their white peers in academic settings so they have the same chances to excel later."

The issue of the stresses felt by students in elite school districts has gained attention in recent years as schools in places like Newton, Mass., and Palo Alto have reported clusters of suicides. West Windsor-Plainsboro has not had a teenage suicide in recent years, but Dr. Aderhold, who has worked in the district for seven years and been superintendent for the last two and a half, said he had seen troubling signs.

In a recent art assignment, a middle school student depicted an overburdened child who was being berated for earning an A, rather than an A+, on a calculus exam. In the image, the mother scolds the student with the words, "Shame on you!"

Further, Dr. Aderhold said, the New Jersey Education Department has flagged at least two pieces of writing on state English language assessments in which students expressed suicidal thoughts.

The survey commissioned by the district found that 68 percent of high school honor and Advanced Placement students reported feeling stressed about school "always or most of the time."

"We need to bring back some balance," Dr. Aderhold said. "You don't want to wait until it's too late to do something."

Not all public opinion has fallen along racial lines.

Karen Sue, the Chinese-American mother of a fifth grader and an eighth grader, believes the competition within the district has gotten out of control. Ms. Sue, who was born in the United States to immigrant parents, wants her peers to dial it back.

"It's become an arms race, an educational arms race," she said. "We all want our kids to achieve and be successful. The question is, at what cost?"

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New Jersey School District Eases Pressure on Students, Baring an Ethnic Divide

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But instead of bringing families together, Dr. Aderhold's letter revealed a fissure in the district, which has 9,700 students, and one that broke down roughly along racial lines. On one side are white parents like Catherine Foley, a former president of the Parent Teacher Student Association at her daughter's middle school, who has come to see the district's increasingly pressured atmosphere as antithetical to learning.

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Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

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Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.

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Changing the game in youth sports: John O'Sullivan at TEDxBend

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Social and emotional learning: Trish Shaffer at TEDxUniversityofNevada

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Sargent Shriver Speaks in New York About the Role of Peace Corps - 1965

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Sargent Shriver delivers a speech in New York about the role of the Peace Corps in 1965.

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This is a great video by Hockey Canada (Great job guys!) showing how dumb us parents can sound giving our kids instructions while they're playing. USA Hockey is also showing this to all their constituants around the US, but it can be used for all sports to send the same message to parents - let the kids play.

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The power of believing that you can improve

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Carol Dweck researches “growth mindset” — the idea that we can grow our brain’s capacity to learn and to solve problems. In this talk, she describes two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet? A great introduction to this influential field.

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Our whole-brain experience leverages connections throughout Northwestern University and neighboring institutions, bringing together undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Augmenting the analytical core of engineering with design, entrepreneurship, leadership and personal development, and unusual collaborations, our students and faculty are prepared to take the world in a whole new direction.

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Creating art is a very effective way to stimulate the brain and anyone can do it. Learn the many benefits of art and why it's so helpful for mental health.
"Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life." - Pablo Picasso

There are a lot of misconceptions floating around about art.

Some think you have to be creating paintings or sculptures to be considered a real artist.

Others believe that you are either born with talent - or not.

Many are afraid that since they aren't very good at something, there is no point and they won't get any benefit from doing it.

Another myth is that you have to work with an art therapist to get any therapeutic benefit from doing art.

But we are all born with an innate desire to express ourselves and art encompasses a wider range of activities than you may have ever imagined.

Here are some of the best ways creative expression can benefit your brain and mental health to make you a happier, healthier person.

Creating Art Relieves Stress

Activities like painting, sculpting, drawing, and photography are relaxing and rewarding hobbies that can lower your stress levels and leave you feeling mentally clear and calm. ( 1)

Creating art provides a distraction, giving your brain a break from your usual thoughts.

The average person has 60,000 thoughts per day and 95% of them are exactly the same day in, day out! ( 2)

When you get totally immersed in a creative endeavor, you may find yourself in what's known as "the zone" or in a state of "flow."

This meditative-like state focuses your mind and temporarily pushes aside all your worries.

Leonardo da Vinci said, "Painting embraces all the ten functions of the eye; that is to say, darkness, light, body and color, shape and location, distance and closeness, motion and rest."

Creating art trains you to concentrate on details and pay more attention to your environment. In this way, it acts like meditation.

A popular art trend for stress relief is adult coloring books.

This idea was first popularized in France, a country that's number one in per capita consumption of antidepressants, tranquilizers, and sleeping pills. ( 3)

Some coloring books are created with stress relief in mind and have become an acceptable adult form of artistic expression.

Many art therapists are supportive of the movement and would like to see coloring become a gateway to reach those who could benefit from art therapy. ( 4, 5)

So far, this has worked to gently transition veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) into art therapy. ( 6)

Art Encourages Creative Thinking

Dr. Lawrence Katz is an internationally recognized pioneer in neuron regeneration research and author of Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss and Increase Mental Fitness.

He found that mental decline was due mainly to the loss of communication between brain cells, not from the death of brain cells themselves. ( 7)

Dr. Katz coined the phrase "neurobics" to describe brain exercises that use your senses in new and novel ways, and creating art certainly fits this definition.

Art enhances problem-solving skills. ( 8)

Unlike math, there is no one correct answer in art.

Art encourages creative thinking and lets you come up with your own unique solutions.

Out-of-the-box thinking also stimulates your brain to grow new neurons.

Contrary to popular belief, creative thinking does not mean using the right side of your brain.

It involves getting both hemispheres of your brain communicating with each other. ( 9)

The concept of left-brain right-brain dominance never had a strong foundation in science in the first place, and now this theory has been totally debunked.

The most complicated functions humans perform, such as learning a language or playing or listening to music, require whole brain thinking. ( 10, 11)

More on Be Brain Fit:
The Brain Benefits of Learning a Second Language
How Music Affects the Brain for the Better Meditation for Beginners: A Practical Guide for Success

Art Boosts Self-Esteem and Provides a Sense of Accomplishment

You may stick your kids' artwork on the refrigerator door to boost their self-esteem.

Hanging your latest work of art on the wall can instill in you the same feeling.

Creating art increases the "feel good" neurotransmitter dopamine.

Dopamine has been called the "motivation molecule."

It boosts drive, focus, and concentration.

It enables you to plan ahead and resist impulses so you can achieve your goals.

It gives you that "I did it!" lift when you accomplish what you set out to do.

Dopamine stimulates the creation of new neurons and prepares your brain for learning. ( 12)

You don't have to produce fine art.

Crafting hobbies of all kinds - knitting, quilting, sewing, drawing, photography, woodworking, gardening, and do-it-yourself home repair - increase dopamine, ward off depression, and protect the brain from aging. ( 13, 14)

Art Increases Brain Connectivity and Plasticity

Every time you engage in a new or complex activity, your brain creates new connections between brain cells.

Your brain's ability to grow connections and change throughout your lifetime is called brain plasticity or neuroplasticity.

Creating art stimulates communication between various parts of the brain.

In this way, creating art has been proven to increase psychological resilience and resistance to stress. ( 15)

It's thought that intelligence depends more on the number of brain connections than the size of your brain. ( 16)

Art Lessons Make Children Better Students for Life

Educators and parents alike have long suspected that music and arts programs make better students.

Now, with neuroimaging, science can finally back this up.

Children with musical training perform better in math, language, and reading. ( 17, 18)

Early music lessons enhance brain plasticity and increase blood flow to the brain. ( 19, 20)

There's evidence that the brain-enhancing benefits of music lessons received during childhood can follow through adulthood and last a lifetime. ( 21, 22)

The benefits of visual art programs are equally impressive.

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We've looked closely at the market and found a supplement that combines many of the most effective, safe and natural brain enhancers we know.

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Art lessons increase brain plasticity, fluid intelligence, IQ, and attention.

They improve overall behavior and reduce impulsiveness. ( 23)

Unfortunately, budgetary cuts have slashed music and arts programs across the country.

Considering the lifelong benefits of art training, this is a short-sighted policy.

More on Be Brain Fit:
Anti-Stress Coloring Books for Adults: The Latest Way to Relax
Biofeedback: Powerful Mind-Body Healing Technique How Power Naps Boost Mental Performance

Art Increases Empathy, Tolerance, and Feelings of Love

A study of over 10,000 students found that a one-hour trip to an art museum changed the way they thought and felt.

Students who visited a museum not only showed increased critical thinking skills, they also exhibited greater empathy towards how people lived in the past and expressed greater tolerance towards people different than themselves. ( 24)

Professor Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at the University College London, discovered that simply the act of viewing art gives pleasure, much like falling in love.

Brain scans revealed that looking at works of art trigger a surge of dopamine into the same area of the brain that registers romantic love. ( 25)

For most of us, it's not possible to visit an art museum every day, but you can get your daily dose of culture with the Daily Art app.

This app shares an interesting background story on one painting masterpiece each day.

Art Improves Quality of Life for Dementia Patients

Art enhances cognitive abilities and memory, even for people with serious brain disorders.

Dementia is mainly thought of as a memory loss problem, but patients also experience symptoms such as agitation, aggression, anxiety, depression, and insomnia.

Drug treatment for dementia symptoms is generally not very successful.

When dementia patients are encouraged to create visual art, they derive obvious pleasure from it.

It improves their social behavior and self-esteem, and reduces psychiatric symptoms. ( 26)

Dr. Arnold Bresky is a physician who has created a program called the "Brain Tune Up" that utilizes art therapy for Alzheimer's and dementia patients. ( 27)

He has seen a 70% success rate in improvement of his patients' memories.

By drawing and painting, patients are increasing connectivity between the right and left hemispheres of the brain and growing new brain cells.

Art Eases the Burden of Chronic Health Conditions

Millions of people deal with chronic health conditions and the stress, anxiety, and depression that accompanies them.

In The Connection Between Art, Healing, and Public Health: A Review of Current Literature, researchers analyzed and reported on the findings of over 100 studies done on the effects of art on physical and psychological health.

They found that music and visual arts affected patients in these positive ways:

Art let patients forget about their illness for a while, allowing them to focus on positive life experiences.

Creating art enabled them to maintain the identity of who they were before they got sick.

Creative pursuits gave them a sense of achievement.

Art helped them express their feelings.

Art reduced stress by lowering levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Dr. John Graham-Pole is a retired pediatric oncologist who wrote poetry to process some of the grim realities he faced working at a hospital. ( 28)

He developed informal art workshops to help both patients and staff cope better with whatever was happening to them through writing and painting.

He believes that "Art is a social determinant of our health. It doesn't cure a particular disease, but benefits whatever ails you."

More on Be Brain Fit:
The Power of Self-Hypnosis to Improve Your Mind
Guided Imagery: Train Your Mind to Relax and Focus

Art Is for Everyone

Unless you have a health concern, seeing an art therapist is probably not necessary.

ArtTherapyBlog.com puts it like this, "If it's therapeutic for you to draw or paint a few times a week (without an art therapist), then I would consider that therapy. Who says art therapy always has to be professional?"

Creating art isn't just for those born with talent or for those in a position to work with a therapist.

Art is for everyone!

Art Exercises to Do at Home

Albert Einstein said that "Creativity is intelligence having fun."

If it's been a long time since you had fun expressing yourself creatively, you might not know where to begin.

If that's the case, check out this list of 100 Art Therapy Exercises.

You don't have to have any particular artistic skills to get started.

Some of these exercises are craft-like, such as making a dream catcher.

If you are more into "cut and paste" than drawing or painting, there are several ideas for creating collages.

For those who are more analytical, you can start by creating a mindmap to visualize your thoughts or feelings.

If you don't want to share what you are doing with others, use sand, chalk, or water to create temporary art.

Buddhists create intricate sand mandalas, circular designs with concentric shapes, that are intentionally swept or washed away upon completion.

These creations are a meditation on life's impermanence.

Remember as you are creating that using art therapeutically is about the journey - not about the end product.

Creating Art vs Art Therapy

Anyone can benefit from creating art, but sometimes it's best to seek the help of a professional.

Art therapists are health care professionals with backgrounds in both art and psychology or counseling.

They usually have a masters degree and must complete 1,000 supervised hours working with clients.

Art therapy can be used to improve physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

You should consider art therapy if you are experiencing any of these situations: ( 29)

high stress occupation

mental health disorder

learning disability

brain injury

chronic illness

Art therapy is also recommended for children or teens who are having personal problems or trouble in school.

Art used as therapy has successfully helped people with anxiety, depression, addictions, PTSD, chronic pain, cancer, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder, dementia and Alzheimer's, and other serious health and mental health conditions.

The video below, Can Art Be Medicine?, shows some real-life examples of how art is being used as therapy.

Particularly moving is the story of a Marine with PTSD who used art therapy to express his pain in a safe way and help lift the burden in a way that nothing else had been able to do.

Within each of us lies a spark of creativity.

Now that you know all the benefits artistic pursuits can provide, I hope you won't put off exploring your artistic side any longer.

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The Mental Health Benefits of Art Are for Everyone

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Creating art is a very effective way to stimulate the brain and anyone can do it. Learn the many benefits of art and why it's so helpful for mental health. "Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life." - Pablo Picasso There are a lot of misconceptions floating around about art.

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Servant Leadership: Chris Hintz at TEDxYouth@FHS

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Senior Chris Hintz lives by Gandhi's words: "Be the change you want to see in the world." Dedicated to make his mark as a leader, Chris believes that true leadership cannot exclude empathy and service.

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Buncombe County Schools in Asheville, NC, has made social-emotional learning a core priority for long-term district improvement. For years, the district focused on its curricular strategy, teacher development and instructional frameworks, but academic achievement gaps persisted.

With the help of a school counselor grant during the 2014-15 school year, Buncombe County Schools created an emphasis on social-emotional skills. Administrators decided closing the gaps in these skills would be equally important as closing academic skills gaps - in part because improving social-emotional skills would help students access good instruction.

David Thompson, director of student services, said the initiative first focused on elementary schools. A social-emotional learning curriculum, Second Step, creates a backbone for teaching these skills, the Mindful Schools curriculum helps students learn strategies for self-regulation, and the Compassionate Schools framework provides an understanding of the impact of trauma and chronic stress on learning and children's brains.

While evidence-based strategies have been identified at the district level, individual schools are free to choose which ones make most sense for their student populations and school cultures. And all elementary schools use the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment, or DESSA, to measure students' social-emotional competencies as well as the impact of any interventions they implement.

Deborah Luckett, the district's grant coordinator and a licensed school counselor, said DESSA offers an important evaluation tool. All schools screen students in the fall to get a baseline of four social-emotional skill areas - emotional management, problem-solving, empathy and skills for learning - and again in the spring to measure growth. Schools use the fall screener to identify students who need additional supports in certain areas and develop plans for individuals or small groups.

Importantly the assessment identifies strengths as well as weaknesses. Whereas educators may have been likely to focus on deficits and strategies for addressing them, the DESSA specifically draws attention to where a student is strong and how those strengths can be used to make progress.

"It really changes the conversation," Luckett said.

School districts across the country have made new commitments to social-emotional skill-building in recent years as a steady stream of research has connected these skills with academic achievement and better preparation for work and life. The Every Student Succeeds Act, replacing No Child Left Behind, has also opened the door for a greater focus on "whole-child" education, and its new accountability framework gives states the option of considering it in assessments of school quality.

Paul LeBuffe, vice president of research and development for Aperture Education and an author of the DESSA, said the marketplace is filling up with social-emotional curricula and assessments of student skills, which can be good and bad.

He recommends looking for three things when considering social-emotional assessments. They should be:

Rigorous. Assessments should have established reliability and validity for a representative sample of students in U.S. schools.

Reasonable. Both the cost of the assessment and the time commitment necessary for training and implementation should be practical for schools.

Relevant. The assessment should measure things that are in line with the mission of the district and the skills it is trying to foster among its student body.

The DESSA was created based on the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning's widely respected framework. CASEL highlights five core competencies under the umbrella of social-emotional learning - self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills and social awareness. LeBuffe and his team kept those intact and added optimistic thinking as one final dimension.

LeBuffe said the goal of the assessment is to arm educators with actionable information.

"It's not just to get a score that characterizes performance and goes in a report," LeBuffe said. "It's really to lead to a better understanding of the child to guide strategies that can lead to better outcomes."

That's how educators in Buncombe County have used it. And researchers from Western Carolina University studied pre- and post-test scores of students in the district's elementary schools, finding their growth in social-emotional competencies was statistically significant, meaning school interventions contributed to greater growth than might be expected had the district not focused on the skills at all.

One school that has made a particular commitment to social emotional learning, Fairview Elementary, saw fewer discipline referrals and higher-than-average growth on state tests in part because of its interventions, which have made a marked impact on school culture.

Looking ahead, Buncombe County Schools plans to scale up its emphasis on social-emotional learning into the middle and high schools. And it approaches this work with useful hindsight - like how difficult it can be for teachers to wrap their heads around SEL assessments.

"We're great at assessing academics," said Thompson, the student services director. "It was a very new task for them to evaluate behavior."

Slowly but surely, though, teachers are buying into the value of the district's new system, recognizing the benefits they see in their own classrooms. And one day administrators expect it to be embedded in every school.

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North Carolina district commits to social-emotional learning and assessment

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Buncombe County Schools in Asheville, NC, has made social-emotional learning a core priority for long-term district improvement. For years, the district focused on its curricular strategy, teacher development and instructional frameworks, but academic achievement gaps persisted. With the help of a school counselor grant during the 2014-15 school year, Buncombe County Schools created an emphasis on social-emotional skills.

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There's a lot of debate about which form of therapy is the most psychologically effective, the most cost-effective, the quickest working and the longest lasting. They all have their benefits and drawbacks, depending on the individual and the kind of mental health problem he or she is dealing with. A new study reports that an eight-week course of group mindfulness training has a similar efficacy to usual care-in the this case, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), which in recent years has been thought of as the gold standard in psychotherapy for a range of mental health issues. But a key point to keep in mind here is the study was done only over the course of eight weeks, so it's not totally clear-from this study, at least-whether the results would last over the long-term. Luckily, others suggest that they very well may be.

The researchers, who published their work in European Psychiatry, had 215 people who were diagnosed with depression, anxiety and/or stress and adjustment disorders come in to different treatment centers around Sweden. They were randomly assigned to a control group or mindfulness-based group therapy (MGT) for a period of eight weeks. In this particular study, MGT was based on both mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), the program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts' Medical School, and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which itself is a combination of mindfulness training and cognitive therapy. In the control group, participants received "usual care," which typically included talk therapy (in most cases, CBT) and medication.

The participants filled out questionnaires before and after the intervention, which measured symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress and somatization (feeling symptoms in one's body), obsessive-compulsive disorder, interpersonal sensitivity, aggression, phobic anxiety, paranoid thoughts and psychoticism.

At the end of the eight weeks, the participants' symptoms had significantly decreased in both groups-in fact, there was no difference between the two groups, meaning the one treatment was as effective as the other.

"Our new research shows that mindfulness group therapy has the equivalent effect as individual CBT for a wide range of psychiatric symptoms that are common among this patient group," said study author Jan Sundquist in a statement. "We have shown in a previous study that mindfulness group therapy is just as effective as individual CBT for the treatment of typical depression and anxiety symptoms; something we also observed in the new study."

In fact, a number of earlier studies have found that mindfulness training can address a range of mental health issues, from depression to anxiety to intrusive thoughts. And even more studies have shown the efficacy of talk therapy-of many varieties-in treating mental health disorders, even significant ones, and reducing the risk of relapse. And both practices have been shown to help rewire the brain: A study last month, for instance, found that for people with schizophrenia, CBT was linked to fewer psychiatric symptoms down the road, but also to changes in brain connectivity that are themselves linked to better emotional control. Many studies on meditation have found that over time it can alter both the structure and the function of the brain.

The authors point out that one of the greatest benefits coming from the study is the cost issue: Individual treatment is expensive, so the fact that a group-based therapy was so effective is encouraging, especially since mental health care is often cost-prohibitive for many.

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Mindfulness May Rival Talk Therapy For A Variety Of Mental Health Issues

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There's a lot of debate about which form of therapy is the most psychologically effective, the most cost-effective, the quickest working and the longest lasting. They all have their benefits and drawbacks, depending on the individual and the kind of mental health problem he or she is dealing with.