Hank visits his mom’s classroom once a week, sparking joyful giggles, inhaling errant crumbs and providing reassurance when a classmate struggles. The 2-year-old English chocolate labrador is a certified therapy dog who’s become a mainstay for a room full of second graders during a tumultuous year. “When Hank is at school, the mood shifts,” said Amy Lounsbery, Hank’s human mom and a second grade teacher at Rose Union Elementary School in the Deer Creek School District. “The kids are calmer and he provides them confidence and connection.” This year marks Lounsbery’s twentieth in the education industry, and she has been incorporating daily social emotional learning in her classroom for years. This is Hank’s first year to help with animal assisted therapy, and Rose Union Elementary has adopted incorporating morning circles in all classrooms this year as well, with team leads piloting social emotional curriculum. “Social emotional learning improves [student] achievement by an average of 11 percent,” said Lounsbery of the research by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) that first motivated her to prioritize teaching social and emotional skills in her classroom. “It increases social behaviors like kindness, empathy and sharing, improves students’ attitudes toward school and reduces their stress responses.” Lounsbery adds when students get comfortable, they can take risks, and new skills or concepts aren’t often conquered without first a willingness to try. While the concept of social emotional learning is not new, and having a classroom therapy dog is icing on the proverbial cake, the pandemic has brought to light what many in the mental health and education industries have been shouting from the rooftops for years: children must first feel safe, secure and connected before they can successfully learn academia, and building social emotional skills endures beyond the classroom. “If we can instill lifelong skills that create kinder, more empathetic people, that will take us so much farther than any academic skills,” said Sarah Kirk, school counselor specialist for the Oklahoma State Department of Education.
What is social emotional learning? Social emotional learning (SEL) involves developing healthy identities, learning to manage emotions, goal setting, feeling and demonstrating empathy, developing relationships and responsible decision making, all imperative soft skills needed for human development and eventual success in the workforce. “Empathy should be a subject in school, just like writing, math and science,” said Lounsbery. A 20-year study in the American Journal of Public Health by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reports that kindergartners who are more inclined to share, cooperate and help are more likely to succeed in higher education and their careers. For every point higher the kindergarteners scored in social competence traits, they were 54 percent more likely to graduate high school, twice as likely to earn a college degree in early adulthood and 46 percent more likely to have a full-time job by age 25. When students feel they belong, that quantifiably increases their levels of hope, which has a direct impact on academic achievement, attendance and behavior, according to Beth Whittle, executive director of counseling for OSDE. Just as kids aren’t born knowing how to solve a word problem, they don’t inherently have social emotional skills. When OSDE has received pushback on the value of SEL, with naysayers in favor of a pick-yourself- up-by-your-bootstaps methodology, Whittle is quick to explain it doesn’t work that way: “A kid can’t do that if they haven’t been taught skills to be resilient.” Kirk adds for SEL to be truly effective, the practices must be embraced and employed by an entire school and encompass how all parties in the school talk to and treat one another. “We’re not doing SEL if we’ve checked things off a list or read a story about feelings,” said Kirk. “To be effective, it has to be done with fidelity. Lots of schools say ‘we’ve done SEL’ but then a student gets in trouble and the principal isn’t talking to the child through an SEL trauma-informed lens.”
METROFAMILYMAGAZINE.COM / MAR-APR 2021 29
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