WHOLE CHILD “Schools must be concerned with the total development of children.” —Dr. Nell Noddings, professor emerita, Stanford University
KEY FINDINGS
> > Clearly, we’re experiencing a much-needed shift from a single focus on standards and skills to a broader perspective that centers on the whole child and social- emotional well-being, honors cultural and linguistic diversity, and recognizes the need for school connectedness and family and community engagement. > > The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires that states report at least one new measure of student progress, beyond the traditional academic ones— drawing from “social-emotional” or “noncognitive” skills such as persistence, creativity, self-control, kindness, respect, and tolerance—that manifest in multiple ways throughout our lives. > > Social-emotional traits and abilities 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” (Garcia and Weiss, 2016). > > Much of the recent social-emotional learning (SEL) interest can be linked to two seminal studies. In 2011, a meta-analysis published in the journal Child Development showed an 11-percentile gain in academic achievement for students who participated in a well-implemented SEL program versus students who didn’t (Durkak et al., 2011). > > In 2015, the economist Clive Belfield and colleagues at Teachers College, Columbia University, published a study in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis that demonstrated a roughly $11 benefit for every $1 spent on a rigorous SEL program. Just about every way to measure student success shows that SEL can work. At one high school in Texas, discipline referral rates have been cut in half, and graduation rates are at an all-time high.
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CHAPTER 3: EQUITY
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