Social-Emotional Learning

      Have you ever had one of those moments when you were so upset that you couldn’t
think straight? Or conversely, felt as though you were at the top of your mental acuity as
you experienced what Csikszentmihalyi calls Flow? Children in school have both of these
experiences, and the responsibility to minimize the former and maximize the latter is
something that the faculty members at Whiteman Primary take very seriously. Social
emotional learning is as much a part of the school day as is academic learning. Children
learn in a social environment at school and at home, so providing them with a warm and
supportive environment is key to facilitating their attainment of academic excellence.
     Each student at LWPS begins his or her day with an opportunity to connect with
peers in a safe environment created and monitored by faculty. We call that opportunity,
“Morning Meeting.” Here a child’s first contact with the school day is positive, so that even
if the child arrives after a rough morning, there is an opportunity to center, focus, and relax
into the academic day. Throughout the day, students and teachers greet each other by name
and with smiles (and sometimes hugs), providing each child with the feeling of being cared
for and the opportunity to demonstrate his/her care for others. The warmth and support that
are a part of this positive educational environment help each student remain in a state of
mind that is optimal for learning.
     Providing a properly compassionate environment for learning is one aspect of
helping children attain social emotional literacy, but there is another aspect that is a part of
each Whiteman Primary student’s day. During Morning Meeting and throughout the day,
faculty actively teach and model empathy, self-control, proper emotional expression,
understanding of social cues, conflict resolution and problem solving, cooperative behavior,
planning skills, and intellectual flexibility.
     In the past, we may have had an intuitive sense that these things were important to
our children in school, but in recent years we have accumulated a wealth of neurological and
psychological research results supporting the interrelatedness of social emotional and
academic learning. Over 200 scholarly studies since 1990 have produced a preponderance of
data indicating that the sort of purposefully child-centered environment that exists at
Whiteman Primary, combined with a program such as our Morning Meeting which is
designed to enhance students’ social emotional literacy, has the effect of increasing
academic performance and attitudes while decreasing behavior problems and emotional
distress. If you are interested in finding out more about the research in this area, the Society
for Research in Child Development webpage is a good place to start (http://www.srcd.org/).
In the meantime, I invite you to experience the supportive educational and emotional
environment at LWPS first-hand.