Archive for the ‘Social and emotional learning’ Category
Friday, November 21st, 2008 |
I found an intriguing answer to this question when I made a recent visit to the picturesque seaside city of San Sebastian, capital of Gipuskoako, one of three provinces that make up the Basque area of Spain. San Sebastian also happens to be a world-class center for the development of social and emotional intelligence, due to an ambitious initiative to upgrade these human aptitudes not just in schools, but also in families, communities, and businesses.
Thirty to forty percent of schools there have curricula in social/emotional learning, and more are being phased in. There are emotional intelligence programs for parents and families, even communities. And businesses in the region are incorporating emotional intelligence into their leadership training.
All this has come about largely through the efforts of a visionary leader, Jose Ramon Guridi Urrejola, the Minister for Technology and Innovation of the province. At his behest local scholars, educators, business people and community organizers are setting out to create a socially and emotionally intelligent society. I was impressed by the progress they are making.
The scope of this initiative can be seen in a series of publications issued by the Ministry:
- “Emociones y trabajo,” which focuses on emotional intelligence and work, and in organizations
- “Necesidades socio-emocionales en contextos socio-comunitarios,” which asseses the social and emotional needs of communities and society
- “Emociones y educacion,” fostering social/emotional learning for children in schools, and for family life.
(For those who read Spanish, the books are available at www.igipuzkoa.net.)
When I met Mr. Guridi, he told me that his inspiration had been a question I ask in my book Emotional Intelligence: If emotional literacy is so crucial for a child’s success in life, then why don’t we teach it to every child?
And so Mr. Guridi has followed this insight far beyond my own imagination.
I wonder if there are other parts of the world where similar efforts are underway – if you are aware of any, please let me know, at contact@danielgoleman.info.
Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social and emotional learning | 12 Comments »
Friday, May 30th, 2008 |
The scene: a first-grade classroom in a Manhattan school. Not just any classroom, this one has lots of Special Ed students, who are very hyperactive. So the room is whirlpool of activity, some a bit frenzied. The teacher tells the kids that they’re going to listen to a CD. The kids quiet down a bit. Then they get pretty still as the CD starts, and a man’s voice tells them to listen to some sounds.
The voice asks them not to say the name of what they hear out loud, but just to themselves. But as they listen to the sounds, they don’t just lie there quietly, like other kids. These hyperactive kids listen with their whole body: when there’s the cry of a bird, they move their arms like a bird. But through it all they manage to calm down and stay focused through the entire six minutes.
The voice on the CD is mine, though the words are those of Linda Lantieri, an old friend and colleague. Linda has pioneered programs in social and emotional learning in the New York City public schools that have been adopted worldwide. Her newest program adds mindfulness for kids to the emotional intelligence tool kit, in one version to enhance focusing and attention, in another to help kids learn to calm themselves better. Linda’s book and CD Building Emotional Intelligence has instructions adapted to kids’ ages – one for five to seven, another eight to eleven, then 12 and up. And she explains how teachers or parents can best introduce these to kids.
Linda’s CD exemplifies the ways we can take advantage of neuroplasticity to help children master the abilities that are crucial for emotional intelligence. As Richard Davidson, founder of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin explained in a conversation we had, the kind of training Linda offers kids strengthens their neural circuitry for self-awareness, self-mastery, and empathy (to hear Davidson’s explanation, listen to the CD Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Skills).
(more…)
Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social and emotional learning | 6 Comments »
Monday, March 24th, 2008 |
The sub-title of my 1995 book Emotional Intelligence reads, “Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.” That subtitle, unfortunately, has led to misinterpretations of what I actually say – or at least it seems to among people who read no further than the subtitle. I’m appalled at how many people misread my work and make the preposterous claim, for instance, that “EQ accounts for 80 percent of success.”
I was reminded of this again when browsing comments on a journal article that fails to find much of a correlation between teenagers’ level of emotional intelligence and their academic accomplishments (Australian Journal of Psychology, May 2008). For me, there’s no surprise here. But for those misguided people who think I claim emotional intelligence matters more than IQ for academic achievement, it would be a “Gotcha!” moment.
But I never made that claim – it’s absurd. My argument is that emotional and social skills give people advantages in realms where such abilities make the most difference, like love and leadership. EI trumps IQ in “soft” domains, where intellect matters relatively little for success. That said, another such arena where EI matters more than IQ is in performance at work, when comparing people with roughly the same educational backgrounds (like MBAs or accountants) – which is exactly what goes on in human resource departments of companies every day.
As I’ve explained elsewhere on this website:
My belief is that if a longitudinal study were done, IQ would be a much stronger predictor than EI of which jobs or professions people can enter. Because IQ stands as a proxy for the cognitive complexity a person can process, it should predict what technical expertise that person can master. Technical expertise, in turn, represents the major set of threshold competencies that determine whether a person can get and keep a job in a given field. IQ, then, plays a sorting function in determining what jobs people can hold. However, having enough cognitive intelligence to hold a given job does not by itself predict whether one will be a star performer or rise to management or leadership positions in one’s field.
IQ washes out when it comes to predicting who, among a talented pool of candidates within an intellectually demanding profession will become the strongest leader. In part this is because of the floor effect: everyone at the top echelons of a given profession, or at the top levels of a large organization, has already been sifted for intellect and expertise. At those lofty levels a high IQ becomes a threshold ability, one needed just to get into and stay in the game.
The one place I expect we will be seeing more data showing a relationship between skills in the emotional and social arena and school performance will be in studies of children who have gone through social/emotional learning (SEL) programs. These curricula give students the self-management skills they need to learn better. And so to the extent that advantage boosts learning (as opposed to IQ, which differs from learning), they should do better on academic achievement scores.
A forthcoming study from the University of Illinois finds around a 10 percent boost in achievement test scores among these students. Presumably, the SEL programs would also have meant higher scores on the particular assessment of EI used in the Australian study – and so had they tested such children, there may well have been a positive correlation.
So learning seems to be another domain where EI may matter – whether more than IQ is an empirical question.
Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social and emotional learning | 15 Comments »
Friday, February 15th, 2008 |
Here’s a sneak preview of some headlines that you’ll see in the next few months: teaching kids to be more emotionally and socially competent boosts their academic achievement. More precisely, when schools offer students programs in social and emotional learning, their achievement scores gain around 11 percentile points.
In the era of No Child Left Behind, where schools are rated on how well their students score on these tests, that’s a huge advantage for individual students and schools alike. And the gains are biggest in “at risk” kids, the bottom ten percent who are most likely to fail in their education.
That’s what the lead story in Education Week for December 19, 2007, [http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2007/12/19/index.html]
tells us – and what I heard at a recent forum held in New York City by the Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning. Roger Weissberg, the outfit’s director, gave a preview of a massive study he’s just completed, based on an analysis of evaluations done on more than 233,000 students across the country. Social/emotional learning (SEL), in short, helps students in every way.
That meta-analysis revealed that students improved on every measure of positive behavior, like classroom discipline, liking school, and attendance – and went down on rates for every anti-social index, from bullying and fights to suspensions and substance abuse. What’s more, there was a drop in numbers of students who were depressed, anxious, and alienated. And all these gains were in as impressive a range as those for academic achievement.
While at the Forum I had the pleasure of once again interviewing George Lucas, whose main philanthropic efforts focus on schools through the George Lucas Educational Foundation. George’s vision for the future of education sees SEL as vital to a world where technology will be so much more pervasive; as computers take over teaching raw knowledge to kids, they will have more time to help students with motivation, cooperation, and other elements of emotional intelligence. George and I (who come from neighboring towns in California’s Central Valley), have explored the ways schooling will morph in the future, and the key role SEL will play in the classroom, in an audio CD.
Teaching students skills like self-awareness, managing distressing emotions and empathy makes them better learners, as Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, explained at the forum. He pointed to data showing that when the brain’s centers for distress are activated, they impair the functioning of the prefrontal areas for memory, attention and learning (a point I made in Chapter 19 of Social Intelligence). Social and emotional learning makes great sense, Davidson argues, because of neuroplasticity – the fact that repeated experiences shape the brain. The more a child practices self-discipline, empathy and cooperation, the stronger the underlying circuits become for these essential life skills.
Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social and emotional learning | 4 Comments »
Monday, December 3rd, 2007 |
George Lucas and Daniel Goleman discuss the many ways that social and emotional learning enhance the education process. Read the interview at edutopia.org: http://www.edutopia.org/lucas-goleman-social-emotional-learning
Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social and emotional learning, Social intelligence | 4 Comments »
Friday, August 24th, 2007 |
The “marshmallow test” became one of the best-known of all the scientific studies I wrote about in Emotional Intelligence; it was featured on 20/20, Oprah, and the Lehrer Report, as well as Time magazine. In this experiment four-year-olds from the Stanford University pre-school were brought to a room and sat in a chair in front of a juicy marshmallow on a table. The experimenter then told them they could eat it now, or get two if they were willing to wait until the experimenter came back from running an errand.
Now we have a better idea of exactly what part of those four-year-old brains was at work in resisting temptation or giving in. An article published August 22 in the Journal of Neuroscience [Marcel Brass at al., vol 27: pp 9141-9145] has pinpointed the brain area responsible for such feats of self-control. Whenever we get an impulse to do something, but then don’t act on it, we can thank – the dorsal fronto-median cortex — an area just above and between the eyes.
A failure in this circuitry may be at play, the researchers suspect, in disorders ranging from attention deficit to addictions. In the marshmallow test, impulse control turned out to predict how well those kids were doing 14 years later, as they were graduating high school. Those who waited, compared to those who grabbed, were more popular with their peers, had less trouble delaying gratification, and scored far higher on achievement tests.
These prefrontal circuits are among the last part of the brain to become anatomically mature; much of the increasing self-control that mark a child’s maturation over the years are the external signs that these circuits are developing as they should.
For instance, the “Terrible Twos” refers to the daily child-parent drama of impulse and its control which no doubt revolves around this circuitry. As a toddler lunges for the fragile lamp, dog’s food, paring knife — you name it – a parent’s firm “No” stands in for a fully functioning dorsal fronto-median cortex. As that circuitry matures, the “no” becomes internalized, a basis for free will, some say – or, more specifically, “free won’t,” the capacity to squelch an impulse.
By their very nature impulses come unexpectedly and unbidden, from the mind’s unconscious. But once they come, we have choice: to act on the impulse or not. The capacity to “just say no” to dangerous impulses is one mark of emotional intelligence. That’s the point of the Stoplight” in school lessons in social/emotional learning, where posters on school room walls remind kids, that when they get upset, they should remember:
- Red light – stop, calm down, and think before you act.
- Yellow light – think of a range of things you should do (not just your first impulse)
- Green light – pick the best one and try it out.
Or, as the emotions expert Paul Ekman put it when I taped a conversation with him recently [www.morethansound.net], one of the key goals of psychotherapy is to “increase the gap between impulse and action.” It’s in that gap that our free won’t keeps us out of trouble.
Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social and emotional learning | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 |
Two companies had formed a joint venture to develop a new telecommunications product. Engineers in both companies were hard at work, but the project itself was stalled. The reason? A consultant we know diagnosed the problem this way: “Engineers on each side never saw each other,” he told us, let alone coordinated their work on the project. “The two sides just e-mailed their irritations to each other. They were having a flame war.”
Flaming, of course, refers to an e-mail message that comes across as rude or otherwise annoying, and a flame war happens when the recipient of such a message flames back, leading to an arms race of insult. Flaming is but one of numerous ways a lack of social intelligence can sabotage the use of technology, especially when it comes to working with others together online. Any IT manager takes a risk that a group’s efforts will falter if he ignores the psychological dimension of social computing.
Read more at CIO.com
Posted in Social and emotional learning | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 |
In a high school English class the day’s topic was how to use commas, and the teacher was trying his best to hold his students’ attention. One student, Jessie, responded this way: she slipped her hand into her bag and discretely pulled out a catalog for a clothing store. In a sense, it was as though she had left one store in a mall for another. Students these days bring something like a consumer mentality to school; if they don’t find class intriguing or exciting, they tune out.
Today’s students are a tough audience. Increasingly, they seem to require added help getting engaged in learning, in part because they have become constant consumers of entertainment and sensation, always searching for new thrills. They carry music and games with them wherever they go, electronic aids to excite and please the brain. They look to the world around them to enchant and engross them. So when they walk into a classroom, there can be an inevitable let-down, if only by comparison to frenzy of the iPod or Gameboy they’ve just put away.
A massive study of American high schools typified the typical classroom as having a “flat, neutral emotional ambience,” one where “boredom is a disease of epidemic proportion .” And when teenagers were asked to name the things they hate about school, Number One on the list is “My classes are so boring.”
A study that had students report how they felt at random moments throughout their day found that if they happened to be in class, they reported feeling sad, irritable, or bored, having difficulty concentrating, and strongly wishing they were doing something else – in short, they were not nearly so happy or attentive as during most other activities of their day. More to the point, the study concluded that even though they are sitting through school classes these students “are probably absorbing only a fraction of the information being presented.”
As another observer with a worldwide perspective put it, “Global teens have a very low threshold for boredom,” adding, “Do not bore this generation or it will abandon you .” While that bit of advice was aimed at marketers, educators would do will to heed those words. Students are used to making choices about how they allocate their attention, and the alternatives to what’s going on in class are many and seductive. The impediment to learning, then, has less to do with a student’s inability to learn than with his wishing to.
This does not mean, of course, that classroom time must be filled with the pedagogic equivalent of video games; the point is not merely to convert education into yet another form of entertainment. But educators would do well to adopt more skilful ways to capture students’ attention. At their best, such moments of learning are inspired, with students glued to the lesson, entranced. (I’ve detailed this “sweet spot” for learning and performance in Chapter 19 of Social Intelligence.)
Sam Intrator, an educator, spend a year observing classroom sessions. Whenever he felt the stirrings of such an electric moment, soon afterward he would signal the teacher to pass out index cards to the students, on which they would describe what they were thinking and feeling. If more than half the students reported a state of total involvement in what was being taught, he would rate the moment “inspired.” Out of the 128 classes he witnessed, he captured 22 such episodes of inspired learning, a rate of about 18 percent (and no doubt higher if the count included such moments for individual students, not just for the majority in a class).
As he describes in his book How Teaching Can Inspire Real Learning in the Classroom, from in-depth follow-up interviews with students, Intrator was able to pinpoint the active ingredients that made a given classroom session so engrossing — a potent combination of full attention, sustained focus and emotional intensity. This list matches crucial ingredients of the neural state people experience at times they perform or learn at their best. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls this the state for “optimal cognitive efficiency” – and ideally, it would be the state students are in most of the time in class.
Posted in Social and emotional learning | No Comments »
Sunday, February 25th, 2007 |
When I was a youngster, I was the only kid I knew who had two parents who worked. It was the 50s, when the mode was for dads to work and moms to stay home. These days it’s hard to find families where both parents do not need to hold jobs.
As a result, couples with infants and toddlers face the tough task of finding quality day care. Some studies have shown that two ingredients of better day care are having workers who are well-trained, and a lower ratio of children to workers.
Now Sir Richard Bowlby, the son of the famous British child development theorist John Bowlby, adds a third ingredient: having someone at day care with whom your child can form a nurturing emotional bond.
Sir Richard emailed me after reading Social Intelligence to say, “Babies and toddlers in daycare avoid chronic separation anxiety if they can develop an emotional bond with one carer.”
Here he follows up on the work of his father which shows that especially during the first two-and-a-half years of life an empathic, responsive caretaker helps a child develop a basic sense of security in the world, one that becomes a basis of healthy relationships lifelong. I explored this idea – and updated it in terms of new neuroscience evidence – in Chapter Eleven of Social Intelligence.
Sir Richard, president of the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, advocates a program called “Sure Start,” which seeks to find ways that babies and toddlers can form an emotional bond to their caretakers. One, “childminder,” is a small day care setting in which a nurturing worker takes care of three children, including no more than one baby under one year – thus enabling all the kids to have a familylike bond. The other, a day nursery, puts kids in groups of similar ages, with up to three babies or toddlers under two per carer. The idea is to have a consistent relationship with the caretaker, the same “key-person” with whom children can form a stable attachment during the part of the day they are away from their parents.
To be sure, all too many working parents do not have the luxury of shopping around to find the “just perfect” day care for their kids. But for those with choices, these are good guidelines to keep in mind. And for the rest, we should be subsidizing day care so that every child can have the best arrangements, for their own well-being and for the good of society as a whole.
Sir Richard is at Richard.bowlby@freeuk.com; his paper is available here.
Posted in Social and emotional learning | No Comments »
Friday, February 16th, 2007 |
“The most important thing you can learn in this era of heightened global competition,” writes Thomas Friedman, author of the The World is Flat and an expert on globalization, “is how to learn.”
Being good at learning, Bill Brody, president of Johns Hopkins University tells me, is sure to be an enormous asset in this age of incessant change and innovation, and an era when jobs will become outmoded and new jobs invented more quickly than ever.
But how do you learn to learn? Friedman remembers his own favorite teachers. No matter the subject, they excited him about learning itself. In fact, he has long forgotten exactly what they taught him – but he remembers being excited about learning whatever it was. His point: “To learn how to learn, you have to love learning.”
That’s the key: how a teacher can help students learn to love learning – or, more generally, how one person can help another excel at whatever they do.
One way is by providing what the psychoanalyst John Bowlby called a “safe haven,” a psychological enclave within a relationship where they can recharge and feel secure. By providing a safe haven, we encourage another to go out into the world in some way, to explore widely, to master something new, to achieve a major life goal. And we complement that encouragement with patience, simply waiting with the faith that he or she has the competence to do well – whether in taking a tough exam, preparing a report for work, or finishing school in a distant city. We give them our vote of confidence that they can succeed, and stand back to let them. We remain ready to help (though only when clearly necessary), offering encouragement and, if needed, comfort and reassurance. By taking care of someone else in these ways we offer a secure base from which they can grow and develop themselves – or just go out for another day taking on a cold, indifferent world.
Posted in Social and emotional learning | 1 Comment »
Welcome to the website and blog of psychologist Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., author of the New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.