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CALGARY AFTERSCHOOL

Posted by Ben Capitano

"Great stuff! I think this is an excellent bridge-in for our courses for Calgary AfterSchool."
        - Calgary Fire Department

Running time: 6:05

Script:

Narrator:

Remember grade school? What did they teach you? Language skills? First the alphabet, then words, sentences, novels, and plays? How about Math skills? First numbers, then adding, subtracting, multiplication, then division, then algebra.

And why were they teaching you reading, writing, and arithmetic? Isn't it to make you a better , productive member of society? But stop and think about what make someone a productive member of society. Is it just an ability to read, write and do math? What has made you successful? What helped you get your job? How about knowing your strengths and limitations?

How important was it that you are able to see other people's point of view? How about taking responsibility and making critical decisions? What about persistence? How important was it that you never gave up? That you continued to push yourself forward, despite setbacks and other obstacles? And then of course, there's getting along with others. Has it mattered that bosses and coworkers actually liked you, and wanted you around?

How important are these thing for where you are in life now, and where you want to go? Now, looking back, could you have learned all that school stuff, the language skills, math skills, thinking stuff, without also learning how to listen to your teacher? How to persist? Developing a sense of identity and confidence? Learning on how to make responsible decisions. Learning how to get along with your classmates and how to hear other perspectives.

We know you can teach skills like language and math in step- by- step sequence lessons. We have a whole education system based on that concept. But can you teach social and emotional skills with the same methodology? The evidence has been building for the past five decades is "Yes." These social and emotional skills can be learned the same way the academic skills are learned. Like reading, writing, and arithmetic. This course will introduce you to the concepts of social and emotional learning. So youth self awareness and social awareness, getting along with others, sounds like ideas form the 60's created by hippies. Well the sort of were, but these ideas really go alot further than that.

Ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates believed that to know yourself was the start of being truly educated. Aristotle said that educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. But if you thought that the 1960's were when some social and emotional learning found their roots, you'd be right. In the late 50's and 60's was a research service that later became known as the Search Institute. It brought together social science research on the healthy development of youth and published books with titles like, "What Youth are Thinking," very 60's. By 1990, the Search Institute produced the 40 developmental assets, which listed the experiences, relationships, opportunities, and personal qualities young people need in order to develop into healthy, caring, and responsible individuals.

These concepts spread through the youth education and development field, influencing the design of learning for youth, formed communities to be inclusive of young people, and the way we created programs to support and engage youth. Another influential program was Comer School development program, piloted by the Yale school of medicine in 1968.

This program focused on two schools in New Haven, CN, the consistently has the lowest attendance and lowest achievement records. By the 1980's, the academic performance of these school exceeded the national average. While truancy and behavioral problems had a sharp decline. As a result, New Haven became the center of research on a concept that is now refereed to as SEL (social and emotional learning).

At the same time another group of social researchers began to compile lists of skills deemed necessary for social and emotional compotance to occur. In the 1990's this group became known as CASEL, and were working on a variety of projects aimed at promoting healthy choices and school community connections. Their list soon became the Five Core Competencies: Self Awareness, Self Management, Solcial Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision Making, that can be found anywhere SEL inspired programs are created.

In the mid- 90's a New York Times science reporter, Daniel Goldman, introduced the world to the concept of emotional intelligence, or EQ. His book sold millions worldwide, the concept of SEL was picked up by community movements across the US and Canada. By the 2000's, Unesco Began a worldwide initiative to promote SEL. As we move towards the start of the 21st Century, we got busy sticking kids heads into MRI machines, and got a first hand look at what's going on in their brains.

And we discovered that social and emotional experiences are powerful factors in how our brains get wired. The adolescent brain is busy being written and rewritten at an incredible rate since babyhood. And I just so happens that social and emotional experiences are critical to how well it turns out. One are a of research that has taken off is that of resiliency, what helps us to cope with stress, changes and the challenges of life. And here again the research shows how social and emotional experiences help in many of life's aspects. Like school, relationships, parenting, and careers.

Today we are seeing many high profile bullying instances that have lead to anti-bullying programs that make use of SEL concepts. But SEL isn't about avoiding social behavior, it's about building young people's skills, so they have the emotional skills, and relationship and social skills needed to thrive. Who knows what's next? Youth are always connected to media on social devices. This virtual world creates all sorts of opportunities for new forms of social connectivity.

But it also brings new problems, like cyber bullying and the loss of face to face action. We don't yet know what the long term impacts will be. The world of work is also changing. Will the children and youth of today have the resiliency to cope with these changes? And will they have the social skills key to their employment ability and in life? One thing is certain, social and emotional learning is critical for children, in order for youth to thrive, now and in the future.