Education Week - July 19, 2017 - 6

Social-Emotional-Learning Researchers Seek Educator Input
Real-world advice
for research agenda
By Evie Blad
In the increasingly popular fields
of student engagement, social-emotional learning, and school climate,
educators and researchers sometimes feel like they are working in
totally different worlds.
While researchers tout longterm studies that show economic
and academic benefits of such efforts, teachers say they sometimes
struggle to apply the findings in
classrooms.
And while many education leaders
and policymakers espouse great enthusiasm for teaching students how
to learn through problems and to resolve conflicts, they sometimes fail
to see the nuance and limitations in
existing research. That means some
who buy in to programs pitched as
silver bullets may end up without
meaningful solutions.
So, when a national organization
set out to craft a research agenda
for what it calls social, emotional,
and academic development of students-which encompasses issues
related to students' mindsets, relationships, and engagement in
the classroom-organizers sought
to build a bridge between the two

worlds, inviting both educators and
scientists to the table to discuss
what excites them, what challenges
them, and what should come next.
"Researchers are often quite removed from the actual [school]
setting," said Michael McGarrah,
a research and policy associate for
the Aspen Institute's National Commission on Social, Emotional, and
Academic Development. "It's difficult unless you're doing the actual
practitioner's work day to day to
have the full insight into all of their
considerations."
While many researchers work
with schools to carry out studies on
specific interventions, they may be
less familiar with how other schools
apply the findings after they are
published, educators say.

Shaping a Research Agenda
The national commission, made up
of current and former leaders from
the worlds of education, policy, government, and business, has an ambitious
agenda to try to define commonalities
in the emerging and overlapping fields
of social-emotional learning, deeper
learning, mindsets, and student engagement.
Among the commission's projects
is the research agenda, which organizers hope will aid academics and
philanthropic organizations as they
find new directions for the work.

The commission convened a panel
of scientists who study such issues
as engagement, social-emotional development, student attendance, and
economics to help draft research recommendations. To ensure that their
thinking incorporates classroom-level
concerns, the scientists reached out to
the commission's panel of educators

"

It's difficult to
maintain focus on the
not-sexy things that
really move the needle
around achievement."
DAVID ADAMS
Director of Social-Emotional Learning
Urban Assembly Schools

who are interested in incorporating a
more "whole child" approach into their
work.
They started small: Over the course
of a few weeks, educators and scientists broke up into six pairs and spent
an hour on the phone with each other,
answering questions and identifying
challenges in their work.
For example, Marc Brackett, the di-

rector of the Yale Center for Emotional
Intelligence, called Josh Garcia, the
deputy superintendent of the Tacoma,
Wash., schools, who has led the effort
in his district to incorporate nonacademic factors into its accountability
system.
Robert Balfanz, a research professor at Johns Hopkins University
and the director of the Everyone
Graduates Center, spoke with David
Adams, the director of social-emotional learning at Urban Assembly,
a network of public schools in New
York City.
Recognizing the interest in their
work, scientists in these fields are
increasingly taking on more public
roles to share and explain their insights and concerns, but the phone
calls organized by the commission
allowed for more personal conversations. The pairs tackled topics ranging from how to ensure that socialemotional learning isn't seen as just
a "fad," how to communicate its importance to families and community
members, and how schools should
measure the results of their work
in a way that is accurate, consistent,
and useful for teachers.
Researchers have cautioned educators not to lean on using measures of
students' social and emotional skills
for high-stakes purposes like placement, teacher evaluation, and accountability. They say such measures
are still being refined so they won't be

prone to bias and inaccurate or inconsistent results.
But some ability to observe, document, and track results would help
teachers as they implement new programs in fields that are still developing, Adams said.

Not Another Trendy Program
Some of his schools track and report
teachers' observations of students'
relationships and behaviors. While
researchers often explore large population changes over time, educators
need tools to track smaller changes
within a school year so they can see if
they are affecting students in positive
ways, Adams said.
That might help convince educators that social-emotional learning
and student-engagement work aren't
trendy programs that are quickly adopted and discarded, he said.
"Every three to five years, there's
a new shift in education that really
grabs the attention," Adams told Balfanz. "It's difficult to maintain focus on
the not-sexy things that really move
the needle around achievement."
Other conversations focused on
the tendency among researchers to
home in on very narrow ideas, such
as empathy, persistence, or learning through failure. It's difficult
for educators to navigate all that
research and chart a path for their
own schools and classrooms, participants said.
In her call, Mary Helen ImmordinoYang, an associate professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at
the University of Southern California, said social-emotional-learning
research also needs to be sensitive
to cultural, developmental, and geographic contexts.
"Even when there are things that
seem to be working really great,
we can't just copy them," she said.
Rather, researchers need to help
educators devise larger strategies for
creating their own approaches that
work with their students and schools,
she said.
The panel of scientists will continue
to meet, using their conversations
with educators as they make recommendations for the commission about
exactly what questions they should
be asking in the future.
Decades of research have shown
that students' emotional and social
development is tied to their success
in the classroom, McGarrah said,
and there is building enthusiasm
for social-emotional learning. The
commission, he said, hopes a research agenda will help build on
that momentum.
"There's a lot of confidence about
where we stand," McGarrah said,
"but saying where we need to go is a
tall order."
Coverage of social and emotional
learning is supported in part by a grant
from the NoVo Foundation, at www.
novofoundation.org. Education Week
retains sole editorial control over the
content of this coverage.
Visit the RULES FOR ENGAGEMENT
blog, which tracks news and trends on
this issue. www.edweek.org/blogs

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