Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Social and Emotional Learning
Share:
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Ben Slavic
Get The Latest Updates
Subscribe to Our Mailing List
No spam, notifications only about new products, updates.
Related Posts
CI and the Research (cont.)
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Research Question
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
We Have the Research
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
2 thoughts on “Social and Emotional Learning”
While I believe wholeheartedly in the importance of social-emotional learning in schools, I have huge reservations about SEL.
They LOVE project learning. Good luck. There are certainly aspects of this that make sense, especially on an institutional level (advisory groups, conferencing, teacher teams which spend time regularly discussing students’ socio-emotional and academic learning, multi-year teacher/student relationships, responsibility to group, etc.–nothing that earth shaking and, in my opinion not extremely effective depending on your staff). BUT, make no mistake; the project learning template piece is very KEY to SEL. Once again, programs like this only work with incredible buy in from all staff–certainly a problem at the school I worked at where we heard about this and tried to implement it ad nauseum.
To me, it is always easy to match up good CI instruction to these kinds of things: up to a point. However, when they see how “teacher centered” (CI delivery) the instruction is, how the kids do NOT work in small groups to grapple with “a problem” and solve it together, how the kids don’t spend time creating projects for presentation (what they call authentic assessment) in small groups, our kind of instruction fails to impress. They don’t get it and won’t get it.
Thank you for the caveat, Jody. I have noticed this too, having just attended an official (that is, ASCD-sponsored) workshop on official differentiated instruction. It is all about group work, etc. But when I spoke privately with the representative/instructor about what I was doing, she was very supportive. I think the more thoughtful educators are able to see that what we do is inherently differentiated, but they have to be down with the notion that language learning is not problem solving. I will also use those kinds of workshops to feature my culture units, which are in English, but occupy an integral role in my Latin curriculum. Or perhaps I can demonstrate Ben’s word chunking activity. So I think there are ways around the limitations, namely by showing that we do this kind of thing part of the time, but not all the time.