February 2004

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In This Issue: Special Feature—An Interview with Youth Development Expert Bonnie Benard

  • Spotlight on Research: Sex, drugs, and delinquency in urban and suburban public schools; Emotional intelligence: warding off risk factors for smoking; Ninth grade: the pivotal year.

  • Spotlight on Practice: Making classroom instruction meaningful; Teachers an important factor in race relations; Two new guides on funding, implementing, and evaluating SEL in schools.

From the Executive Director’s Desk: Interactions with Colleagues

In this issue we’re introducing a new feature: an interview focusing on an important new book we believe will be of interest to all our readers and colleagues. This interview is a first for CASEL Connections. We’re eager to try new ways of communicating about social and emotional learning in this newsletter, and the interview is a special opportunity to do one of the things CASEL does best—encourage collaboration with colleagues who are leaders in the field. We’re excited about Bonnie Benard’s new book, and we think you will be, too.

—Roger P. Weissberg, Ph.D.

 

Special Feature: An Interview with Bonnie Benard—Translating Resiliency Theory into Action for Schools

For more than 20 years, Bonnie Benard has brought the concept of resilience to the attention of a wide audience of educators and specialists in prevention and youth development. She has written numerous books and articles, leads professional development workshops, and, as a senior program associate at WestEd, in Oakland, CA, one of the U.S. Department of Education’s regional laboratories, makes presentations in the field of prevention and resilience/youth development theory, policy, and practice. Her newest book, just published, is titled Resiliency: What We Have Learned (WestEd, 2004). It synthesizes a decade and more of resiliency research and describes what applications of the research look like in successful efforts to support young people.

Benard’s work on resilience has also led to the development of the Resilience and Youth Development Module of the California Department of Education’s Healthy Kids Survey. Now administered in grades 5, 7, 9, and 11 to all students in California, the module asks students about their perceptions of supports and opportunities in their schools, homes, communities, and peer groups. This will permit California to become one of the first states in the nation to track the social and emotional well-being of successive groups of students over time.

CASEL’s Hank Resnik interviewed Bonnie Benard for this issue.

CASEL: What have been the most important influences on your work?

Benard: The research that I’ve found the most compelling, and where all my suggestions in my new book come from, is longitudinal studies of human development. Much of this research has focused on kids that most people would give up on, kids who grew up in homes with alcohol and drug abuse, in foster care, and in other difficult situations. Over the course of 15 years of looking at the research, three protective factors clearly stand out, whether you’re looking at schools, families, or community settings. The first is caring relationships. The second is what I call “high expectation messages”—positive messages that the young person has the capacity to be successful and will be supported in his or her efforts. The third is opportunities for participation or contribution, such as being part of a group, having meaningful responsibilities, and making decisions about your life. Probably the most important way to do that is to be of service to other people. Service-learning activities are a good example.

CASEL: What are some recent developments in your work you would like our readers to know about?

Benard: I’m excited about the findings we’re getting from the Resilience and Youth Development Module of the California Healthy Kids Survey. We’ve found that when kids have the supports, caring relationships, and high expectations in their school and opportunities to participate and contribute, these factors are associated with higher scores on their standardized tests. It’s similar to what CASEL has found with regard to social and emotional learning. If you don’t pay attention to these factors, young people are not going to achieve academically. CASEL recently highlighted one of our studies of these findings in CASEL Connections (Oct. 03 issue).

CASEL: This is the first year the Resilience and Youth Development Module is being required of all schools in California, and you’re gathering massive amounts of data. What’s happening with those data? How are they being used?

Benard: We at WestEd work with school district representatives to help them interpret the data when they get it back.

CASEL: Can you give an example of that?

Benard: One finding that’s been very disturbing is the steep decline in students’ responses to the questions about caring relationships in their schools. The survey asks them if it’s true that they have a caring relationship with an adult at school. By eleventh grade only about one-third of the kids say that’s true—that there’s someone at their school who would listen to them if they had something to say, who would notice if they weren’t there, or who cares about them. There’s a continual downward trend from fifth to eleventh grade. The data we feed back to schools permits them to address this issue.

CASEL: What answers are there in your book for schools that want to develop solutions to this problem?

Benard: The message to us as educators is we have to make sure we provide positive opportunities for young people. A lot of it revolves around improving the school’s climate or culture and emphasizing caring relationships. CASEL’s theoretical model, featured in your book Safe and Sound [http://www.casel.org/downloads/Safe and Sound/2B_Performance.pdf], makes clear how evidence-based programming fits in to the bigger picture. It supports my contention that resilience has to start with the adults who work with kids, not with the kids themselves. If teachers have self-awareness and empathy, and if they model good relationship skills, that’s a basic step in teaching those skills to children. You have to have adults modeling and living the skills for children to learn them.

CASEL: Why would teachers be motivated to do this when they’re under so much pressure to raise students’ standardized test scores?

Benard: It’s so clear when we look at the data that teachers truly make a difference. When you ignore a child talking to you or say “shut up,” that’s a powerful message. But if you say, “I’d like to hear what you’d like to say,” that’s a powerful message. It means listening to kids, being respectful, and making a one-on-one connection.

 

Spotlight on Research

Sex, Drugs, and Delinquency in Urban and Suburban Public Schools

A new study from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research suggests suburban schools need to be as concerned with prevention and health promotion as their urban counterparts. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, researchers Jay Greene and Greg Forster found that twelfth-grade suburban students were more likely to drink, drive while drunk or high, engage in casual sex, and smoke cigarettes daily than urban youth. Suburban females were less likely to have been pregnant. You can read the executive summary or the complete report at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_04.htm.

Emotional Intelligence: Warding Off Risk Factors for Smoking

A study by Dennis R. Trinidad and colleagues in the January issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health (34(1): 46-55) underscores the importance of including refusal skills and emotional management skills in smoking prevention programs. The study examined how emotional intelligence in sixth-graders related to their intentions to smoke in the future. The students who indicated they were most likely to smoke in the future were those with low overall emotional intelligence who also had high levels of hostile feelings, or felt they would have a hard time refusing cigarette offers. The researchers hypothesize that these students have trouble decreasing feelings of hostility by effectively managing their emotions. This study builds on previous work from this group, which found that seventh- and eighth-graders with low emotional intelligence were more than two times more likely to have engaged in smoking behavior.

Ninth Grade: The Pivotal Year

Nearly all students enter ninth grade with high aspirations, but many lose their self-confidence by the time they get their first report card, reports Susan Black. Tedious lessons, overcrowded classrooms, and indifferent teachers were among the factors research has found to diminish students’ attachment to school. Read the article online at http://www.asbj.com/current/research.html

Spotlight on Practice

Making Classroom Instruction Meaningful

In the December/January 2004 issue of Educational Leadership, Education Professor Elliot Eisner reflects on what the primary elements of instruction should be to best prepare students for their lives outside the classroom. His list includes:

  • Judgment—having students grapple with and deliberate about problems with more than one answer, or no simple answer at all.

  • Critical Thinking—critiquing and exploring powerful ideas, such as the relationship between culture and personality or how to protect minority rights when the majority rules. 

  • Meaningful Literacy—cultivating literacy in its many forms—from reading, writing, and speaking to music and other arts—so students can decode and derive meaning from a wide range of sources.

  • Collaboration—providing students with opportunities to learn to work collectively and cooperatively with others on meaningful projects.

  • Service—having students contribute to their larger communities.

You can read the article at: http://www.ascd.org/cms/objectlib/ascdframeset/index.cfm?publication=http://www.ascd.org/publications/ed_lead/200312/toc.html

Teachers an Important Factor in Race Relations

Amanda E. Lewis says the inspiration for her new book, Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms, stemmed from her experiences as a student teacher at ethnically diverse schools in Oakland and Berkeley, CA. She hopes educators who read her book will realize how implicit assumptions about people and race can shape behavior and expectations in the classroom. She says teachers need to look carefully at their own classroom practices. For example, who is in what reading group? Who’s getting into trouble? Which students are participating regularly? Giving an example of a school working to help break down racial and cultural barriers, she states that all teachers in the school had “culture bags,” where students brought in something from home to talk about in class, sharing cultural traditions and family experiences with classmates. Her book provides other practical suggestions for teachers who want to raise their own awareness and improve their practices in this area. San Francisco Chronicle (2/13/04)

Two New Guides on Funding, Implementing, and Evaluating SEL in Schools

Two excellent new guides are now available to help with school improvement efforts.

Safe, Supportive, and Successful Schools—Step by Step builds on two previous guides sent out to schools nationwide, Early Warning, Timely Response and Safeguarding Our Children. The book stresses the importance of addressing the social and emotional needs of all students in a school, and it provides specific guidance for doing so in a coordinated way. It uses a pyramid with three tiers to describe student populations with different social and emotional needs. 

  • The bottom or foundation-level tier is the general population of all students; their major need is for primary prevention—basic SEL programs.

  • The second or middle tier is students with behavioral problems; they need more targeted early intervention. 

  • The third or top tier is the small group of students with significant emotional and behavioral disorders who require intensive interventions.

The book leads schools through the process of planning and funding to address the needs of all three groups of students.

The guide contains numerous checklists, surveys, and tools to aid schools with each step in the process (including a school climate survey and student problem-solving skills assessment). For example, click here to see the “Schoolwide Prevention Program Checklist.” A matrix of programs for each student group, found to be effective by the federal government, is also included, along with detailed descriptions of each program. The book can be ordered from Sopris West publishers at: http://www.sopriswest.com/swstore/product.asp?sku=872

Getting to Outcomes 2004: Promoting Accountability through Methods and Tools for Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation (RAND) is designed to narrow the gap between what scientists prescribe and what practitioners can realistically accomplish. The manual presents a ten-step process that enhances practitioners’ prevention skills while empowering them to plan, implement, and evaluate their own programs. It was designed to help any school, agency, or community coalition interested in improving the quality of their programs aimed at preventing or reducing drug and tobacco use among youth. The manual can also be useful for prevention efforts targeted at other youth behavior problems such as crime, teen pregnancy, or delinquency. The manual is organized around ten accountability questions that address:

  • Needs and resources assessment;

  • Goals and objectives;

  • Choosing best practice programs;

  • Ensuring program “fit” to local needs and circumstances;

  • Capacity, planning, process, and outcome evaluation;

  • Continuous quality improvement, and sustainability.

Like Safe, Supportive, and Successful Schools, this manual includes a variety of student, parent, and teacher surveys in addition to planning tools. The entire manual and all tools are available for free download at http://www.rand.org/publications/TR/TR101/.

Sound Bite

"We now have considerable research and practitioner interest in resilience, youth development, asset-building, positive psychology, wellness, health promotion, health realization, strengths-based social work, social capital and its sub-categories, multiple intelligences, values-centered or spiritual intelligence, and emotional intelligence. Obviously, people in professions known for studying and ameliorating human problems are increasingly attracted to what has become a new paradigm, a new way of thinking about and working with human beings across the lifespan, but especially during the years of childhood and adolescence.”—Bonnie Benard, Resiliency: What We Have Learned, WestEd, 2004

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Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL)
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