Giving Compass' Take:

• The National Commission on Social, Emotional & Academic Development released a report titled, "From a Nation at Risk, to a Nation at Hope" that examines how SEL functions in the classroom. 

• The author reviewing the Commission's report contends that SEL can be harmful to students if not executed properly, thus making the report helpful in offering recommendations to effectively incorporate this learning style in the classroom. 

• Read about teaching social-emotional learning in the digital age. 

The long-awaited report of the National Commission on Social, Emotional, & Academic Development is now out and will doubtless make some waves within education’s chattering classes and more broadly among practitioners. But will anyone else notice or care?

For the Commission’s central message is not new. It’s basically about “educating the whole child,” as we’ve been told to do at least since Dewey, since Montessori, since Rousseau, arguably since Aristotle. We’re admonished, once again, not to settle for the Three R’s, not to treat test scores as the only legitimate markers of school success, not to succumb to the cramped view that schools’ only job is to develop one’s cognitive faculties. So much more is needed…

The country may also be commission-weary. There have been so many highfalutin reports on education over the decades—and while they often make a few waves in the near term, few have made much tangible difference over the long run.

The Commission does a nice job of explaining the intersection between SEL and cognitive learning and how the former is to some extent a precondition for the latter. The research they cite both in this report and previously is substantial and convincing. Unfortunately, cognitive learning isn’t necessarily a precondition for SEL—it’s not reciprocal in that way—and there are troubling signs that not everyone touting SEL today is as conscientious as the commission about the need for schools to produce academic learning.

Lose that balance and SEL risks being treated as a substitute for academics and falling into the trap of touchy-feeliness, which would both get it marginalized (akin to yesterday’s “self-esteem” movement) and also weaken the country’s slog toward higher achievement. Simply put: SEL, properly conceived, can foster achievement; ill-conceived, it can do harm.

Read the full article about the commission on SEL by Chester E. Finn, Jr. at Education Next