Sam Piha

The recent How Kids Learn V conference in Berkeley and LA focused on Preparing Youth for Work and Career Success. We featured the Employability Skills Framework (below) and were quite pleased with how well it overlapped with social emotional skills and character building. Beyond the Bell at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) granted us permission to share this excerpt from their larger paper, in which the link between employability skills and SEL is described in detail.

"Although some researchers argue that schools are not doing enough to support the development of the necessary skills for workforce readiness, evidence suggests that we already know a lot about how to develop some of the employability skills outlined in the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE - U.S. Department of Education) framework—we may just be calling them something else.

School-day and afterschool programs across the country have been implementing what are called social and emotional learning (SEL) programs for years. These programs support the development of social and emotional competencies such as problem solving, critical thinking, interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, and social awareness through both explicit SEL instruction (this is more common in school-day settings) and broader SEL strategies and practices (this is more common in afterschool settings). Although not termed as such, the social and emotional skills that these programs target are also key employability skills. In fact, the framework developed by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) bears a strong resemblance to OCTAE’s Employability Skills Framework.

As these two frameworks illustrate, there is a great deal of connection between social and emotional competencies and employability skills. Although not identical, when you dig deeper into the two frameworks, the alignment is clear. For example:

• Interpersonal skills (OCTAE) and social awareness (CASEL) both require the ability to understand social norms and work with others from diverse backgrounds.

• Personal qualities (OCTAE) and self-awareness (CASEL) both require the ability to recognize one’s emotions and have a sense of confidence.

• Communication skills (OCTAE) and relationship skills (CASEL) both require the ability to communicate clearly, listen well, and resolve conflicts.

​Given these similarities, it makes sense that SEL programs that explicitly target the development of social and emotional competencies could also be considered workforce readiness programs or programs targeting the development of employability skills."

Sam Piha

Tom Little was a close friend and my former co-teacher at Park Day School in Oakland, a school he co-founded in 1976. After ten years of teaching, Tom went on to serve as Head of School at Park from 1986-2014 and co-founded the Progressive Education Network, a national organization of educators working to advance progressive educational practices throughout the United States.

Before he died of illness in 2013, Tom’s dream was to write a book on progressive education and the teaching practices they practiced at Park Day School and other schools across the country. Tom achieved his goal of publishing a book entitled, Loving Learning: How Progressive Education Can Save America’s Schools, which is available through Amazon.

Loving Learning, by Tom Little and Katerine EllisonBelow, we repost an article that Tom wrote before he passed for our LIAS blog, which we think is very relevant to the 360°/365 project.

ALL ABOUT CHARACTER
By Guest Blogger, Tom Little
Much is being made these days about character. Especially those virtues of character related to grit, perseverance and all manner of a person’s capacity to persist and endure. Educators across the country are making waves in schools and school districts on the heels of the release of How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough. Tough is a writer for the N.Y. Times who wrote an article last year presaging the publication of his book. Pulling together findings from various fields, Tough makes the case that there are traits beyond cognitive ability, namely perseverance, resiliency and optimism, necessary for academic success.

Tom LittleEven before his book was released, I could see the tides rising. Last year I wrote an article for Park Central asking to what extent the development of character was the province of a school, using as examples Tough’s description of schools in New York which have embarked on efforts to make character development essential to their mission.

Angela Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania is featured prominently in Tough’s book (see her 2009 TEDtalk on the subject of Grit here). Duckworth’s research focuses on hundreds of subjects who had achieved measurable success, and revealed that the most successful individuals have in common character traits such as perseverance, grit, and diligence. More than intelligence or talent, in study after study these attributes demonstrated that the “grittier” a person is, the more he or she is likely to succeed. Both Tough and Duckworth make the distinction between two categories of character: moral character and performance character. Moral character embodies ethical values like fairness, generosity, compassion and integrity, while performance character refers to values such as effort, diligence, and grit.

So, what is grit? In her tool measuring this attribute in children and adults, Duckworth looks at a person’s reaction to very difficult or challenging tasks; how does one respond to failure? Does one have the capacity to stick with projects that require perseverance and hard work? Grit is a measurement of how one endures and pushes through obstacles in pursuit of a goal or passion.

It’s no surprise if you are asking (as I have been), “so, how can we teach grit?” Are there teacher parenting or educational strategies that seem to foster these virtues in our children?

In his book, Tough illustrates that the most important factors in a child’s early life are close, loving, nurturing, and attached relationships with a parent (or guardian). Ironically, the need to pull back becomes vital as the children grow. Resisting the temptation to intervene, we need to allow children to stumble and fall, experience failure, have lots of frustrations and disappointments, then to dust off and carry on, learning something about themselves in the process.

Progressive educators have resonated strongly with Tough’s premise and the recent research in the measurement of student success. We understand the need to partner with parents in the challenging task of child rearing. Weighing on us is the tension between wanting to pave the way for children and allowing them to experience disappointment and failure. As parents, we can feel it viscerally – the pain of failure – we want to fix it or make it better. This tendency is quintessential to parenting. Teachers also face this struggle.

In part, the teaching of character arises situation by situation. I spoke recently with a parent whose daughter had “hit a wall” while trying to learn a new skill.  Though she wanted to quit, he pushed her to stick with it and she finally succeeded in learning the process. It was difficult for him to watch her angst and resistance. Similarly, I recently observed a teacher who insisted that two students who were involved in a conflict sit as long as necessary for them to resolve their issue. I saw the students’ transition from a fevered pitch of anger and venom to a reasonable place of calm and measured discussion and problem solving. In these situations, had it not been for the parent and the teacher, the players would have walked away from an important learning opportunity.
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I recommend that folks read Paul Tough’s book. It has spawned countless blogs and commentary such as this. The book validates our mission of holding children’s social and emotional development, and brings into relief the importance of encouraging the development of their character. These virtues are important to their success as students, but equally to their success at life.
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Tom earned his Masters Degree in Educational Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia, at the Klingenstein Leadership Academy. In 2001, Tom was awarded a Klingenstein Visiting Heads Fellowship. From 1997-2003, he served as the Private School Representative on the Mayor's Oakland Education Cabinet. He served on the Board of Directors for the Oakland Academic Stars, an organization providing college scholarships for public school students in Oakland, and the Board of Wingspan, a national organization sponsoring public and private school partnerships. Tom consulted on educational matters with public and private schools in the Bay Area and in Ireland. Tom died in 2013 from cancer shortly after completing his book.