Blogs on Social & Emotional Learning

There has been a lot of talk lately of what makes a good teacher. It is easy to make lists of hundreds of values, skills and attributes that make for good teachers, but there are two skills that separate the good teachers from the great ones. One skill is the ability to "reframe" a situation for students, which I will discuss today. The other, which I've mentioned in earlier posts, is the recognition that "fair is not equal." I will devote next month's post to some specific teaching techniques which build on this.

There are many instances in which ancient wisdom anticipated contemporary research, and one of them can be found on the upcoming Jewish observance day of Yom Kippur. It is also known as the Day of Atonement and it is considered the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

Happiness is something we all want, and new research shows that happiness and well-being can be taught! But who has time to teach happiness when there is so much else to cram into a school day? At the university level, we see courses at Harvard and University of Southern California on the Science of Happiness. There are good reasons why those courses are among these schools' most popular classes. Happier people tend to be healthier, more productive, more generous and kinder to others. They also learn more easily and enjoy life. Who doesn’t want some of that?

The boy is small in stature, bespectacled, and unnaturally articulate for a sixth grader. I have heard from his teachers and principal at Annapolis, Maryland's Wiley H. Bates Middle School about the academic benefits of arts integration, how various forms of artistic expression (PDF) are employed to learn math and science as well as language arts. I have also learned about the virtues of a critical-thinking technique known as Artful Thinking, developed by Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, that deepens students' intellectual understanding generally by deepening their understanding of the multiple layers of artistic expression.