Role of Social & Emotional Learning in Student Success

Much of my recent SoTL research and classroom-based explorations have had to do with unlocking our understanding of student success for different types of at-risk students. Students can become derailed for many reasons – some we can control – and others we can’t. Academic skills as well as attitudes towards learning both play important roles in student success, and these we can impact through careful curricular planning and targeted instruction. For example, In past semesters, I’ve worked with students to increase their lifelong learning capacity with good success. Students each semester have grown significantly in areas such as resilience and their willingness to change and learn. Yet, there is more work to be done.

I’d like to expand this exploration to include more work with improving their social and emotional skills. As a commuter campus, we struggle to help students feel a sense of community and engagement. Increasing their social and emotional skills can help them to engage and connect in a stronger, more lasting way with our campus community. When students don’t feel connected, this can have wide-ranging negative impacts including overall retention and more recently (I posit) a growing problem with academic integrity violations.Let’s look at this a little more closely.

Why do students cheat? For many reasons –  from feeling the pressure of being under-prepared, to feeling that “everyone does it”  or that it is a victimless crime, or feeling that there aren’t severe enough consequences to prohibit it. I would like to suggest that this growing problem also represents a sense of disconnectedness from the campus community. Imagine asking students if they would lie or cheat in their close personal groups. From friends to family to work to sports teams – in which of these contexts would they feel it would be OK to cheat or lie? I venture to say that many would not feel it was OK in any of those scenarios.Yet, they feel it is OK to do it here, with us. We take it personally, yet they don’t. What does this tell us? In addition to the worrisome fact that this shouldn’t be OK in any context, I think it tells us more specifically that we aren’t part of their connected world – the world in which it wouldn’t be OK to lie, cheat, or steal.  So how do we reach students (short term) to help them feel more closely connected to this community and then more long term to a growing ethical awareness?

I believe we can  build awareness and connections by helping students grow in social and emotional skills which in turn can impact their lives with us in the academic community as well as beyond.

To get schooled in how to do this, I’ve applied to the University of California (Berkeley) to attend their summer institute for educators at the Greater Good Science Center on improving social and emotional learning. I’ll bring back what I learn for use in my own classroom, get some data on the results, and then share the techniques more broadly with interested faculty. For now, interested faculty can check out a UC Berkeley MOOC on The Science of Happiness that touches on some of the aspects of social and emotional learning.