This chapter will provide an overview of the history and the basics of SEL/SEAD, SEAD in current time, mindfulness as the foundation of SEL and SEAD, and emotional resilience as the key to successful SEAD implementation and application in all areas of education, from the legislative offices to the PK learning space. The hope is to increase the understanding that SEAD is not a passing fad, not a trend, not “one more thing” that teachers will feel overwhelmed by, and not something to be feared or dreaded.
TopIntroduction
By 2015, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) had gained a foot hold and was being taught in clinics, hospitals, and schools around the world. In the 1970s, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., spent years at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center creating a mindfulness meditation program, MBSR, (what was then called Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program) to support those who suffered health problems. The results of his MBSR program are far-reaching and profound. Adults, teens, and children have experienced improvements in the cultivation of attention skills and emotional regulation as well as reductions in stress, anxiety, and worry. (Kabat-Zinn, 2013).
Herein, we borrow Kabat-Zinn’s concept of Mindfulness-Based and apply that to social, emotional learning (SEL), and to social, emotional, and academic development (SEAD) to focus our approach through a different, more personalized lens. Each educator, administrator, and school counselor must stand on an unshakeable foundation of mindfulness; only by and through the focused application of attentional awareness can one know their emotional state and inner landscape, and then make responsible decisions of how to best manage the self and interact with others. As the adults in education reinforce their foundation with Mindfulness-Based SEAD, used in conjunction with Mindful Social, Emotional Learning (M-SEL), their influence on their students, as well as their colleagues, will increase in its positive effect.
According to Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, “all learning in emotional.” (Immordino-Yang, 2016). If the emotional component of learning, and teaching, is neglected, the educational process and the outcomes will not be as positively powerful as the potential they hold—that potential being the observable thriving, flourishing, and holistic well-being of each individual in the education system.
This chapter will provide an overview of the history and the basics of SEL/SEAD, SEAD in current time, mindfulness as the foundation of SEL and SEAD, and emotional resilience as the key to successful SEAD implementation and application in all areas of education, from the offices to the PK learning space. In The Aspen Institutes The Evidence Base of How We Learn report, “social, emotional, and academic development is an essential part of pre-K-12 education that can transform schools into places that foster academic excellence, collaboration and communication, creativity and innovation, empathy and respect, civic engagement, and other skills and dispositions needed for success in the 21st Century.” (Jones & Kahn, 2017).
As education embraces SEAD and cultivates a dynamic relationship with it, we will enjoy the reality of Dr. Martin Seligman’s perspective:
The time has come for a new prosperity, on that takes flourishing seriously as the goal of education and of parenting. Learning to value and to attain flourishing must start early—in the formative years of schooling—and it is this new prosperity, kindled by positive education, that the world can now choose. (Seligman, 2011).
TopBasics Of Sel
Education is a changing phenomenon, based on the changing dynamic of human progress and growth. When a society is mainly agrarian and performing work and labor with the physical body, classroom education might be of little importance. Yet as societies have progressed beyond a focus on agriculture, and through the industrial age into the technological age and beyond, education has both shaped that progress and become a product of it.
At this current point in the history of educating societies, by educating their children, we have moved into the realm of the inner world. Advancements in technology, science, and human potential have necessitated a shift in the way we educate our children in the 21st Century. Whereas once the focus was on mastering outer, hard skills with myriad tools, the shift has moved us inward to the essential skills of human potential, the amazing plasticity of the brain, and the infinite realm of the mind. The tools now most needed by our young are those that will enable them to “contribute to and thrive in this new environment.” (Goleman & Senge, 2014).