Making a Commitment to Character

By Sam Piha

Sam Piha

We all know that preparing young people with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed as adults is a primary function of a society. But who is really responsible and what skills and knowledge are needed? 

To begin, we believe that adults and institutions where children spend their time need to think about their role. Naturally, the family, media, and broader culture comes into play but it is time that schools and youth programs step up to the plate by promoting social and emotional skills and opportunities to practice them. 

Photo credit:
http://hummingwords.blogspot.com/
2013/12/to-children-with-love.html

In the recent past, school leaders claimed that their only responsibility was promoting academic skills as measured by test scores. We would argue that the responsibility for developing a positive school climate and developing social emotional skills is vital to academic learning and healthy development. In a new study released today by the Brookings Institution, "Non-cognitive skills and character competencies have as much of an effect on success as academic skill". This joins a growing body of research on non-cognitive skills, social emotional learning, school climate, growth mindsets, and the brain that points to the importance of these skills to academic learning in promoting healthy development - something that youth development researchers have been saying for a long time. 

Photo credit: http://wkirwan.edublogs.org/committocharacter/

Expanded learning youth programs, whether they are school-based or after school, also have an important role and there is room for much improvement in this area. According to research, afterschool programs that include social emotional learning are the most successful in positively impacting young people in every domain including academic success. And let's not leave off the role of parents and guardians.  

People ask, "What exactly are these skills? What can we do?". Because children are increasingly growing up in a "mean culture", now is the time for everyone to come together and promote these skills and opportunities to practice them. We will expand on these issues in future blog posts.

Paul Tough, How Children Succeed and Non-cognitive Skills

By Sam Piha

Reporter, Paul Tough, recently authored a book entitled How Children Succeed.  It has stimulated conversation among educators and afterschool and summer providers. This book can be ordered by clicking here, and Paul can be heard on a recent This American Life radio broadcast by clicking here. 

Paul Tough, Author, How Children Succeed

Mr. Tough was unable to attend our recent How Kids Learn II conference but offered the responses below, many of which are drawn from his own website. 

Q: What made you want to write How Children Succeed?

A: In 2008, I published my first book, Whatever It Takes, about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone. I spent five years reporting that book, but when I finished it, I realized I still had a lot of questions about what really happens in childhood. How Children Succeed is an attempt to answer those questions, which for many of us are big and mysterious and central in our lives: Why do certain children succeed while other children fail? 

Q: Where did you go to find the answers?

A: My reporting for this book took me all over the country, from a pediatric clinic in a low-income San Francisco neighborhood to a chess tournament in central Ohio to a wealthy private school in New York City. And what I found as I reported was that there is a new and groundbreaking conversation going on, out of the public eye, about childhood and success and failure. It is very different than the traditional education debate. There are economists working on this, neuroscientists, psychologists, medical doctors. They are often working independently from one another. They don’t always coordinate their efforts. But they’re beginning to find some common ground, and together they’re reaching some interesting and important conclusions.

Q: What’s new?

A: Until recently, most economists and psychologists believed that the most important factor in a child’s success was his or her IQ. This notion is behind our national obsession with test scores. From preschool-admission tests to the SAT and the ACT – even when we tell ourselves as individuals that these tests don’t matter, as a culture we put great faith in them. All because we believe, on some level, that they measure what matters.

But the scientists whose work I followed for How Children Succeed have identified a very different set of skills that they believe are crucial to success. They include qualities like persistence, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control. Economists call these non-cognitive skills. Psychologists call them personality traits. Neuroscientists sometimes use the term executive functions. The rest of us often sum them up with the word character.

Q: Who are the big thinkers behind these ideas?

Economist, James Heckman

A: The central scholar in this movement is James Heckman, a Nobel prize–winning economist at the University of Chicago. He’s the one who did some of the first work identifying and quantifying these non-cognitive skills. And in recent years he has been working to pull together thinkers from lots of different disciplines — psychologists and economists and neuroscientists and geneticists — to get them to share ideas and find connections between their theories.

The book includes plenty of others doing important research, from Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies self-control and grit; to Michael Meaney, a neuroscientist in Montreal who found a remarkable connection between a mother rat’s licking-and-grooming habits and the future success of her offspring; to Suniya Luthar, a psychology professor at Columbia University who has written about the unique stresses faced by kids who grow up in affluence.

Q: How do these ideas play out in the lives of actual kids?

A: There’s a lot of science in How Children Succeed, but much of the book is taken up with stories of young people trying to improve their lives, and the teachers and counselors and doctors trying to help them, often using unorthodox methods.

Sometimes these kids are achieving great things: Take James Black Jr., a student who just graduated from Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn. He grew up in a low-income neighborhood, he has siblings who’ve spent time in prison, and he doesn’t do great on traditional tests of cognitive ability. But he might be the best thirteen-year-old chess player in the country. I followed him for a year, trying to figure out why he’s so successful.

James Black, Jr. was featured in a recent documentary
entitled Brooklyn Castle

When I started my reporting, I thought what everyone thinks: that chess is the ultimate intellectual activity, a skill inextricable from IQ. But to my surprise, I found that many chess scholars now believe that chess success has more to do with non-cognitive skills than with pure IQ. James’s chess teacher at IS 318 is a woman named Elizabeth Spiegel. She’s a great teacher, and I think what makes her so good is that she’s able to help her students develop their non-cognitive skills to high levels — in James’s case, to very high levels.

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A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough is also the author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America, which focuses on the steps necessary to improve the lives and education of underserved children. Through the case study of the Harlem Children's Zone, Tough describes the inspiring struggle to establish a way to combat poverty that could be replicated nationwide. Tough has also contributed to This American Life and The New Yorker, where he has honed his focus upon education, poverty, parenting, and politics.

The Power of Gratitude

By Guest Blogger, Allison Kenny, Co-Founder of Glitter & Razz Productions 

Allison Kenny

According to the Greater Good Science Center out of UC Berkeley, it’s a scientific fact that practicing gratitude makes us happier, healthier people. 

For the Go Girls! at Glenview Elementary, I frame it like this: “Gratitude is like a superpower. When you are feeling negative or angry or lost or sad or scared, try remembering the things in life that make you feel happy- the things that you are thankful for. These thankful or grateful feelings can lift you up and help you feel better. Gratitude makes us happy.”

Then we got to work making our very own Gratitude Journals. Simple. Tiny books. Girls love to fill them with sketches, lists, poems, watercolor, stickers- whatever they can get their hands on. And the focus is gratitude, or as I tell the littlest girls if they look confused, “parts of life that make you feel happy.” I asked the girls to choose a special place where they could keep these journals and come work in them when they need to use their power of gratitude. One 4th grader decided to tape hers to the back of her frog’s cage. Whatever works! Go forth and be grateful.

Check out a few tips from parenting expert and Go Girls! mom, Christine Carter on practicing gratitude at home with your kids.

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Allison Kenny is the co-founder/owner of Glitter & Razz and serves as the Chief Officer of People & Programs.  She has spent a good part of her life leading and participating in creative and community-based activities focused on personal transformation. Growing up in Phoenix, AZ as the dramatic and extroverted one in a house with 3 other sisters, she built her values through active engagement in softball teams, theater productions, show choir, and youth ministry programs. She was a natural leader from a young age who was particularly influenced by her role in WomanStory, a Phoenix-based organization that supports the spiritual and emotional development of women and girls in intergenerational, arts-based camps and retreats. To this day, she has a personal mission to create healing spaces for women.

Skills That Matter and the Role of Afterschool and Summer Programs

By Sam Piha

Sam Piha

There is a growing body of research that suggest that young people's development of non-academic skills are critical to their academic achievement and success. In fact, there is good evidence that the acquisition of these skills are better predictors of academic achievement and life success than standardized test scores. These skills are referred to as social-emotional competencies and non-cognitive skills. We believe that afterschool and summer programs are well-positioned to develop these skills and educate stakeholders as to their importance. It is important to note that having an impact on youth outcomes requires strong program design and consistent implementation. 

Jenny Nagaoka

Pedro Noguera

The Learning in Afterschool & Summer project will use the upcoming How Kids Learn II conference and several future blogs to highlight these important skills. At the conference, we will hear from Dr. Daniel Goleman (via video), Founder of Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and the author of Emotional Intelligence. The conference will also feature a presentation by Jenny Nagaoka, University of Chicago, on the role of non-cognitive skills in adolescence. We expect that we will also hear about the importance of these skills from presenter, Dr. Pedro Noguera from NYU. 

Joseph Durlak

A future blog will focus on the Responsive Classroom approach - a way of teaching that emphasizes social, emotional, and academic growth in a strong and safe school community. In addition, future blogs will feature interviews with Joseph Durlak and Paul Tough. Dr. Durlak is known for his meta-analysis studies of the impact of in-school and afterschool programs that worked to promote social-emotional learning and key features of implementation that are required for impacting youth outcomes. Paul Tough is a writer whose articles and books examine the importance of non-cognitive skills. His latest book, How Children Succeed, is having a major impact in the fields of education and youth development.  

Practitioners can find more articles on social-emotional learning and activities that promote these competencies on the Edutopia website.