When six people died and 13 others were injured in Tucson, Arizona on Jan. 8, 2011, investigating Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik claimed that the shootings occurred because of “irresponsible” political vitriol, according to ABC News. Although there is no evidence to support the sheriff’s claim, the comments have sparked a national debate concerning whether or not Americans have relational issues in the public realm.
While this may or may not be true, educators of the nation’s children are ahead of the debate as they implement programs that help students learn how to identify relational problems and how to solve them.
“We’re helping to empower kids by teaching them how to manage their emotions,” said Jody Sniff, a counselor for the Swink School District , which is located in rural southeastern Colorado.
Through a curriculum called Second Step, Sniff is teaching second, fourth and sixth grade students skills “that will help students succeed in school and in life,” she wrote in a letter to parents.
The program teaches empathy – listening, respect, identifying feelings; individual and group communication; perspective taking, which is understanding others, recognizing the value in considering different perspectives about a situation; respectful disagreement; assertiveness; emotional management (understanding what happens in the brain and body, three steps for staying in control, applying positive self-talk strategies); problem solving and bullying prevention.
“The program doesn’t concentrate on the bully but teaches kids to be more assertive,” Sniff said. “It teaches kids not to be bystanders.”
Sniff learned about the program at an educator’s conference and implemented it in another school in Paradise, Calif., before moving to Swink. “I researched the program and talked to others who used it. After we started using it in the Paradise District there were less discipline referrals.”
Although Sniff finds that discipline is not a “huge problem” at Swink School, she finds that it helps with prevention. “It helps students identify what is going on in someone else,” she said. “To me, prevention has more value than intervention. The program gives students a foundation when they are younger and helps them when they reach high school and are expected to make more adult decisions.”
The sixth grade curriculum also includes preparation for middle school – what to expect, fears and challenges – and addresses goal setting, peer pressure, substance abuse prevention, cyber bullying, and sexual harassment. “It teaches kids to begin independent thought,” Sniff said. “The program is progressive. It becomes more sophisticated every year with what the kids learn. It uses the same building blocks to talk about issues.”
Reinforcement on the part of teachers is essential. Sniff said that teachers adopting the common language and the ways of solving problems help the precepts of the program become “second nature” to students. She has also invited interested parents to sit in on the 30-minute classes that she conducts with the students. “When the kids are grown up they can learn to evaluate options. I wish that I had something like this as a kid. It prevents ‘shooting from the hip.’ We expect our kids to make good decisions or to understand their emotions but we don’t give them the tools. This program helps kids understand themselves and be more introspective. It helps them be better people and see themselves and others in different ways.”
Second Step was developed by Committee for Children , a “nonprofit working globally to prevent bullying, violence and child abuse.” The organization’s learning materials are in 25,000 “schools from Illinois to Iraq, Chile to California,” the website said.
Sniff said that the main obstacle to presenting the curriculum is time; she doesn’t want to distract the students from academic development. However, Sniff believes the program works and is implementing the courses with the help of the teaching staff. She hopes to introduce the program to Swink’s seventh and eighth grade students next year as well.
This may work well for Sniff and the district. According to the Committee for Children in a pamphlet titled "Academic Achievement and the Second Step Program,” a study conducted by CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning found that, “students receiving school-based (Social and Emotional Learning) scored 11 percentile points higher on academic achievement tests than their peers who did not receive SEL.”
“What I like about the program is that the activity videos have a peer talking to the kids instead of an adult. I liked it because it has a script – it just flows and it presents options in every lesson,” Sniff said. Sniff also asked the students what they would like to talk about. “The sixth graders were talking about wanting to have good grades and friendships. They were concerned about not being bullied. Everything they talked about is in the lessons in the book. That tells me that the company listens to kids.”
