Members in the Media
From: The New York Times

Teaching Peace in Elementary School

The New York Times:

FOR years, there has been a steady stream of headlines about the soaring mental health needs of college students and their struggles with anxiety and lack of resilience.

Now, a growing number of educators are trying to bolster emotional competency not on college campuses, but where they believe it will have the greatest impact: in elementary schools.

“It’s not just about how you feel, but how are you going to solve a problem, whether it’s an academic problem or a peer problem or a relationship problem with a parent,” said Mark T. Greenberg, a professor of human development and psychology at Pennsylvania State University.

“The neural pathways in the brain that deal with stress are the same ones that are used for learning,” said Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, a research and teaching center. “Schools are realizing that they have to help kids understand their feelings and manage them effectively.” He added, “We, as a country, want our kids to achieve more academically, but we can’t do this if our kids aren’t emotionally healthy.”

To advance the science and practice of S.E.L., researchers at Yale established the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning in 1994; under the leadership of Roger P. Weissberg, it moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1996.

Read the whole story: The New York Times

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