�Ѿ������dzܰ���’s are being refined to focus on student behavior after the State Board of Education reviewed on the program.

Some board members referred to the current draft as a “beginning,” and the board decided not to vote on passing the standards during its meeting Tuesday.

The public was invited to comment on the department’s proposed social-emotional-learning standards in September. Although a majority of responses were positive, the State Board of Education decided to alter the state’s approach.

Chrissy Bashore, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s coordinator of school counseling and student wellness, said there was “a great deal of confusion around social emotional learning and what it means” — particularly as she read negative comments.

Positive comments were optimistic about potential mental-health gains for students, whereas negative comments told state officials that this was beyond their role.

“Kids belong to their parents, and parents have the right to educate their kids and the responsibility to see that their kids are well-educated,” one comment said.

Others complained that social-emotional learning, often abbreviated as SEL, sounds like diversity, equity and inclusion and accused the department of “indoctrination.”

“When conservatives hear social emotional learning,” Kimberly Bailey, a board member from Raymore, said during the meeting, “they think of the loaded-up, ideological version that you find in some places. That’s not what we’re trying to do.”

Commissioner of Education Margie Vandeven suggested changing the word “standards” to “framework” to reiterate the optional nature of the state’s plan.

“They can choose to use the resource, or they can choose not to,” Board President Charlie Shields said. “They can develop their own frameworks.”

Board members said they were eager to provide a resource for teachers that want to address behavioral issues, but they wanted schools to have “local control” to create their own plans.

Shields said the SEL guidelines should assist teachers who feel overwhelmed by student behavior, likely helping the teacher retainment issue.

“Teachers are asking us for some level of expectation about the classroom environment,” he said.

“This is an opportunity to not just focus on one thing but to take on that charge of being thought leaders and create that portfolio,” she said.

She wants to study other states’ resources to see what Missouri can offer educators.

Vandeven wondered how fruitful the study would be.

“The issue is states are implementing SEL standards or they are forbidding them,” Vandeven said. “This is a very divisive issue.”

Board member Kerry Casey, of Chesterfield, wanted to focus more on the standards and proposed renaming them to remove the “social-emotional learning” title.

“We are concerned about behavior in the classroom because that is what is certainly impacting our teacher retention and recruitment,” she said. “But it’s affecting the lives of our students and their ability to learn.”

Her proposed name would include “behavior” instead of emotions.

Shields said the name wouldn’t fit, for not every guideline addressed a behavior.

Other board members thought the public would be suspicious of a title change after the standards stirred controversy.

Vandeven was worried about the time to make larger changes Casey mentioned, pointing to the two DESE staff members working on the framework.

“There are two of them,” she said. “That will take all year.”

Vandeven also worried that some criticisms would persist even after edits.

“We have the potential of revisiting something, and we could find ourselves in the same place again,” she said.

Although they received harsh words from some community members, the board seemed to focus on the potential to help educators. The criticism was not the sole reason for making changes.

“The controversy doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to move forward,” Shields told the board.

The board reiterated the importance of creating a guide for student behavior and interactions.

Carol Hallquist, the board’s vice president, said those who want to reserve behavior as a parent’s responsibility may not see all the work educators do.

“The desenters said this is the job of the parent,” she said. “But it’s the job of the parent to feed them, and we’re doing that. It is the job of the parent to ensure that children have warm clothes to wear, but we’ve got clothes closets in schools.”

A handful of those in attendance at the meeting applauded.

Casey said districts who have implemented a similar program to the proposed standards have enviable results. She referenced Potosi R-III School District’s work implementing researchers’ methods.

“It not only benefited the teachers, but it benefited the students. It benefited the students in terms of academic outcomes, their behaviors and their success in life,” she said.

Christi Bergin, associate dean for research and innovation at the University of Missouri, helped create Potosi’s program. She is co-chair of the group creating �Ѿ������dzܰ���’s framework.

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As part of their work, researchers determined school’s effectiveness based upon its impact on students’ social-emotional development, test scores and behaviors. They concluded that the most effective schools provide a welcoming environment for students, an experience that shapes their later years. 

“High schools matter,” said Shanette Porter, senior research associate at UChicago Consortium on School Research and the study’s lead author. “And they matter quite a lot. How safe students feel — physically, socially, psychologically — how deeply connected they are to others, how much they trust their teachers and their peers matters.”

She said, too, that student voice is a powerful tool, one schools can use to design better, more effective systems: The biggest predictor of student outcomes in their study was what the students themselves said about their school experience. 

And the impact isn’t just social-emotional, Porter said. It influences trackable metrics such as test scores, high school graduation rates and college attendance, researchers found. 

“These things that feel soft are inextricably linked to these hard measures of learning,” Porter said.  

Researchers drew their data from six cohorts of 160,148 of eighth and ninth grade students who attended CPS between 2011–12 and 2016–17: 42% were Black, 44% were Hispanic and 86% received free or reduced-price lunch, a key indicator of poverty. The college attendance-related data came only from those who attended ninth grade for the first time between 2012 and 2014. They totaled 55,564 students. 

The study examined students’ administrative records — including those related to attendance and discipline — plus surveys provided by both children and teachers about their school’s climate, whether it had effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, a supportive environment and ambitious instruction.

Students also completed a questionnaire focusing on their emotional health, connectedness to school, academic engagement, grit and study habits. 

The study found that students who attended a highly effective school — one ranked by the researchers as being in the 85th percentile based on their collected data and student and teacher survey responses — saw their test scores improve more than those at other CPS campuses. They noted, too, that attendance increased for this group while suspensions and disciplinary infractions dropped.

And the beneficial effects continued well beyond freshman year: Students who attended a school at that 85th percentile increased the likelihood of graduation by 2.41 percentage points and the chance of attending college within two years of graduation by 2.57 percentage points. They also were 20% less likely to be arrested on campus as compared to the average rate of arrest for all high schoolers in the district. 

A spokeswoman for the Chicago school system said it remains committed to social- emotional development: CPS has spent millions growing such offerings in recent years, based in part on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . The study found that in 2021, 10% of high school students attempted suicide one or more times in the prior year. 

CPS has hired 123 additional school counselors since 2021, placing the staff at its highest-need campuses. It also has expanded training and support for school-based counselors, social workers, and psychologists so they can implement small-group and individual social-emotional interventions, the spokeswoman said.

But the social-emotional learning tactics underpinning the positive results seen in Chicago Public Schools — and employed by many other districts around the country for several years — are now under attack from the far right. 

Members of the conservative parent group Moms for Liberty have labeled social-emotional learning, which can include lessons on self-regulation and relating to others, indoctrination, saying it leads to the idea that the country is  

They say it infringes on parents’ right to raise their children. Karen VanAusdal, vice president for practice at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, known as CASEL, acknowledged the pushback. 

“Certainly there are groups like that that are trying to make social-emotional learning a political soundbite,” she said. “But … there are many more parents, educators and policy leaders who understand the importance of social-emotional learning. The work is continuing.”

VanAusdal said helping students develop skills outside academics is invaluable, especially now, in the wake of the pandemic, when so many are reporting mental health struggles. showed some consensus among parents: 66% said it’s “extremely or very important” that their children’s school teaches them to develop social and emotional skills. Twenty-seven percent said it was somewhat important, Pew reported.  

“This has always been a bipartisan issue,” VanAusdal said. “We want children to have healthy relationships. We want them to have the skills they need to achieve their career and life goals and be caring members of our communities — and we know social-emotional learning is the pathway to achieving that.”

It is widely understood that sound SED leads to stronger life outcomes and that trauma or adverse childhood experiences can disrupt healthy SED. During the 90-minute series, attendees heard nearly a dozen early childhood research experts and innovators pitch their solutions to promote and prioritize healthy SED among children, parents and communities. Our takeaways below highlight some of the featured companies.

1. Interventions for kids

• helps young children with big feelings, using interactive games and augmented reality all through the app store. Their application, Wisdom: The World of Emotions, is full of activities that promote mindfulness and fun. It also features resources and actionable tips for parents.
• Hattie the Happy Hippo and Fanny the Fear Frog are just a couple of the characters developed by for their educational toolkit. Each feeling is associated with a character that appears as a puppet, on apparel, in storybooks and more, to aid both parents, caretakers and teachers in social and emotional education.
• is committed to expanding social emotional learning beyond the school setting through educational toys and their mindfulness app . The app features research-based audio sessions designed with kids and their adults in mind.

2. Parent and caregiver support

• offers at-home parent coaching using the evidence-based To improve overall caregiver and family outcomes, this program addresses the intergenerational cycle of trauma and helps parents to productively reflect on how their own childhood experiences may affect their parenting.
• , the largest early education provider in Northern California, recently launched a consulting, training and certification program aimed to empower all care providers, from parents to teachers to school administrators. The model targets mental health, racial and social justice for overall capacity building as they look to increase their impact across the United States.

3. Relational health

• By leveraging the primary pediatric care appointment, focuses on prevention to promote healthy parenting behavior. If parents opt in to record a playtime interaction with their child, they receive real-time coaching tips that focus on the strengths of the interaction. Families leave the appointment with a video and a plan to strengthen their interactions at home until next time.
• was born in response to neighborhood needs. Sixty percent of children under the age of five live in poverty in Detroit, which is three times the national rate. The facilities serve as a neighborhood hub providing education, healthy and family supports specific to the community. There are currently eight hubs across Detroit, with growing interest for additional locations.

One might think a life’s work focused on ending humans’ inhumanity to other humans arose out of a place of sweetness and light, born of loving kindness. But no.

“It was born out of rage,” Gordon says. “It was born because I swore and cried from frustration at the generational violence I was encountering.”

Prior to the time of this pound-the-steering-wheel moment, Gordon had been working as a kindergarten teacher in Toronto. In that role, she saw firsthand high levels of domestic violence and child abuse, and knew intimately the damage already done to children before they even got to kindergarten.

Children came into her classroom “wearing their wounds in their behavior,” she says. Learning was hard for them, as was simply getting along with their classmates. From the day they were born, these children were swimming upstream, and the idea that a child’s circumstances at birth would determine their destiny was an idea she found “vicious and unfair.”

In working to address the violence, she realized that the common thread in all that suffering, the common denominator of violence, aggression and cruelty of all kinds, is the absence of empathy. Her first social innovation (1996) was to start Canada’s first Parenting Centers in schools, which later became public policy, to coach young parents in what babies and young children needed.

One day, she visited the illegal boarding house where one of her young moms lived. The young woman came to the door with her face bruised, her eyebrow gashed where her boyfriend had punched her glasses into her eye and her new little baby girl in her arms. Another little girl, a toddler, clung to her mother’s leg.

“I felt such despair when I saw that and cried from frustration all the way home, knowing that these little girls and this young woman deserved so much more. But her mother had been abused — and we know that story, right? I decided on the way home, ‘OK, I’m going to break this intergenerational cycle and bring the attachment relationship to school so those two little girls and every other little person who goes to school will have an opportunity to see one version of love.’”

“There’s no one right way to be a parent, but children know when they’re in the presence of love,” Gordon says. “I wanted to put another track down in children’s brains of what was possible.”

Gordon describes the attachment relationship — the child’s first deep connection to a significant, reliable person — as the “secret sauce” in being able to create a more caring, empathetic world. The roots of empathy, the realization of human potential — all that we wish for in the world — are in this first relationship, she writes in “.”

In these times especially, Gordon says, there is a yearning for empathy because our common humanity is the connection we need most during fraught times. It can’t be taught, but neuroscience tells us empathy can be caught.

“When you are immersed in an experience where mirror neurons can be at play and you can see, feel, hear, maybe even touch a demonstration of empathy or kindness, you have the capacity to develop that same empathy in your own brain,” Gordon says. She set about developing a novel way to expose children to the contagion of empathy and turned to humanity’s best little professors in graduate-level openheartedness: babies.

At the heart of the program, designed for children from kindergarten age to high school age, and its younger sibling, , for 3- to 5-year-olds in early learning settings, is a baby. Babies love without borders or definitions, Gordon says, and they respond intuitively to love, which makes them perfect transmitters of empathy.

Here’s how it works. The 2- to 4-month-old infant and parent, chosen from the community, visit the classroom every three weeks over a school year along with a Roots of Empathy instructor who coaches the children to observe the baby’s development and identify the baby’s feelings. The vulnerable baby is the “teacher” (and wears a little tee shirt that says so), the parent is the “expert,” the ROE instructor is the coach and the children are the “changers,” learning the vocabulary of feelings and developing the capacity to recognize them in themselves and others.

Children who participate in the Roots of Empathy program sometimes are seeing a loving parent-child relationship for the first time, says Mary Gordon, the program’s founder. She tells of one boy who had been in foster care for years and more group homes than he could count, after having seen his mother murdered in front of him when he was 4.

He was in eighth grade, trying hard to appear aloof and unaffected, cultivating as much of a dangerous look as he could manage, with a shaved head, a ponytail on top and a tattoo at the base of his skull.

“If you don’t have a word for something,” Gordon says, “you can’t think of it. We give the children a language for their feelings and also real, relaxed, supportive opportunities over a whole school year to relate to the feelings of the baby, to anchor that awareness in themselves. And we have a dialogue over the whole year about recognizing those feelings in their friends.”

The babies are chosen not by the education level of the mothers or by socioeconomics, but through a home visit to orient the parent to the program and to make sure that the parent and child manifest a secure attachment. For some children in the program, this is the first such parent-child bond they’ve ever encountered.

The program’s core includes neuroscience, in which the children learn that love grows brains. Rather than being told this, the children can see for themselves how the baby lights up at the parent’s empathic, nurturing interactions with the infant. Another element at the core is the children’s exploration of the baby’s temperament. As they move from observing the baby’s temperament to a discussion of their own, they begin to understand that their classmates and even their parents will have different emotional reactions to situations.

“It’s sad to me, but teachers don’t really know this work about temperament,” Gordon says. “One of the workshops I give most around the world is on temperaments, explaining to teachers that not all of the little people in their class can sit at a desk for an hour at a time, and if you understand where they’re coming from, you can help them get with the game.”

Central to Roots of Empathy is the development of a vocabulary for feelings, so that the children learn to use art, music, storytelling or other means to communicate, “I feel sad” or “I feel so angry,” rather than striking out or hiding away. The children learn the principle of authentic communication, meaning that the adults in the program honestly reveal their feelings and don’t ask questions to which they already know the answers.

“Our instructors don’t judge or say, ‘Good answer, Johnny.’ And they never ask the child whose hand shoots up first to share — they wait for the seventh person,” she says. “We aren’t rewarding being able to quickly get your brain and mouth in gear. We want children to genuinely have something to say when they put up their hand and not answer to get an adult to acknowledge them. We want them to consider what they’re saying and then acknowledge themselves.”

Roots of Empathy is grounded in social inclusion, recognizing that every human has a deep need to be heard, seen and to belong. The program creates an environment where everyone has a voice, where children break down barriers and where the classrooms become a microcosm of democracy and collaboration.

“What we have seen all over the world where we have offered our programs is a reduction in aggression, violence and bullying,” Gordon says. “We have rock solid international research that supports that and tons of anecdotal evidence.” The Roots of Empathy classroom is creating children with empathic ethics and a sense of responsibility to each other, she says — citizens of the world.

Roots of Empathy began with a pilot in Toronto, Ontario, in 1996, and has expanded to every province in Canada and 13 other countries, and is delivered in seven languages. In Canada, it is funded under the umbrella of mental health, social and emotional learning or bullying prevention. In Canada and in New Zealand, the program is doing deep work with indigenous people, trying to undo some of the damage done by decades of colonization and neglect. Throughout the world, funding comes from various sources — foundations, philanthropists and government entities. Funding in the U.S. is a challenge, she says, as is finding families with sufficient family leave time to be able to bring their babies into the program.

“It’s not so hard, really, to develop empathy in children,” she says. “It’s not so hard to eliminate cruelty of all kinds, which includes violence and bullying. It’s not hard. We’ve done it. What is hard, is to get the commitment that you care about that.”