Leading the Way With SEL

If you read the headlines and stay abreast of the research on EQ you no doubt know that individuals with high quality emotional intelligence, relationships, and character are greater predictors of success than IQ. We recognized this at Brewster in 2011 when we became the first boarding school to establish a curriculum emphasis on emotional intelligence making it as necessary as precalculus and biology, as breakfast and study hall, as afternoon enrichments and Sunday pickup games. It has been a part of mission ever since.
 
Beyond the business columns and interviews with CEOs, beyond the research and white papers that show individuals who possess high emotional intelligence are more successful than those who lack a high EQ, what does “teaching” social and emotional learning (SEL) actually look like?
 
As students navigate through A and B weeks (hint: Saturday classes happen on A weeks), block schedules, and trying to remember the official start time of afternoon practices, they also participate in an SEL block nearly every week. And participate they do, as there is a lot of role playing and interaction – actions that strive to cultivate empathy and compassion – that happens in these classes.
 
Here’s what building a foundation for emotionally intelligent and socially aware graduates looks like at Brewster.
 
Freshmen are beginning the year with a focus and discovery of emotions: why they matter and how they impact their daily cadence. Specifically, students will work on recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions (the RULER Approach) in a course we call Owning Up. And understanding the value of meta-moments. Since Brewster graduated its first class of SEL prodigies, we have seen more than one social media post from an alumni who proclaimed something like “Just took a meta-moment! Thank you, Brewster Academy!”
 
Try this at home (or anywhere): The next time you receive an email or text that raises your eyebrows, sends your BP trending upward, gets your goat, or otherwise just annoys you, your assignment is to take a meta-moment. It could literally be a moment or, better yet – a few hours or a whole day – before you respond to the “trigger”. Then reflect on how that response looked after your meta-moment against what it might have revealed had you reacted immediately. Emotions matter, and we’re helping teach our kids just that.
 
In their weekly Optimizing Your Intelligence classes sophomores are being introduced to growth mindset. Dr. Carol Dweck coined the term decades ago, and she explains it like this: “When students believe they can get smarter, they understand that effort makes them stronger. Therefore, they put in extra time and effort and that leads to higher achievement.” In Opti (as the students refer to it) they practice visioning out goals and strategies to meet those goals – in roll up the sleeves and talk it out with peers and teachers’ sessions. In doing so they reflect on their personalities and what motivates them, eventually merging into understanding how emotions impact learning (remember Owning Up?), critical thinking, and handling dilemmas. The goal isn’t to make 10th graders experts in handling setbacks but rather to set them up to handle what they might perceive as failure in ways in which they will grow from it and eventually meet success. This is growth mindset.
 
Engage to Educate (or E2E as you’re likely to hear from a Brewster junior) has them exploring the social issues they encounter daily – across the lunch table, in the dorm, and in the broader world. They are immersed in discussions about ableism, stereotypes, sexual orientation, transgenderism, and gender binary, and will finish out the term creating a multimedia gender messaging project to help raise awareness within the BA community about gender stereotypes, transgender issues, negative gender messaging, or turning those negative messages into positive ones.
 
Seniors – as this cohort prepares to Launch into college – they examine issues beyond themselves like civic engagement, ethics, reviewing their own social media presence, and understanding their place and expectations as community members in the greater world in which they will inhabit as young adults.