Social and Emotional Skills call for a holistic action
It requires evidence to drive systemic change, said Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for the Directorate of Education and Skills, in his final words at the international launch event for the first results from the OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES).
“We know that many employers value [social and emotional] skills, and many school systems nowadays prioritize their development, but they are quite hard to measure and compare.” To address this gap, the OECD survey has collected data on the social and emotional skills of 3.000 students aged 10 and 15 from ten cities around the world. The virtual launch session, hosted by OECD in cooperation with Microsoft, provided an opportunity to learn about the key findings of the study and to discuss actions necessary to drive forward action to root social and emotional learning (SEL) in education policy worldwide.
The online launch event, on 7 September 2021 was held in partnership with Salzburg Global Seminar, with Program Director, Dominic Regester moderating the panel discussion that featured several Salzburg Global Fellows.
Social and Emotional Learning has been at the core of Salzburg Global’s education programming since 2016. The OECD survey is one of the most significant pieces of research on this topic and has important implications for teachers, school leaders and policymakers around the world.
For the first time at an international level, the SSES describes students’ social and emotional skills and how they relate to their personal perception as well as that of their parents and teachers. This triangulation is unique to the OECD study and has made way for ground-breaking findings.
In his report summary, Schleicher explained that while persistence is considered a valuable skill and often encouraged by parents or teachers, curiosity is a skill that intrinsically motivates children from a very early age. The study thus shows that curiosity is positively linked to strong academic performance, particularly in mathematics, suggesting children with the intrinsic motivation to engage in often challenging subjects are likely to perform better.
One way to enhance curiosity is to encourage children to build links between their personal interests and the subject they are learning about, suggested Angela Duckworth, psychologist, and CEO of Character Lab, a non-profit organization with the mission to advance scientific insights that help children thrive. However, research has shown that such efforts usually do not have a long-lasting effect on children’s level of curiosity. Instead, regular training and continuous encouragement are necessary to build the muscle memory for these 21st century skills.
As James Heckman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and professor at the University of Chicago, outlined, – social and emotional skills – unlike personality traits – are competencies that can be learned and trained. However, this cannot be done in schools alone. A holistic approach looking at the role of teachers and parents, as well as extracurricular activities such as sports or arts and culture, is crucial in fostering these skills.
With her Escuela Nueva education model, Vicky Colbert, former Vice-Minister of Education in Columbia and current Executive Director of the Escuela Nueva Foundation has found one possible approach to integrating SEL in the classroom. Developed out of the need to provide equitable education for children in rural Columbia, the model has received wide acclaim internationally and proven that SEL can go hand in hand with traditional academic learning instead of a trade-off between the two.
Nonetheless, the discussion also revealed that while there has been a notable increase in similar individual and bottom-up efforts to foster SEL throughout recent years, a systemic paradigm shift in education policy is yet to occur. The status quo of education has many protectors, and it requires evidence to change that, closed Schleicher.
If you are interested to learn more about SEL outside of schools, join our upcoming program Beyond the School Gates: Developing Social and Emotional Skills Outside of Formal Education.
