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Social and Emotional Learning: Making a Case in an NCLB World"

Target audience: Educators in the elementary and secondary grades interested in evidence for the value of social and emotional learning and practical ideas for implementing it

Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important -- there's no doubt of that. But it takes more than those basic academic skills for students to grow into happy, successful adults.

This could have happened at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory cooperation — one that other primates did not take — led to social rules and their enforcement, to human altruism and to language. “Humans putting their heads together in shared cooperative activities are thus the originators of human culture,” Dr. Tomasello writes.

Schools offer teachers and students an opportunity to do what is almost never done in society. In schools we can gather together a group of twenty to thirty people and have them listen, discuss, analyze, and share differing points of view. Schools provide a rare chance to read, debate, write, and quietly think. We don’t need expensive technology to learn how to ask excellent questions, articulate ideas, and be forced to defend our thoughts.

Technology can, of course, do amazing things. Any tool can be used properly or improperly. Unfortunately, with devices like Smart Boards, images come and go, and the teacher is often looking at a computer screen for part of the class. Smart Boards and similar technologies reinforce the idea that knowledge resides in things. We don’t need Smart Boards, we need smart people.

teaching is worth discussing. Anything else can be found for free on the Internet.

Good technology use in the classroom is transparent and intertwined.

Motivation is a drug. It is a short-term target.