Social Emotional Learning, PART 7: TEACHERS - NOT TRAINED PSYCHOLOGISTS!

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Even if the science supported SEL, a serious operational problem with implementing SEL is assessing its effect on students, their behavior and mindsets, and their achievement. In a poll conducted in late 2017 and early 2018, only one in ten teachers reported that their schools measure such non-academic characteristics very well. Even SEL enthusiasts admit that valid assessment is challenging. 

An overarching problem is that, the personnel doing the assessing probably aren’t qualified. Mental-health professionals undergo years of training in evaluating patients, and it simply isn’t possible to train teachers to perform similar evaluations of their students. This is especially true when mental-health professionals recognize the ambiguities of assessing social-emotional traits among still-developing children and adolescents.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Megan O’Bryan expresses dismay at this concept: “The idea that our government would sink millions (billions?) of dollars into training and supporting unlicensed, quasi-trained teachers/ interventionists in the hopes that they can improve the social and emotional development of masses of children frankly makes me sad.” O’Bryan warns that having poorly trained personnel apply one-size- fits-all interventions to groups of children will backfire, especially with respect to sensitive children. “As a practitioner who specializes in anxiety,” she writes, “[I know that] almost every anxious child misinterprets messages from well-meaning teachers. Sensitive children are hardest hit by these programs” because they “take [the teachers’] words, quite literally, and agonize over them.”

But Duckworth and Yeager pointed out that observers of these experiments may draw subjective conclusions, and that children may behave differently in such contrived situations than they would in the real world. 

Duckworth and Yeager concluded: “perfectly unbiased, un-fakeable, and error-free measures are an ideal, not a reality.” And while Duckworth argues that grit and other SEL attributes should be measured to provide feedback for personal improvement and for research purposes, she believes the measurement difficulties create “incentives for cheating,” and “displac[e] intrinsic motivation” and should therefore not be used to assess SEL traits like grit for accountability purposes. Because of this, Duckworth withdrew from the board of a California consortium of schools incorporating SEL into accountability measures. “I do not think we should be doing this. It is a bad idea.”