Online NewsHour: Emotional Intelligence -- November 27, 1997

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

November 27, 1997

NEWSHOUR TRANSCRIPT

Betty Ann Bowser looks at a new teaching method that stresses social development.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Some of the kids in Miss Denuzzo's second grade class recently had a meltdown on the playground during recess. Eight-year-old Moddie was jumped by a bunch of girls who tried to take his play money. It's the typical kind of problem schoolteachers face every day, but Denuzzo didn't solve it in a typical way.
DAWN DENUZZO: Okay. Take a deep breath. All right.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Each child was allowed to explain their version of what happened.
MODDIE: They were just pushing me around, but they were choking me.
DAWN DENUZZO: Can you two talk this out for a quick second and come tell me one story.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: And then instead of sending all of the guilty parties to the principal's office, Denuzzo sent Moddie and the ringleader of the fight off by themselves to sort things out. In the end there was an apology and life moved on.
GIRL: I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.
DAWN DENUZZO: Is that okay with yo. Can you sake hands? Can you smile?
BETTY ANN BOWSER: What Denuzzo did was make the children use the social development skills they are being taught, just like reading and math, every day in her classroom at East Rock School in New Haven, Connecticut.
DAWN DENUZZO: Let's take a second to think about some things that make us excited while Billy puts the face up on the chart.
LITTLE BOY: When your ma says we won the lottery and come on we'll get in the limo. (laughter)
DAWN DENUZZO: Has that ever happened to you?
LITTLE BOY: No, but we'll keep on trying.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Social development or emotional literacy classes like these are being taught in 700 public school systems around the country. But New Haven is the first to teach it systemwide to all children, regardless of economic background, from kindergarten through high school. New. New Haven decided to teach social development seven years ago, after a study of the school population showed those who dropped out got pregnant, did drugs, and broke the law were also kids who lacked impulse control, problem-solving skills, and displayed anti-social behavior. Karol Defalco is one of the directors of the program.
KAROL DEFALCO, Program Director: Attendance rates have improved. The suspension rates and the expulsion rates have improved. The number of students who feel that fighting is an acceptable solution to a problem has decreased. They now find that there are other solutions to problems. The number of students involved in gangs, gang fights, carrying weapons, has all decreased.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: In the early grades social development focuses around a daily circle. The children are encouraged to talk about their feelings. The idea is to get the children to understand that feeling sad, feeling angry, feeling happy, or feeling lonely are all normal feelings.
DAWN DENUZZO: I want you to close your eyes and think about something that makes you feel lonely or a time that you were lonely.
BOY: When you don't have nobody to live with.
BOY: When your mother get dressed and you be alone; you be all by yourself with nobody there, just you.
DAWN DENUZZO: Children nowadays I think are dealing with things that are much more grown up than ever before. When I was in school, I don't think we dealt with the things that some of them are dealing with today, and social issues need to be addressed. The kids need to be able to come here and know that if they have to get something out, that they can. So the long-term goal is to teach kids that these feelings are okay and that everybody feels them, but how we deal with them is important, and then we make choices about how we deal with them.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Denuzzo teaches the kids appropriate ways to deal with loneliness and anger, and even though they are only second graders, when asked, they have a sense of how to use what they are learning.
TEACHER: Do any of you learn a better way to solve the problem with another kid?
LITTLE BOY: When your brother hits you, don't hit him back.
LITTLE BOY: If somebody call you a name, don't call them back a name because they're gonna keep on fussing with you.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: As students get older, the program deals with more sophisticated ways to make decisions, and the subject matter becomes more sophisticated too. In this middle school class students are asked what to do if a stranger offers them a cigarette.
TEACHER: But what could somebody do in that situation? I'll make a list.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: One by one the students go through ways they can address the problem and what the consequences would be from each solution.
STUDENT: I might tell ‘em that they shouldn't smoke, and that's bad.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Teaching social development is part of a movement that believes in the importance of emotional literacy, or emotional IQ. The concept was popularized in a book that has become a bestseller all over the world. The author is Daniel Goleman.
DANIEL GOLEMAN, Author, "Emotional Intelligence:" Emotional intelligence is a phrase for a different way of being smart. It's not the usual way of thinking about it--academic smarts--IQ--it's how you do in life, how you manage yourself, your feelings, how you get along with other people, whether you're empathic, how well motivated you are. We've been over-sold on academics as a predictor of how well you're going to do in life. You know, at best, IQ predicts maybe 20 percent of life success, and a harder look suggests maybe it's closer to 10. If you look at studies of top performers, you find that it's their emotional intelligence abilities that set them apart from people who are at the average.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: But some school reformers like Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform say social development classes take too much time away from academic training.
JEANNE ALLEN, Center for Education Reform: There's no empirical research to suggest that these programs actually do anything for the children in terms of education; that they actually get those children reading at grade level; that they get them knowing what they need to know with history and geography and all that other stuff; none.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: But Goleman says emotional intelligence programs do improve academic performance.
DANIEL GOLEMAN: I think it facilitates learning. Everything that we know about what it takes to learn shows that a child who's agitated, a child who's upset, a child who is impulsive and distracted is a child who does not learn.
JEANNE ALLEN: They're intended to make children feel good that are touchy-feely, that oh, I'm okay, you're okay; if you feel good about yourself, then you'll always do well. Meanwhile, they don't know any math.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Although no formal testing on academic performance has been done in New Haven, teachers like Susan Fineman see students making progress because she sees they are now thinking about what they do. Fineman has been a teacher for over 25 years.
SUSAN FINEMAN, Teacher: I see a calming feeling coming over the children, a better attitude about school. And even if the make the wrong decision, they know it's the wrong decision now, which is a really good step in the right direction.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: But critics say it's not just the content of emotional literacy that worries them; it's also how it is taught. Chester Finn, a former assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration, says teachers are not trained to handle such a risky topic.
CHESTER FINN, Hudson Institute: I think it's dangerous--two ways: One is a poorly trained or inadequately trained person may do it very badly, and you could end up with a problem worse than you started with. That's a possibility. The other risk is that a lot of parents really don't think schools should be mucking around with their kids' psyches and with their kids' behavior.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Even supporters like Teacher Fineman believe they are asked to do Herculean tasks in school these days.
SUSAN FINEMAN: We're doing so much that it could be overkill; that the teacher's job has expanded to such a degree that she is now a teacher and a social worker, a mother, a father, a breakfast person, a chef, whatever, but--
BETTY ANN BOWSER: And a psychiatrist?
SUSAN FINEMAN: And a psychiatrist, and whatever else has to be done. But I say if a teacher has to do that to get the child to learn, fine, because my main goal is not actually the social development program and my main goal is not to serve breakfast; my main goal is to teach the children information and to have them learn it. That's my main goal.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: But when it's not done right, the effect can be devastating, according to Eileen Rockefeller Growald, a pioneer in emotional literacy programs. Her sons attended a private school, where she says the program was mishandled.
EILEEN ROCKEFELLER GROWALD: With perhaps the best of intentions, people who are misguided can abuse programs in ways that emotionally abuse children, and they could be calling it some form of emotional literacy program, but if they're publicly humiliating a child in the midst of it, they're not doing a true service to the child.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Growald founded CASEL, the Collaborative for the Advancement of Social and Emotional Learning, an organization that is working with teachers all over the country to establish standards for programs. This fall CASEL will mail 100,000 curriculum development guidebooks to teachers all over the country. Even though she has had many hours in social development curriculum training, Dawn Denuzzo would welcome standards and new ideas. Every day her students bring more and more problems from home into her classroom.
DAWN DENUZZO: And I still am afraid that they're going to come to me with something that maybe is not within my boundaries to discuss or that I am not going to know how to deal with.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Soon it may become clearer whether supporters or critics of emotional literacy in New Haven have academic statistics on their side. Some time in the next year the city hopes to begin a study to see if emotional skills really do improve test scores.

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