This article this morning has inspired a blog post. In a nutshell, the results of this study say that if we look after the ‘whole child’ we can change academic outcomes – even in our low socio-economic schools.
Is anyone surprised by that? Anyone? We say that children go to school to learn – which they do but let’s be real about the learning. Children learn about the world, how to add, grammar but mostly they learn about other kids, working in a community, who to play with, who to avoid, how difficult planning and organisation is without a system and most of all just how robust and resilient they are.
Schools are a rich learning environment and we place an enormous amount of importance on the academic learning in that environment. Here are some ‘whole child’ factors that will mean that even the cleverest of clever children will not flourish:
- The child who comes to school without breakfast
- The child who comes to school hauling an emotional issue behind them
- The child who comes to school with limited or broken sleep
- The child who comes to school and hasn’t figured out the hidden rules – like putting up a hand to speak, sitting on a chair…
- The child who struggles to remember it’s library day, to pick up their lunch off the kitchen bench
- The child who is worrying if there’s going to be a friend to place with at recess and lunch
- The child who wasn’t invited to the birthday party and is worrying about that
- The child who is ‘on-edge’ and struggles to cope emotionally during their school day.
That’s SOME factors that impact on the ‘whole child’ and unless we address those factors, the little sliver of left over bandwidth that should be directed at learning will evaporate.
We need to make sure that the child knows how they’re feeling and when their feeling has become a mood. They need to know how to self-soothe, calm down and get back to learning. This emotional-self-regulation is an essential part of learning.
We need to make sure that the child has skills and strategies to cope with the inevitable tough stuff. Social stuff, emotional stuff and learning stuff too.
We need to educate parents on what to do and how to help and most importantly, to place as much, if not more importance on the Social and Emotional Learning of their child as on sourcing good tuition and ensuring good grades.