My name is Bob Selman and I am a professor
of education and of psychiatry at Harvard University,
and I've been here for over 40 years.
I began my career at Harvard Medical School.
I was trained as a clinical psychologist and I directed a school.
I actually directed a school for socially and emotionally disturbed kids.
After 15 years of that kind of work I became very interested in
what causes these kids to end up the way
they were when we finally got to see them because if you look at them,
they didn't have a lot of biological problems,
so most of it was environmental.
So, I became interested in prevention.
And now, we're just looking at everybody and trying to figure out ways to promote
social development for all kids.
I've been puzzled by
a similar question to the one that random acts of kindness has which kind of goes,
if it's so important to promote social development,
why aren't we doing it?
There are a couple of new forces
emerging recently that really make this issue much more salient.
Social-emotional development or social development feels more
urgent for three reasons that are new.
One is that the federal government has started to put funds into
safe and secure schools and states are trying to figure out how to use those funds.
The second reason is that teachers are now
facing the effects of being evaluated in their classrooms,
and the evaluations are not limited to academic instructional time but also
the classroom climate and how teachers promote positive social relationships in schools.
And the third is a general cultural issue which is that social media,
social networking is putting kids' interaction with each other 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, and some of those interactions are clearly not going well.
There's a lot of teasing, harassment and bullying
on the web and that's just caught everybody's attention.
So the digital era is really also having an impact.
So often, when folks start to
talk about the kind of competencies and skills we're talking about today,
they're not sure what to call them.
So they call them something like non-cognitive skills.
And I think that sets a tone which is that they're not essential
because I think not everyone,
but a lot of people, have bought into the idea that
school is simply about academic achievement.
It never has been, it isn't now,
and it never will be.
But we need to bring back an interest in what I call social development.
Other people call them soft skills because somehow I guess they
think physics is hard and social relationships are easy,
but I would tend to disagree with them.
I think social relationships are among the hardest things we have to
learn how to do well.
I think one can make a distinction
between two kinds of school-based social development categories.
One is what I want to call
pro-social behavior and the other I'll call social understanding.
I won't give formal definitions but I'll try to exemplify them.
So pro-social behavior is being nice to people, having good discussions,
following reasonable rules, and just those kind of things that
almost everybody would agree are indicators of respect and decency.
And those we can find largely in the climate of the schools,
on the playgrounds, in the classrooms.
Those are not often taught directly.
That's a big leap. But the other kind of skills that we're talking about are
social understanding skills and those are really social cognitive skills.
Those are the kind of understandings and awareness that
traditionally are part of the content of curriculum.
So I think if we think about those two categories and
try to understand how they relate to each other we can make a lot of progress.