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#BTColumn – Social and emotional learning – for teachers, too

by Ralph Jemmott
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By Ralph Jemmott

An article by Barbados TODAY’s reporter Emmanuel Joseph quotes Tony Olton as outlining a litany of social and emotional issues facing students and teachers in the contemporary Barbadian classroom. He is quoted as saying that unless attention is paid to the needs of both students and teachers, the authorities would be “spinning top in mud”. What was surprising was the long list of issues presented in the case of both teachers and students with the current system.

The Barbados TODAY reporter stated that the findings by Olton’s Caribbean Institute for Social and Emotional Learning (CISEL) were backed by the Barbados Ministry of Education’s own assessment of the issue. Among the conditions presenting among students were no less than 14 disaffections. Within the student body, these include frustration, uselessness, disappointment, exasperation, confusion, depression, intolerance, discontent, indifference, insecurity, sadness and fatigue. Among the faculty, the negatives included being tired, frustrated, anxious, angry, disappointed, demotivated, discouraged and impatient.

If these negatives represent an existential truth about our schools, they must have a substantial pejorative impact on the teaching-learning activity in our classrooms. It should be beyond question that a reasonably stable learning environment is a prerequisite for qualitative teaching and learning. No teacher can teach effectively and no student who actually wants to learn can do either in an environment that is perpetually disruptive and disrupted. But go ahead and abolish the 11-Plus which some have us believe is the source of all our schooling woes.

Some of the above-mentioned negatives require explanation. What, for example, would constitute uselessness, insecurity, disappointment and sadness? Disappointed, intolerant and exasperated about what exactly? The world is full of troubles; the Good Book says, “Man is born to trouble as the smoke flies upward.” Children are not immune to and in fact, may be more vulnerable to some of these troubles some of which are not of their own making. I told a parent at a Harrison College form-level meeting that her son seemed to have suddenly changed. The boy had actually moved from where he normally sat and distanced himself from his classmates. Hearing that, the mother said to me, “Mr Jemmott, I don’t want to bother you with my problems, but me and his father are divorcing.” That explained a lot and I chose to deal more cautiously with the child.

The issues of teacher social and emotional well-being also require greater expansion. If teachers are in fact encountering more vulgar behaviour, drug use and violence from and among students, it may not be surprising that they are experiencing increasing feelings of anxiety, burn-out and demotivation. After all, teachers are human too, often with their own problematic children and facing their own domestic and interpersonal issues. A teacher told me some months ago that given the stress she was experiencing in the classroom, she had to admit that sometimes she felt that she was just going through the motions. How much is that kind of sentiment replicated among the teaching fraternity at large? What would that say about our chances of “reimagining and implementing education transformation”?

We are living in an unhinged world in which people seem to be less caring and empathetic. Teachers are not immune to social and emotional disease. They do not have an inexhaustible reservoir of patience and care in a culture that is showing diminishing quantities of both. The problem of co-opting and retaining a satisfactory quota of teachers will worsen as the current reform movement seems to be asking more and more from classroom teachers, particularly in the sphere of affective learning. Some time ago I heard a high-level teacher-educator say that the teachers entering the profession today were far below the standard compared with ten years previously.

Philip  H Coombs, in his excellent text entitled The World Educational Crisis: A Systems Analysis, has written: “The problem of teacher supply is not one of simple numbers. It is first and foremost a question of quality—of getting a large enough quantity of the right quality. We can ‘usually find enough warm bodies to keep order in the classroom. Our problem is to find enough who can actually teach.”  

Coombs concluded that the teaching profession must “recoup enough of its own best output to reproduce a good future crop”.           

Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator.

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