Keeping the Program Alive Posted on April 10, 2008 Marc Brackett (bio) describes quality assurance issues with work in social-emotional learning.

Another issue with our work in social-emotional learning with children is schools don’t have a social and emotional learning department. So we go in, and we do our one-day trainings, and we get them the curriculum. But we’ve had to develop over the last few years techniques and methods for keeping the program alive in the schools.

How do we make sure the teachers are actually doing it? Are they doing it right? Are they actually doing the 25 lessons that are required per year? Are they following the procedures within each of the steps of the delivery? And so my lab and my colleagues and I have been really working a lot on figuring out the best ways to do this quality assurance.

Is it going to be in-class observations? Peer observations? Video taping the teachers delivering the program? So we’ve come up with a number of methods to help us see that. Again, this is very costly because it requires a lot of time on the part of the research team.

And then there is whether or not the students enjoy the program, testing, figuring out ways of doing that. Whether or not they’re actually doing the assignments at home because a lot of our curriculum is trying to get parents involved with children, having conversations about emotions and feeling comfortable disclosing and getting this to be topics that are not taboo.

That it’s okay to know that Mommy’s stressed or that Daddy’s stressed and that you’re stressed. And if everybody knows about it, maybe stress can go away a little bit because there’s no need to hide it, and you’re not scared to disclose it and comfortable with it. So we’re working on methods to figure out the best way to test whether or not parents are actually doing the program with their children.

And so those are all things that really have to be taken into consideration in going back to study design. Because when a program is multifaceted, you’re testing the program, which has multiple components.

« Back to Article