Inside Education 425, Social Emotional Learning with Sara Rimm-Kaufman (5-6-22)

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

On this podcast I discussed social and emotional learning with Professor Sara Rimm-Kaufman from the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development.

Among the topics discussed were:

• What social and emotional learning is
• The implicit and explicit process of learning social and emotional skills
• How children can learn empathy
• Her book for teachers: SEL from the Start
• From listening to respectful communication to respecting others’ perspectives
• Where social emotional learning fits in the regular school curriculum
• What service learning is and examples of it in practice
• Three possible categories of service learning solutions: Educate others, change a policy or take direct action.
• The relationship between service learning and project-based learning
• How Sara Rimm-Kaufman and her colleagues (including Tracy Harkins and Eileen Merritt) developed Connect Science, a scheme that uses the service learning approach to combine social emotional learning and academic content
• Applying service learning in different curriculum subject areas
• The notion of “fidelity of implementation” in education research (and an “intent to treat” analysis)
• The theme that characterises her research interests: the centrality of social emotional learning (e.g. for racial equity) and the widespread practices in school that have never been studied but would benefit from research into their effectiveness or lack of effectiveness
• The source of her research interests
• Her early research on primates and working with Professor Jerry Kagan to subsequently working in schools with children in first grade.
• Why she likes conducting research in schools, despite the challenges such research brings
• Relational trust – what it is and why it is important among the adults in a school
• Who has responsibility for building relational trust among the adult community in a school?
• Building relational trust with and among children in a school
• The relation between a teacher’s beliefs and their practice – a bidirectional process.
• She loves the work of Dan Willingham, a former guest on this podcast.