I was glad when I learned that a program called the Second Step Curriculum is being used in our District 91 schools. First let me describe how Second Step works and then I’ll tell you why I like it.

Joan Duffell, one of Second Step’s creators, served from 2007 till 2019 as the executive director of the Committee for Children.

“We realized,” she says, “that we needed to understand why people hurt other people. When we reviewed the literature, we found that violent and aggressive offenders consistently lack a core set of social and emotional skills: empathy, impulse control, emotional management.”

According to the Second Step website, “The program builds the vital competencies students need to thrive, strengthening behavior, belonging, and engagement. Independent research involving more than 19,000 elementary students shows Second Step delivers consistent, real-world gains in climate, belonging, and behavior.”

All K-8 grades are given four age-appropriate units, each with weekly scripted lessons and downloadable handouts to support student engagement. Every unit contains five 15- to 30-minute, teacher-led lessons available in English and Spanish, with the final lesson serving as a performance task where students demonstrate their learning. The four units are:

Growth Mindset & Goal-Setting

This unit’s content helps create classrooms that are connected and encouraging by helping students set and achieve collective and personal goals and learn from challenges and mistakes.

Emotion Management

Students learn how to build their emotion vocabularies, practice identifying their own and others’ emotions, and recognize the importance of labeling and processing their emotions.

Empathy & Kindness

Students learn how to recognize kindness and act kindly toward others and how to develop empathy by learning strategies to take others’ perspectives. This unit’s content helps students understand others’ points of view.

Problem-Solving

Students learn how to process strong emotions, describe a problem, identify the wants and needs of others, think of and explore the outcomes of potential solutions, and pick the best solution.

Why is Second Step a good thing?

1) Social emotional learning

The church where I used to be the pastor, St. Paul’s Lutheran, is located right across the alley from what used to be Grant White School.

For several years during the 1990s I would go to the kindergarten and first grade classes once a month and sing songs I had made up about feelings. Until one day the principal told me that the children had to spend more time on subjects like reading and math (cognitive learning), so I should not come by anymore. 

Here is why I got fired from my volunteer “job” and why I feel good about Second Step.

In 1983 a report was published called A Nation at Risk. Standardized test and SAT scores were falling. The U.S. was dropping behind competitors such as Japan; 23 million Americans were functionally illiterate.

“The document set off panic.” (Hechinger Report)

In the scramble to compensate, social/emotional learning was deprioritized.

The pendulum began to swing back toward social/emotional learning at D91 in the new millennium with the introduction of programs like Character Counts and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS).

2) A counter to privatized morality

Professor Dean Thomson explained privatized morality this way:

“Martin Luther King Jr. could confidently declare that segregation was wrong because it violated a moral order built into the universe. His authority and moral power stemmed from a shared understanding [in our country] that certain truths — like the inherent dignity of all human beings — were not merely personal opinions but objective realities.

“Today, such appeals to a universal moral order seem almost quaint back home in the west. The shift from shared moral frameworks to individualistic, subjective values, the privatization of morality, has left Western societies adrift.”

For example, if I say this is right or this is wrong, someone who disagrees with me can reply, “Well that’s just your opinion.”

Tinisa Huff is the principal of Betsy Ross Elementary School here in Forest Park. One of her tasks is to create a “unum” out of the “pluribus” in her school, a culture in which everyone is heading in the same direction and knows how to get there together.

The Second Step website states that the program teaches skills and competencies, but words like empathy, kindness, and understanding others’ points of view imply that certain values and virtues are assumed, which most residents in this community believe to be self-evident.

Without apology, it seems to me, D91 is unwilling to go along with privatized morality and say “that’s just your opinion” regarding social/emotional learning and is willing to promote values/virtues like empathy and kindness.

Principal Huff said, “At Betsy Ross, we are very intentional about developing the whole child. We know these early years are an important time for children to begin developing strong character, positive values, and the social-emotional skills they will carry with them as they grow.”

Check out Tom’s ongoing substack posts about the fictional life of Pastor Walter Mitty at https://tomholmes10.substack.com