Even if I was a therapist, I wouldn’t use social-emotional circles
Monday, August 19, 2024
Part three of a three-part series called “Breaking my silence on social-emotional learning.” You can read part one here and part two here.
Until this point I’ve argued that since I’ve trained most of my adult life to teach math, and not give therapy, I shouldn’t try to become a therapy hobbyist with the teenagers in my classroom. I’ve also argued that the thorny issue of confidentiality probably can’t be overcome with any clear benefit to students. But until reading Shier’s book, aside from a few other misgivings – like whether there was evidence that this actually translated into real skills for kids or would actually improve academic performance – I assumed that social-emotional circles might be a useful practice for a properly trained individual.
(A quick aside on what I mean by “properly trained”. Therapists and counselors go through years of focused training to do what they do. So when I say “properly trained” I’m not talking about a three-day professional development intensive or extra online learning modules. I mean actually trained. A person with a little bit of knowledge and too much confidence is more likely to cause harm than a person with no knowledge and no confidence.)
However, Shier convincingly argues that this practice shouldn’t be done with students because it’s bad therapy. That is, a good therapist wouldn’t conduct this practice with students to begin with. In the chapter before she addresses circles and social-emotional learning more generally, she details ten steps to “bad therapy.” Here they are:
- Teach kids to pay close attention to their feelings.
- Induce Rumination
- Make “happiness” a goal but reward emotional suffering
- Affirm and accommodate kids’ worries
- Monitor, monitor, monitor
- Dispense Diagnoses Liberally
- Drug’em
- Encourage kids to share their trauma
- Encourage young adults to break contact with their “toxic” family
- Create treatment dependency
The three that are most relevant to circles are teaching kids to pay close attention to their feelings, monitor, monitor, monitor, and encourage kids to share their trauma.
Teach kids to pay close attention to their feelings
Shier interviews Yulia Chentsova Dutton, who is the head of the Culture and Emotions Lab at Georgetown University. She says that, “Emotions are highly reactive to our attention to them. Certain kinds of attention to emotions, focus on emotions, can increase emotional distress. And I’m worried that when we try to help our young adults, help our children, what we do is throw oil into a fire.” The problem, as I understand it, is that our emotions are our brain’s blunt reaction to stimuli – and they aren’t true in some fundamental, cosmic, objective sense. This is related to one of the psychologist Jonathon Haidt’s three great untruths that we too often tell kids, which is “always trust your feelings.”
Dutton goes on to point out that we tell kids feelings are “always valid, always important to track, pay attention, and use to guide your behavior, use (them) to guide how you act in a situation.” This is problematic for several reasons. Emotions are unstable, are a result of “many cues” that are sometimes not even visible to us, focusing on them can cause them to intensify, and they are manipulatable. In circles and similar SEL interventions, like SEL “check-ins”, we erroneously send the message that emotions are of the utmost importance.
Monitor, monitor, monitor
Constantly monitoring kids’ emotions, and asking them to do the same, almost certainly encourages them to place more importance on their emotions. But beyond that, the monitoring itself is problematic. Just asking kids to share personal feelings in front of their peers is stressful enough, but in a circle we ask them to do it in front of an adult who they look up to as well. Peter Gray, psychology professor at Boston College and author of an introductory psychology textbook, points out that adding monitoring in and of itself adds anxiety. He says, “When physiologists do research where they want to add an element of stress, and they want to compare people doing something under stress versus no stress, how do they add stress? They simply add an observer. If you’re watched by somebody who seems to be assessing your performance, that’s a stress condition.” In a circle this “stress condition” is built-in.
Encourage kids to share their “trauma”
Finally, and maybe the most important reason circles in schools are a form of bad therapy, is that it’s bad practice to encourage kids to share their “trauma.”
It might be different if a kid is asked to “share their trauma” once in a school year. But many teachers doing this throughout the year creates a cumulative effect and the potential harms become greater the more that we do it. Physician and mental health expert Richard Bing helps ex-convicts adjust to life outside of prison. This group of people has disproportionately suffered severe trauma. He says, “Really good trauma-informed work does not mean that you get people to talk about it. Quite the opposite.” Essentially, this can encourage rumination, a “state orientation” instead of an “action orientation,” and for some people not talking about things is actually good for them. (Even when I read the last of those I recoil a bit. How could NOT talking about something be good for a person? It’s so antithetical to our mental health culture. But given how diverse one human mind is from the next, why would we assume that one singular approach to trauma works for everyone?)
There is a lot to be said on this, but I think Shier’s story about Sarah drives the point home. Sarah is “a teacher married to a doctor, raising three kids she and her wife adopted out of foster care. All three kids suffered sexual and physical abuse before the state removed them from the home of their biological mother. Each has a significant learning disability.”
I’ll spare you the details of what the kids went through, but one of Sarah’s constant concerns is, according to Shier, the “teachers and counselors (who) are eager to play amateur therapists.” Sarah explains that teachers who engage in social-emotional lessons “don’t understand the ramifications of the words that they use can make a child feel less than, in just a simple assignment, whether it’s social-emotional or not. By trying to do the right thing they hurt my kid.”
When asked how they hurt her kid, Sarah responds “Because they don’t understand the gravity of what her situation is.”
It’s worth including Shier’s entire paragraph following Sarah’s response:
When teachers casually pry into Sarah’s kids’ past pain for the benefit of class “unity” and empathy development, it puts at risk all the work her children have done in actual therapy to cope with the memories of their early childhood, and cordon them off, for the length of a school day. “It’s not right,” Sarah said, referring to teachers, constant invitations the kids share their traumatic experiences.
The tip of the iceberg
This leaves us searching for a good reason to use circles. The “check-in” style circles, which teachers are supposed to try while building up to the more “meaningful” circles, encourages students to put undue importance on their feelings, possibly amplifying negative feelings, and are a form of monitoring by adults. The more meaningful circles are likely to do all of that and additionally could re-injure students who are working through (or have worked through) real trauma. The only other broad type of circle I’m aware of is a restorative justice-style circle. The problems with this type probably warrant a post of their own, so I won’t get into those here.
I should add one more thing about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that a teacher should never have times in class where everyone has the opportunity to share, even about something traumatic. I can imagine “elephant in the room” situations in which open conversation is important for the classroom community. Or at the beginning of the year when you’re establishing classroom norms with students. But these should be the exception, not the norm.
Also, as I’ve emphasized in the disclaimer below, I am not disparaging anyone who does circles or other SEL practices we’ve learned in recent years. Until roughly last April I would ask students how they tired or energetic they felt and how positive or negative they felt as part of every warm-up to start class. I stopped after I read this article from Shier called “How Bad Therapy Hijacked our Nation’s Schools.” (This article is a great synopsis of her arguments related to education, for anyone who wants to read them without buying the book.)
Given the reasons circles are bad therapy and that they’re almost always run by a person who is not a therapist, it seems clear that not only should I not do them in my classroom, educators shouldn’t advocate for them to become common practice in educational settings at all. As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I focused on circles because it provides a concrete example that demonstrates many aspects of bad therapy. In reading the book, however, Shier argues that much of social-emotional teaching, and therapy culture in general, hurts young people’s mental health more than it helps. The implications are far beyond what I’ve addressed here. Unfortunately, given the school year is imminent, I probably won’t have much time to write about the rest of the proverbial iceberg in the coming months. But I highly encourage you to read the book and decide for yourself. For a brief synopsis, you can also read the article I linked above. Or, if podcasts are more your thing, you can listen to her discuss her arguments here.
I linked this in the first post, but if you think I’m overstating anything about circles here, read this Edutopia article about them.
Disclaimer: I realize that in writing this and publishing it publicly I run the risk of upsetting some friends, colleagues, and, potentially, administrators. Unfortunately, there are times when that risk must be taken in order to say what is true, needs to be said, and is not being said. I write this while passing no bad judgement on any educator who has implemented restorative circles or other restorative and social-emotional learning practices in their school or classroom. We have had countless trainers in countless hours of professional development the last several years telling us that this is best for kids – that kids will learn better and be more emotionally healthy if we do this. I don’t fault anyone for doing what we were told by the experts was best practice. I hope only to illuminate a contrary perspective that, in my opinion and experience, has significant ramifications if we are to truly do what’s best for our students.