One of the country’s most prominent organizations promoting social-emotional learning has a new leader. Joshua P. Starr is now the chief executive officer of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL.
Previously, Starr was the CEO of PDK International, a nonprofit focused on eliminating teacher shortages, as well as a former superintendent and classroom teacher, among many other roles he’s held in a long career in K-12 education. He’s also contributed occasional pieces to Education Week Opinion.
CASEL, a nonprofit, promotes SEL in schools nationally by disseminating best practices.
Starr takes the helm of the group as the field of SEL is navigating swiftly changing political and technological landscapes. SEL has been challenged by some conservatives as promoting liberal ideologies. And while there may be opportunities for artificial intelligence tools to boost students’ social skills, there’s also potential for the technology to undermine the development of those skills.
Education Week spoke with Starr about the current challenges facing educators as they try to teach students social-emotional skills, and how CASEL plans to support them. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What do you think are the big challenges and opportunities for social-emotional learning in the next five years?
I love the fact that there are so many educators, nonprofits, parents, elected officials, and the business community that get it. That was not the case when CASEL started.
That’s the opportunity we have, to continue to lead a field that is widely recognized as more important now than ever before, but also within a landscape that is rife with conflict and disagreement. So, how do we continually reinvent ourselves, assert the importance of social-emotional learning within a very changed landscape?
Will there continue to be political pushback to SEL, and how should supporters of grounding students in those skills respond?
I really try hard not to read any political tea leaves—because how can one these days?
I know that when you describe the core SEL competencies—much in the way that my 12th grade creative writing teacher, Ms. Freeman, used to say—“show, don’t tell.” When you show people how critically important the competencies are to a child and an adult’s well-being and their future success, nobody can disagree with you. When you talk about the need for kids to have good relationships, take responsibility, be disciplined, have a sense of self, set goals, everyone’s going to agree with that.
Because we live in an attention economy, snippets of lies about what SEL is take hold in the popular imagination. That’s unfortunate, and we’re going to have to constantly fight against that as all educators do these days with so many things.
What challenges and opportunities does AI present to social-emotional learning?
I’m not sure yet.
I feel like some of the backlash against tech and AI is well-founded. Some of it is fear of the unknown. It is changing our relationship with institutions. It’s changing the workforce landscape. It’s changing teaching. It’s changing everything. And when people fear the unknown, they glom onto, “it’s the fault of social media companies. It’s the fault of one-to-one devices,” whatever it may be.
And there may be some truth to some of that, but the manifestation is in laying blame at the hands of something that’s very tangible, and not stepping back and saying, “we’re actually afraid of the unknown.”
Academics are necessary. They are not sufficient if we want our kids to thrive in an increasingly complex world on their own terms.
That’s actually where SEL competencies are more important than ever. How do we sit in a community and even have discussions about the right role of screens? How to use AI? How to use social media? In order to have those conversations, you’ve got to be self-aware. There’s a theme here, right? You’ve got to have relationship skills. You have to be able to listen.
So, I actually think there’s a role for us in helping to create that dialogue around what AI should look like in different communities and in schools.
I know that sounds a little abstract right now because I honestly don’t know. We need to be at the table. We offer something that nobody else does.
What are your thoughts on using artificial intelligence-powered tools to teach SEL?
One of my great frustrations with education in general is the number of educators who are willing to take simple solutions to really complex problems. If they think SEL is 9:45 on Thursday morning for 20 minutes and a chatbot can do that, I wish I could convince them otherwise.
Although I may not know enough about technology, education is ultimately a human undertaking. The experience that kids have with each other, with content, with adults is directly correlated to their success as human beings in the marketplace and academically.
I don’t know that AI can help with anything other than the back-end management of some of that experience. There are some great management tools, but certainly not the forward-facing, delivery of the kind of experience we know is so essential to kids’ success.
Attendance is another persistent challenge that schools face. CASEL will soon be partnering with districts to tackle chronic absenteeism. What will that look like?
This is not about attendance management. This is about the experience that children have when they’re in school. And if they have a relationship with an adult, if they are engaged in classwork, and if they have good relationships with peers, they are more likely to attend school.
We are taking all that we know through our research and our practice to then really roll up our sleeves with a school district, do a thorough assessment, because Montgomery County, Md., [where Starr once served as superintendent] is going to be different than a rural Kentucky district.
So the first step is understanding what the needs of the district are, how they’re approaching attendance management, and then really providing some very in-depth support to the school system as well as people in the schools to increase belonging and engagement and relationship development—that will make kids want to come to school and want to stay there.
What is your vision for CASEL moving forward?
When CASEL started, it defined the field. There would be no field of SEL without CASEL.
I want us to reassert ourselves as the clear standard-bearer for a very broad field. And to do it in a way that brings people together around this idea that schools are about more than academics.
Academics are necessary. They are not sufficient if we want our kids to thrive in an increasingly complex world on their own terms.
