An Interview with Dr. Gil Noam: SEL, Trauma, and Measurement

By Sam Piha

Dr. Gil Noam shared his model for social emotional learning at the HKL IV conference. 

We recently interviewed Dr. Noam regarding a few follow up questions. His responses are below.

Q: In your remarks at the HKL IV conference, you talked about the impact of trauma. Can you give a brief description of what you mean by "trauma"?

A: This is an excellent question because we tend to use the term quite loosely. Anything that is seriously adverse in a child’s life can be labeled as traumatic and different investigators, clinicians, and educators will have varying definitions of the term. The following points are the ones I use to teach about trauma.

Psychological trauma occurs when overwhelming demands placed upon an individual’s physiological system result in a profoundly felt sense of loss of control, vulnerability, immobilization, betrayal, and heightened sense of evaluation. It is very important to distinguish between “objective trauma” and “subjective trauma.” My definition of “objective trauma” refers to serious events of chronic conditions. For example, an airplane experiencing engine failure is going to be an objective trauma for everyone on board. However, there are many circumstances that come up that are highly traumatizing for one person and less traumatic for another. This then gets us to “subjective trauma.” Chronic parental strife is a good example of an experience that is going to be very unpleasant for any child. But some young people will experience it as highly traumatic, toxic stress, where for others, it’s part of their daily hassle but not necessarily trauma-inducing.

Q: You have said that afterschool programs can be therapeutic for youth. I know that you do not expect afterschool staff to be trained therapists. Can you comment further on what you mean by this?

A: Treating trauma requires a great deal of training and experience. It has taken many years for clinicians to develop and learn the advanced techniques required to treat trauma. it would be unreasonable to expect afterschool staff to perform as experienced therapists.

So what is the role of the teacher and afterschool educator in creating a therapeutic setting? My answer has three components:

• First, they play a role in helping create trauma-sensitive environments that support both psychological and physical safety. Children who have been traumatized need these kinds of environments, and all students can benefit from them.

• Second, staff should know the basic manifestations of trauma, such as severe separation anxiety, lack of focus, and high levels of anxiety. These symptoms can have many sources, not all of them are trauma-related for every child. Still, afterschool staff and teachers should be on the lookout for these types of signs (similar to the way they are attentive to rashes, fevers, and other physical symptoms of illness) and should refer children, in collaboration with parents, to services.

• Lastly, the closeness of mentoring relationships in out-of-school time space can lead children to describe traumatic experiences and can reveal cases of physical or psychological harm. In these cases, laws require educators and youth workers to file an official report – a very difficult process that brings up many feelings in both the child and the adult. Afterschool educators need to be trained on best practices for handling reporting. They also need to learn how to help the child speak to a trained professional. This, of course, is easier for school staff, because there is typically student support staff available during school hours. On the other hand, many afterschool staff do not have access to mental health professionals, so it is essential that we create more access points for them.

Q: You talked about the necessary connection between adversity and resiliency. There are those who say that we underestimate the impact of adversity on the youth we serve. Can you comment?

A: I am very concerned about the return of the education field to a pathology perspective. Many of us have worked for a long time to change the prevalent paradigm that saw a direct link between trauma and other adversities to psychopathology and later issues. Now, with the advent of new research on toxic stress as well as the work on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), a medical approach to problems is resurfacing. Although these new sciences and ACEs research provide valuable insight, what people tend not to recognize is that most studies show that, even with children who have experienced many difficulties, the majority are adapting well. While difficult experiences have a heightened probability of producing negative outcomes, I truly believe that the significant work on resiliency, which has shown that adversity can actually encourage and expand resiliency (even though we don’t wish adversity on anyone), has to be mentioned and looked at while maintaining concern for the vulnerable child.

Q: There is a disagreement about whether or not we should be trying to reliably measure social emotional learning and character building within school and afterschool programs. Can you share your thoughts on this?

A: Yes, we believe in the assessment of social-emotional skills as long as it is only one tool of many. It is imperative that we place youth voice at the center of educational research. In order to do so, we are required to push back against the academic purist attitude that argues against it. At The PEAR Institute, we take the approach of many academic researchers and evaluators: producing the most thorough information by triangulating methods. This multi-method approach provides different systematic relationships: parents, teachers, evaluators and students all contribute perspectives that help tell a larger story.

PEAR at Harvard UniversityWhile some argue in favor of a discussion or in-depth interview and oppose forced-choice, self-report questionnaires, others see observations conducted by teachers and anthropologists as the best option. However, we can go far if we introduce measures that allow students to communicate their strengths in the domain of SEL and we program their school experience to leverage their strengths and address their challenges from the start. If we base the decisions we make for our educational systems on quantifiable, normed student data, we can improve both personalized learning and student support in schools.

It is illogical to dismiss self-report as biased and soft when, in fact, the whole philosophy and the model of youth development and student engagement is based on the participation of the young person in their own growth, learning and self-assessment. It is also important to recognize that no method is free of potential bias in the collection, reporting, and interpretation of data – whether the method is observation of youth behavior, evaluation of student work, or examination of reports by parents, teachers, or peers. All of these methods carry a certain amount of bias that must be managed through careful psychometric research.
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First and foremost, schools should be working hard to know every child from the beginning of every school year. A well-crafted social-emotional self-report survey can give students voice to share their strengths and challenges with teachers. Schools can then use that student-provided information to tailor individualized learning and services to students’ needs at the beginning of the school year instead of waiting until a student is in crisis to step in. This form of assessment will go a long way in supporting both the social-emotional development and academic success of students and should therefore be a part of every school’s toolkit.
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Gil Noam, Ed.D., Ph.D. (Habil)
Gil Noam, Ed.D, Ph.D (Habil), is the founder and director of The PEAR Institute: Partnerships in Education and Resilience at Harvard University and McLean Hospital. The PEAR Institute is a translational center that connects research to practice and is dedicated to serving “the whole child-the whole day.” An associate professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School focusing on prevention and resilience, he trained as a clinical and developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst in both Europe and the United States. Dr. Noam has a strong interest in translating research and innovation to support resilience in youth in educational settings.