Teaching emotional regulation and social skills: New challenges for schools

Annual Report 2024 – Our research foci

As Western societies change and become increasingly diverse, school ­systems must adapt accordingly. How can we transform traditional educational structures to­create more inclusive ­systems? In an insightful conversation, Lilly Shanahan, Ana Costa-Ramón, and Denis Ribeaud offered comprehensive perspectives on the changing dynamics of school systems in Western societies. 

Today’s school systems face multifaceted challenges closely linked to societal changes such as shifting gender roles and immigration over recent decades. One of these challenges comes in the form of increasing immigration and the resulting heterogeneity of pupils, as Denis Ribeaud highlights. Sociologist and criminologist by training, the Senior Research Associate has spearheaded multiple projects at the Jacobs Center. According to him, linguistic barriers and cultural diversity can cause parents to have different values, leading to diverging expectations of what schools should or should not do. Another challenge is how timetables are structured, especially in elementary schools which often don’t offer daycare. For instance, if students have to return home for lunch since there is no daycare at the school, one of the parents has to be at home to receive them. “This is a part that is usually done by women as it has traditionally been the expected duty of women,” Ribeaud clarifies. In turn, this will affect the working hours of women and, subsequently, the economic dynamic of the household. A third challenge that schools face is integrating students with learning disabilities. Despite this, many school structures in Switzerland have remained unchanged, making it difficult to address these issues effectively.
Lilly Shanahan, Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, stresses that “we have a shortage of clinical child and adolescent psychologists. For instance, if a child has ADHD or needs evaluation for learning problems, they must sometimes wait for six months or longer for professionals who can evaluate, which in turn can affect the children, their parents, and teachers, and even entire schools.” 

Schools today must teach children a broad range of skills beyond traditional academic subjects. Shanahan notes that “schools are already doing an incredible job, and we should also talk about what they have already achieved.” However, she emphasizes that the school systems need to rethink their curricula: “What schools have to address in addition to math and languages is teaching emotional regulation skills, social and civic skills, and also preparing young people for their professional life.” Essentially, a school’s core mission should include developing students’ social skills to live in a complex and diverse society.
Lilly Shanahan’s research in the United States focused on “self-regulation from childhood to adulthood.” Her findings indicate that “children who were able to regulate their behavior and emotions better, which in part they learned in the school context, were doing better in terms of their mental and physical health in adulthood.” When measuring academic achievement, the study revealed that academic performance also reflected social competence. Students with better “self-regulation and social skills” tend to have better grades. According to Shanahan, “investing beyond traditional childhood education is worthwhile because self-regulation and social skills contribute to school performance but also to health and well-being later in life.”

As Ana Costa-Ramón, Assistant Professor of Economics of Child and Youth Development, summarizes, “developing non-academic skills is crucial.” However, she also highlights implementation challenges, 
noting that “measuring these alternative skills, finding ways to improve them, and enhancing students’ lives across multiple dimensions” remains a primary objective and challenge. She adds that “how to teach what we teach” deserves further “examination and study.” Building on this point, Shanahan suggests that “teachers’ education should also be adjusted to what is expected of them in school. In addition, schools need support from more personnel, because it is unreasonable for teachers alone to cover all the diffi­cult tasks that schools have to fulfill.”
Costa-Ramón further emphasizes the vital role of schools in providing structure, creating consistency, and nurturing students equally regardless of background. She explains that “schools can be a great equalizer for kids from different backgrounds. Changing home ­struc­ture is much harder, but they have similar resources in school. Schools can compensate for needs that aren’t met at home.”

Ribeaud reminds us that the increasing challenges in school systems don’t stem exclusively from systemic deficiencies but that the socioeconomic and diverse cultural backgrounds of students inevitably influence their behavior in school as well as their academic per­formance. According to his research on school career models, gender played a significant role in students’ performance in secondary school and apprenticeship: Immigration background in boys tends to affect their performance in school more than their female peers of the same circumstances, whereas there is hardly any difference between girls with a migration background and boys without a migration background at age eighteen.

Educational policies in Europe, the United States, and other regions have been evolving to better prepare schools for the future. For instance, more external support systems have been adopted to assist teachers in classrooms in dealing with the overwhelming situation resulting from integrative policies. As Shanahan stresses, “teachers have to be supported appropriately.” According to her research and experience in the US, many school districts offer additional assistance to teachers who have students with behavioral problems. “In some cases, there is a second person in the elementary school classroom as the teacher’s assistant. Also, if a child has behavioral problems, a person can be assigned full-time to assist them. This is not cheap, but it benefits everyone involved.” 

Apart from human resources, schools are adapting to technological changes in society, particularly with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). This has led to a very controversial debate among scholars and the public. Reminding us that AI has already entered the schools, complementing the older system, Shanahan asserts that “a huge part of school is learning how to function in social groups, how to interact with your peers, how to interact with adults, or how to deal with failure. Those are all things that, at least at the moment, you can’t fully learn by interacting with a computer program or AI. There is a human element, plain and simple.” She also highlights the flaws of AI where it can be “biased because it is trained on materials created by people, many of whom have their own biases.” For instance, there have been reports of “racial bias and bias against women by AI.” In short, AI can be extremely useful in school contexts if used responsibly for certain assignments, such as learning about a new topic or even learning a new language. Importantly, in school, children learn “the responsible way to deal with AI, learn what’s real and what’s fake.” Costa-Ramón adds that schools are necessary as independent structures in children’s education: “Isolation caused by social media is among the common concerns nowadays. And the school time appears to be a safe break during the day.” In conclusion, Ribeaud notes that the lack of skills to monitor and guide children toward healthy technology use requires further research and consideration.

Author: Florence A. Zufferey
Editor: Servan Grüninger