Antecedentes en el derecho Ecuatoriano

Even though staff may have attended a training course or worked closely with support teams it does not guarantee that, at the end of the course, they will deliver the programme in the same way, or will be more skilled or feel more confident in their ability to meet children’s emotional needs, particularly those children who present as having early mental health difficulties. For example, a specific social and emotional learning intervention, the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (RCCP), which was reported as being one of the oldest and largest school-based conflict resolution programmes in the United States, was evaluated in a large-scale research project by Brown, Roderick, Lantieri and Aber in 2004. The use of this programme spread because of the practitioners’ convictions of its value and the schools’ perception of their need for such a programme. Brown et al. (2004) reported that the RCCP had trained approximately 6,000 teachers since 1985. A large-scale, short- term longitudinal, quasi-experimental evaluation was conducted involving over 350

teachers and 11,000 children in grades 1–6, enrolled in 15 elementary schools across four school districts in New York City. In order to deliver RCCP, teachers were trained to deliver the programme by attending a 25-hour course to introduce teachers to the concepts and skills in social and emotional learning, with a focus on conflict resolution and diversity education, and on the RCCP’s interactive approach to teaching these skills to children. In addition, regular classroom coaching was delivered by staff developers (generally 10 visits throughout the school year). Regular delivery of the programme to students was designed to mean at least one lesson from the RCCP curriculum took place each week. The length of the lesson varied from 20 minutes to 1 hour, depending on the age of the pupils. Teachers were also encouraged to integrate the ideas and skills of social and emotional learning into other areas of the curriculum, throughout the school day.

The extent of classroom implementation varied greatly from school to school and from classroom to classroom (Brown et al., 2004). Overall, when children were not controlled for their demographic characteristics or their exposure to RCCP intervention, the

researchers found three patterns of growth in children’s social and emotional competencies from ages 6 to 12.5: (a) increasing rates of growth, or acceleration, for outcomes such as hostile attribution bias, aggressive interpersonal negotiation strategies, and teacher- reported prosocial behaviour; (b) steady rates of growth, or linear increases, for outcomes such as conduct problems; (c) decreasing rates of growth, or deceleration, for outcomes such as competent interpersonal negotiation strategies, depressive symptoms, aggressive fantasies, and teacher-reported aggressive behaviour (Aber, Jones, Brown and Jones, 2003). One of the strengths of Brown et al.’s (2004) evaluation was that it attempted to take into account differences in how the RCCP was delivered. Over two years’ data on the

two core components of RCCP were recorded, namely the amount of staff development a teacher received, and the number of lessons in RCCP a teacher taught to the children. The findings showed that children whose teachers provided substantial instruction in the RCCP curriculum developed more positively than peers who received less or no instruction.

The findings highlighted the challenges of running effective school-based programmes and demonstrated how implementation is dependant on teachers’ attitudes and characteristics and on the commitment of school leadership. It was suggested that this has implications for education and health projects in that they need to consider how to enable schools to

develop children’s social and emotional skills and how to best help schools to enhance their ecology to promote emotional wellbeing. What the RCCP research team found was that, although RCCP staff developers made efforts to assist ‘low lessons’ teachers, they could not mitigate the overall negative impact that these teachers were having on children.

One of the criticisms of Brown et al.’s (2004) study was the lack of random control, as teachers decided whether to, and how much to, participate in the RCCP and so the

observed effects might be due to teacher characteristics as well as frequency of lessons, or a combination of the two. The RCCP programme seems to be similar to the SEAL (DfES, 2005) programme presently being implemented in British schools, in that it provides age- appropriate interactive activities designed to develop pupils’ understanding and skills in a wide range of topics related to social and emotional learning, including active listening, assertiveness, handling feelings, negotiation, mediation, celebrating differences, and countering bias. This study (Brown et al., 2004) highlights the many factors that might influence the effective delivery of such a programme. A recent evaluation of SEAL

(Document Summary Service, 2010) has also revealed a range of barriers relating to the implementation of the programme. The SEAL evaluation concludes that successful social and emotional learning programmes have certain characteristics that SEAL lacks. These were: a high level of structure and consistency in programme delivery, careful monitoring so the programme is delivered as intended by the developers, and the underpinning of resources (both human and financial). This has impacted on the successfulness, or not, of the SEAL programme in the schools participating in the evaluation.