Educar con equidad -Promoting social and emotional learning in the early years – Think Equal Colombia
The requirements for a successful individual, social, and work life go beyond intellectual skills. Healthy social interaction depends on abilities linked to interpersonal relations and personal capabilities such as emotional intelligence or empathy. This innovation’s objective is to improve the socio-emotional learning of 3 to 6 year old Colombian boys and girls, taking advantage of the window of opportunity that this early age provides in terms of capacity development, in order to put an end to discrimination tendencies and equip children with abilities that will help them succeed in the future as young and adult members of society. This will be the first implementation in Colombia of this curriculum, which seeks to introduce changes in the way boys and girls interact with other people, accepting and valuing differences from an early age. The structured and innovative Think Equal curriculum brings together best-practice resources and tools that have already been successfully implemented in several countries.
Problematic
In an increasingly digitalized world, the prevailing tendency appears to be the improvement of cognitive skills, disregarding the fact that adequate human interaction requires the proper development of socio-emotional abilities. Likewise, educational, and academic advances have been linked to areas such as self-discipline, perseverance, and a number of personality traits favoring cognitive development. Building these skills is crucial to help combat prejudices and to promote peaceful relations. While there has been some interest in designing programs to develop these skills, none of them focuses on early childhood. In this sense, there is not enough evidence on structured curricula and on the implementation and measurement of the effects of these programs. Since neuroscientists have confirmed that early childhood is an ideal period of time to modify behaviors and attitudes, it is crucial to obtain more evidence on the subject.
Solution
The Think Equal curriculum was conceived under the premise that it is never too early to learn to recognize each other as human beings and to respect our differences. It is one of the few programs for 3 to 6-year-old boys and girls that explicitly and intentionally promote the development of socio-emotional skills. Developed by the Think Equal Foundation and successfully implemented in countries like Argentina, South Africa and Singapore, this program will now be implemented in Colombia for the first time. Its curriculum focuses on the caregiver’s ability to boost the motivation, self-esteem and emotional balance of boys and girls by becoming effective learning mentors and facilitators. The program has been designed as a step-by-step plan applied 4 times a week, with 30-minute lessons over a school period lasting a maximum of 30 weeks. The lessons, based on a book that is read at the beginning of every week, are grouped in specific socio-emotional skills that are taught sequentially.
Evaluation and Impact
An experimental evaluation will be conducted in which 180 centers will apply the program and their results will be compared with those of a control group. The program’s impact on socio-emotional abilities such as emotion regulation, social skills, and behavior assessment (anger, aggression, anxiety, etc.) will be evaluated. The study will also provide valuable information on the advantages of using a structured curriculum to strengthen socio-emotional skills and on the effects of providing prescriptive and easy-to-use material to preschool teachers and other professionals who may not necessarily have high levels of education or training.