Social, Emotional, and Ethical Development

Shipley is committed to ensuring that all students develop the skills and ability to make good decisions at every point in their career at Shipley. We offer an integrated and thorough “core values” curriculum devoted to Social, Emotional, and Ethical Development (SEED). The SEED curriculum is under the direction of the office of Student Support, which provides assistance that is individual and developmental in nature and designed to connect health (physical, social, and emotional) with academic skill development. At Shipley we know that it is the combination of rigor and support that leads to deeply rooted learning and success. Our SEED curriculum is a critical component of Shipley’s unique approach to education.
 
As with other parts of the Shipley curriculum, the SEED curriculum is:

  • Integrated PreK through Grade 12 and addresses a wide variety of topics (see below)
  • Integrated with other curricular elements (e.g., science, character education, physical education, emotional literacy, service learning, advisory program)
  • Supported by parent programming (details below)
  • Age and developmentally appropriate in instruction/experiences
  • Built to spiral and scaffold through the years, repeating and reinforcing key concepts over time
  • Clear about the content, skills, and assessment of each curricular piece
  • Designed to equip students at every age to acquire the knowledge and develop the skills to make good decisions.

Positive Education

Trough a partnership with Penn Center for Positive Psychology and IPEN, Shipley is poised to become the first full-immersed Positive Education school in the US.
In order to integrate evidence-based practices from Positive Education, Academic and Social Emotional Learning, Emotional Intelligence and other programs, Shipley has chosen to use an overarching framework to inform its SEED program. The framework was developed through a “metasynthesis of over 18,400 peer-reviewed publications from fields such as psychology, education, public health, neuroscience and social science across an eighteen-year time frame” (Waters, et al, 2016). The acronym SEARCH identifies six domains that contribute to a student’s psychosocial functioning and wellbeing. The framework identifies the aspects of psychological and social functioning that lead a person to “feel good, function well and do good” (Waters, et al, 2016). (Read the original research as well as the work of Lea Waters, PhD.
 
Waters, L., Sun, J., Rusk, R., Aarch, A., & Cotton, A. (2016). Positive Education: Visible wellbeing and the five domains of positive functioning. In M Slade., L Oades., & A Jarden (Eds). Wellbeing, recovery and mental health. (Chapter 13; pp 235-260). Cambridge University Press

List of 6 items.

  • Strengths of Character:

    Strengths of Character: Thoughts and actions that are guided by moral and ethical principles.

  • Emotions:

    Emotions: Present-moment experiences of emotion, identification of emotions, understanding emotional associations with stimuli and memories, cultivating positive emotions, reducing negative emotions.

  • Attention and Awareness:

    Attention and Awareness: The consciously controlled or automatic regulation of attention toward particular aspects of sensory or cognitive information, including novel aspects.

  • Relationships:

    Relationships: Enduring social relationships and momentary social interactions, including family, friend, romantic, school, societal and spiritual levels.

  • Comprehending and Coping:

    Comprehending and coping: Comprehend one’s situation by using consciously controlled or automatic processes involved with identifying stimuli, determining processes and causal relations within past and present stimuli, and anticipating or predicting future possibilities. This domain includes the application of these comprehension processes to cope effectively with adversity.

  • Habits and Goals:

    Habits and Goals: Enduring conscious or unconscious values, rules, principles and goals involved in guiding the selection of behavior and the habits and skills involved in the execution of those behaviors.

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Recent Research

  • The Missing Piece
    A National Teacher Survey on How Social and Emotional Learning Can Empower Children and Transform Schools
The Shipley School is a private, coeducational day school for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade students, located in Bryn Mawr, PA. Through our commitment to educational excellence, we develop within each student a love of learning and a desire for compassionate participation in the world.