Why training in Nonviolent Communication is important for Social-Emotional Learning?

Sometime back I was having an interesting discussion with a school teacher on restorative practices in schools versus retributive practices. She was talking about her own experiences of using both practices. She shared how she would quickly resort to punishments when her students did some mischief in the classroom. She was struggling with her classroom management. Later when she was exposed to different ideas of socio-emotional learning, she said she was able to handle her students’ emotions in a more constructive way and started focusing on restorative practices.

During the course of the discussions, I introduced the teacher to nonviolent communication and how it can be a powerful classroom management skill that needs to be nurtured by both teachers and students. After a month, the teacher came back to me with astounding results.

We know how social-emotional learning equips students to comprehend their emotions in a better manner. It helps the students to feel these emotions, and nurture skills of empathy and compassion. These behaviors help the students to become positive, take responsible decisions and strengthen relationships with others. We also know how social-emotional learning helps students to enhance their self-awareness and self-management skills. It also helps them to enhance their social awareness skills and handles relationships more constructively. Besides through social-emotional learning, students get equipped to become responsible decision-makers which guides them to make ‘constructive and respectful choices about personal behavior and social interactions based on ethical standards, safety concerns, social norms, and a realistic evaluation of outcomes in a given situation’. (https://www.cfchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/mission-vision/what-is-sel/docs/sel-e-book.pdf)

Further, different studies point out how an integrated school-community approach to implementing social-emotional learning can lead to social cohesion and stronger communities. Also during the discussion with the teacher, she said how social-emotional learning was linked to the neurosciences. She said during her study of social-emotional learning she realized how looking deeper into human emotions was actually useful to understand the neuroscience of social learning. We discussed how emotionally literate students are cognitively more active and how it impacts their learning, problem-solving and memory retention processes.

The one month of experimentation on using strategies of nonviolent communication helped the teacher realize how nurturing it can help students be more socially and emotionally aware. Senior Gandhian, Natwar Thakkar beautifully describes the holistic nature of nonviolent communication. He says: “To me, nonviolent communication literacy would mean how our communication efforts should be nonviolent; how our ability and capacity to communicate not only with ourselves but with our family and society be nonviolent in all aspects and overall how the entire process of communication whether between individuals, groups, communities and the world at large should be nonviolent in nature. This would entail a deep understanding of the art and science of nonviolence and its centrality in all our daily actions. It’s not just verbal and nonverbal communication, nonviolent communication literacy would also include whether our thoughts and ideas are nonviolent or not. This would also mean that we can rid of our preconceived notions of individuals or groups with whom we want to communicate and stop evaluating them to suit our own ideas. More than often we are attuned to think in terms of moralistic judgments which may be our own constructions. By developing a deep understanding of the art and science of nonviolence and integrating it into our communication practices we could get over biased and moralistic judgments; this in turn could contribute to emotional bridge building.”

Nonviolent Communication is definitely a 21st-century skill that should be nurtured by not only young people but also citizens of all ages. It is based on Mahatma Gandhi’s 5-pillars of nonviolence: respect, understanding, acceptance, appreciation, and compassion. Further, the different elements of nonviolent communication include:

• Nonviolent Communication means a complete lack of violence in the way we communicate with others.
• We should learn to communicate with ourselves and self-introspect.

· Use of appropriate and positive language

· Avoiding stereotypes in our communication efforts

· Avoid moralistic judgments

· Avoid evaluative language

• Role of mutual respect in communication

· The power of empathy

• Strong belief in the power of compassion
• Connecting with the needs of others
• Importance of flexibility in our communication
• Practicing active listening skills
• Expressing gratitude
• Humanization of our communicative efforts
• Promoting kindness in our communication

We will find the holistic approach of nonviolent communication and its different elements are essentially aimed at enhancing social-emotional learning. As the teacher said that her experience suggested that nonviolent communication helps in the promotion of constructive intrapersonal communication; this is critical at a time when many times we find that our self-talk and inner dialogues are getting strained. Similarly, the teacher talked about how the different elements of nonviolent communication were important for the enhancement of self-awareness, better self-management skills, social and emotional awareness, and relationship management.

In conclusion, to my view, nurturing and training in nonviolent communication are important for social-emotional learning to be effective.