Committee for Children Blog

2018 Midterm Election Lesson: Adults Should Model Social-Emotional Skills

Adults can help foster a more peaceful society using social-emotional skills like empathy, and by supporting children.

Over the past couple of years, America’s children have seen adults doing things that social-emotional programs specifically teach them NOT to do: bullying, ridiculing, and threatening. Committee for Children’s executive director suggests how adults should practice social-emotional skills.Read More


Mindfulness - Joan Duffell

Response to Charlottesville: A Call for Empathy and Inclusion from Joan Cole Duffell

The terrible events in Charlottesville and the news stories and conversations of the past week are weighing on our minds here at Committee for Children. Such hatred, violence, and intolerance can only be extinguished by working together now to buiRead More


Joan Cole Duffell

Harvard’s Global Education Innovation Initiative Conference Recap

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As leader of Committee for Children, a global nonprofit that strives to help the world’s children develop vital social-emotional skills through Second Step SEL, our evidence-based social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum, I was excited to be invited to Harvard’s Global Education Innovation Initiative Conference (GEII) this past May.Read More


Building on Martin Luther King’s Powerful and Profound Empathy

What role do educators play in creating a more empathetic world? ? In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. day, Committee for Children’s executive director Joan Cole Duffell and Dr. Calvin Watts, superintendent of the Kent School District have written a gripping op-ed in an effort to urge school systems and the country at large to do the work that’s needed to build on Dr. King’s profound and powerful level of empathy. 

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