The PEAR Institute is a nonprofit organization founded as a collaboration between McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. PEAR partners with school districts, out-of-school-time programs, and youth-serving organizations to promote social-emotional development in the service of student engagement, academic achievement, and life success. PEAR is developing a set of social-emotional curricula for middle-school-age children building upon the Clover model of youth development for educational institutes such as public schools, after-school programs, and other education nonprofit organizations all over the United States.
As a psychology major, I am highly interested in the social-emotional development of children. My academic and career goal is to directly make a positive impact on the social-emotional development of children. As an intern at PEAR Institute, I am getting training regarding the Clover model of youth development and social-emotional development curricula developed by PEAR to understand how to improve the resiliency of high-risk children in order to help them develop effective strategies to overcome challenges in their social and academic life.
The Clover Model of Youth Development
Children in families of low social-economic status are more susceptible to mental health burdens and social-emotional challenges due to family instability, financial stress, and undermined collective efficacy of neighborhoods, while they have limited affordable resources available to overcome these social-emotional challenges throughout the course of development. Furthermore, due to the prejudice, social stigma, and impairment caused by social-emotional difficulties, children with mental health burdens are more likely to stay in low social-economic statuses when they become adults. To ameliorate this social injustice, the PEAR institute contributes to offering professional help to children in need, especially children who cannot afford individual therapy and support.
As a PEAR intern, I am responsible for further developing and refining activities of the social-emotional development curriculum program, which includes setting and adjusting goals according to the Clover model, conducting literature reviews on social-emotional development, and applying research findings and feedback from instructors. In the beginning, I received training on the social-emotional development curriculum and the Clover model of development to better understand how the whole set of curricula works. I will also refine evaluation tools for the curricula and maintain consistent structures of curriculum materials across the Clover groups.
Our goal this summer is to improve the flexibility and attractiveness of the activities in the curricula so that educational institutions with smaller budgets can still run the curricula while allowing more students to benefit from the curricula. With more institutions implementing these curricula, we will be able to observe changes and acquire holistic student assessment data for children who have taken our curricula. This feedback will allow us to refine the curriculum and to improve its credibility with evidenced-based research, both of which will enhance PEAR’s efforts to further promote the curriculum to additional communities and partners.
My internship just started this week and I had so much fun trying out the games and activities of the Clover curricula. I am definitely excited to continue exploring this field!