Author: Shumin Chen

The summer went by so fast! Now I am approaching the final week of my internship at PEAR. This is such a fun organization and I wish I could stay longer. Although the workplace environment is much less official and standard than I expected–locating in a house-like building at the bottom of the McLean campus–I really like the office culture here. People feel at home in the office and are close to each other. The senior staff members are easy-going and open-minded. We have brown bag lunch every Friday where people working in the office all have lunch together and chat. We shared a lot of laughter during this time. This friendly vibe helps me gain a sense of belonging and gives me the bravery to speak up and share any ideas I have that come up at the moment. Through my eight weeks working at PEAR, office culture has become one of the most important considerations when I choose my future job.

Through my time at PEAR, I realize that funding is one of the biggest issues for most of the non-profit organization and social justice work in the world. Take educational injustice as an example. Some non-profit organizations conducting research on educational injustice have to wrap up their research project quickly as soon as they are able to create a report. They often do not get to the point of getting their research work published into the field because the budget is running. Many schools and after-school programs are not able to provide engaging social-emotional learning curricula and STEM education because of the limited educational materials and facilities. Some educational institutes have to give up sets of curricula because they cannot afford some materials required to run them. When I was designing the Clover social-emotional learning curriculum for non-profit programs, I took a lot of practical factors into consideration. I try to minimize the technology components and replace the teaching tool kit with more affordable ones without compromising the quality of the curriculum. I hope this could increase affordability of the Clover curriculum and allow more schools in low-income communities to implement the Clover curriculum set developed by PEAR.

At PEAR, I have developed a twelve session social-emotional learning curriculum manual from scratch, and now it is almost ready to be piloted. After spending seven weeks doing research, brainstorming, editing and formatting the curriculum, it seems like my baby now. I could not have achieved what I created this summer without collaboration with my supervisor, my fellow interns and other staffs in the office. I learned that collaboration is such an important piece at work. In most workplace settings, people are expected to work independently and be responsible for their own tasks. Everyone is busy working on their tasks and people don’t have the responsibility to help you. This dynamic is very different from that in a school setting. I find it harder to reach out for help at work than in a school setting where professors, mentors, and advisors are paid to help students and my fellow schoolmates get used to helping each other because we share similar goal or interest. It took me some time to learn how to appropriately reach out, speak up and get both my concerns and interesting ideas noticed in the work setting.

Another important lesson I learned was that I should build my work upon my strength. People have different personalities and working styles. Some of your colleagues might be more active or talkative, more humorous and come up with ideas faster than you, and that is OK. That doesn’t mean you are doing worse. You have your own strengths. You might be more organized, more meticulous, or better at creating things on paper. You are good as long as you are contributing in some way and always report your progress in time so that your supervisor is aware of what you have contributed. Don’t wait on presenting your progress until the last minute.

Now my internship at PEAR is coming to the end but I am not ready to say goodbye. I am grateful to everyone at PEAR and the WOW program for making this wonderful summer experience happen.

Through my academic work at Brandeis, I have learned that curing psychopathologies is rather difficult. Even after recovery, patients might still relapse. Therefore, early intervention and support on social-emotional learning are important.

People don’t just have mental disorders all of a sudden. They might start with a small concern or bother and then it gradually progresses into an affliction. With professional support, patients can better handle those concerns and keep them from growing into a blaze, which can prevent further difficulties in the future.

Despite this information, we rarely talk about early intervention in the classroom. Therefore, before my internship this summer, early intervention was only a vague concept to me. I did not really know how it is developed and carried out. To me, it seemed like a magic stick and somehow it was developed by some professionals to save children from mental distress in their futures. That is until recently, when I took over the role as a social-emotional learning curriculum developer at PEAR (Partnerships in Education and Resilience) for early intervention, which exposed me to how complex the process is.

The past few weeks of my time at PEAR have been a mixture of fun and struggle. In the first couple days, I received training on the Clover Social-Emotional Development Model and pretended we were middle-school kids as we tried out the activities and games in the curriculum manuals. It was a lot of fun. But as I started to do the actual work to further develop other manuals for this group of curricula, I realized that I underestimated the hard work required to develop such a fun and audience-specific curriculum for the early intervention of mental disorders.

I have sat at the desk all day for weeks conducting literature reviews, and looking for evidence provided by researchers to figure out what mechanisms and practices would be effective to support different populations of students at early adolescence with different needs for mental support. At times, I felt my research findings were never enough and that many research findings were inconsistent. Furthermore, deciding which practices should be implemented in the curriculum manual to guarantee effectiveness has not been an easy task, beyond also making the curriculum kid-friendly and engaging.

Fortunately, my colleagues and supervisors are very supportive. Every week, we brainstorm potential activities for the curriculum based on the research finding. I also carry out field test experiential of those activities to keep refining the curriculum manuals according to feedback. Even though I am working on intervention of mental health burdens, my focuses are not limited to dimensions that a certain population need support on. Kids are very complex. Kids who need mental health support do not just have a combination of several symptoms. In order to help kids balance among different dimensions of abilities, we need to take both strengths and weakness into account. Even though this process contains a lot of twists, turns and frustrations, I am glad that I am working on intervention curriculum that will make a direct impact on children, especially those who are in low-income communities.

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!