Jonathan Cohen

Columbia University | CU · Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology

School climate improvement is an ecologically informed process that recognizes and seeks to promote individual pro-social learning (e.g., social emotional learning, character education, mental health promotion) as well as organizational health. It is systemically informed improvement efforts that foster safe, supportive, engaging, and healthy schoo...

This study investigates internal and external factors that influence the post high-school success of young adults with learning disabilities. Graduates of Winston Preparatory School (n = 36)—a specialized school for students with learning disabilities located within the Northeastern United States—were interviewed between 5 and 10 years after their...

This study investigates internal and external factors that influence the post high-school success of young adults with learning disabilities. Graduates of Winston Preparatory School (n = 36)-a specialized school for students with learning disabilities located within the Northeastern United States-were interviewed between 5 and 10 years after their...

Educators have been attuned to the importance of school climate for more than 100 years (Cohen, McCabe, Michelli, & Pickeral, 2009). School climate is an ecologically informed idea that recognizes individual, small and large group trends about a range of safety, relationships, teaching & learning and environmental issues that shape student learning...

This special issue on School Safety and School Violence includes two "lead papers": A clinical-research summary of current understandings about school safety/violence trends as well as individual, instructional and school-wide preven-tion/health promotion recommendations; and a case study of a school threat situation and the resulting clinical proc...

Feeling and being safe provides an essential foundation for children to learn and develop in healthy ways. I will summarize the current research and clinically based understanding about K-12 school violence and school safety. I summarize prevalence rates that underscore that school violence is tragically common. I then outline the spectrum of exper...

School climate has received considerable attention in the literature and educational policy as a potential target for school improvement and school safety efforts. This paper provides a critical review and synthesis of the literature on school climate, with a particular focus on topics related to measurement, data collection, analysis, as well as p...

Scores of intervention programs these days apply instructional and, sometimes, systemic strategies to reduce bullying in schools. However, meta-analyses show that, on average, such programs decrease bullying and victimization only by around 20%, and often show no or negative effects in middle and high schools. Due to these sobering results, we prop...

This article provides a preliminary report on the construct validity and internal consistency of the Community Scale. The Community Scale was developed to acknowledge the perceptions of community members and to promote a student-led School Community Partnership Process within the larger context of school climate improvement efforts. A brief history...

There is very significant and growing interest in school climate, SEL, and other prosocially informed school improvement efforts. Yet there is confusion about how they are similar and/or different. I have suggested that it is useful to consider the underlying concept, the educational tradition that each camp grows from, as well as an effective and...

The objective of this study is to understand what K-12 building and district leaders as well as school climate coordinators in the U.S. think about school climate reform: How important do they believe school climate is? And, to understand what they need and want with regard to further conceptual clarifications, policy reform guidelines, measurement...

This insightful volume focuses on the critical challenge facing our educational system: how to develop supportive, engaging, and healthy schools and educators that successfully enhance the social, emotional, ethical, civic, and academic competence of all students. Fink, Cohen, Slade, and other field leaders brilliantly connect multiple perspectives...

Many youth participate in extracurricular activities, and research has linked activity participation with school engagement and academic success. Social-ecological theory suggests that the social contexts of different types of extracurricular activities may differentially affect student outcomes. Yet, there is scant research examining the relation...

Reviews the book, Promoting Youth Sexual Health: Home, School, and Community Collaboration by Gina Coffee, Pamela Fenning, and Tommy L. Wells (see record 2015-48015-000 ). This book is written for prevention and intervention specialists who learn and work with youth. It is designed to offer current information about sexual behavior and guidelines t...

In this paper, we review and critique current bully prevention efforts. This work presents an integrative, narrative review of bully prevention and school climate improvement research. We suggest that targeted bully prevention programs and curricular-based efforts are marginally helpful. We suggest that a continuous process of school climate improv...

There is growing federal and state support for school climate improvement and pro-social education. The National School Climate Council has developed a consensus statement about the foundational importance of intentional pro-social instruction and school climate improvement efforts. In addition, this consensus statement outlines a core set of resea...

A growing body of school improvement research suggests that engaging all members of the school community, including community members and leaders , provides an essential foundation to successful school improvement efforts. School climate surveys to date tend to recognize student, parent/guardian, and school personnel voice but not the voice of comm...

There has never been more federal and state support for school climate reform efforts in America. Paradoxically, most practitioners are not sure what school climate improvement means on day-­‐to-­‐day basis. This commentary details three factors that contribute to school climate reform being more of an idealized goal than an actual school improveme...

In this issue of the Journal of Character Education we have been asked to consider two sets of understandings about change and to comment on their implication for our educational goals and the methods we use to actualize these goals. My comments and suggestions grow out of my understanding of the purpose of K-12 education to promote skills, knowled...

For more than a century, there has been a growing interest in school climate. Recently, the U.S. Department of Education, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Institute for Educational Sciences, a growing number of State Departments of Education, foreign educational ministries, and UNICEF have focused on school climate reform as an evidence-b...

Life is full of ups and downs. What allows some people to be able to “bounce back” and some not? Virtually all scholars appreciate that this capacity to “bounce back” or be resilient is a biopsychosocially informed interactive process that refers to the findings that some individuals have relatively good psychosocial outcomes despite suffering risk...

The Organization of American States’ (OAS) Inter-American Charter (2001) declares that “The peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it” (preface). As the Charter also recognizes, one important means to promote and defend democracy is to teach it in schools. We will examine how...

School climate refers to the character and quality of school life. It is based on these patterns and reflects norms, goals, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching, learning, leadership practices, and organizational structures. School climate is at the nexus of individual and group experience. School climate is based on the individual's perce...

Understanding people and school communities is complex. Facilitating helpful and meaningful change—at an individual or school‐wide level—is challenging. As a clinician‐educator and a socially and emotionally informed educator, we describe what we do and do not understand about School ABC. We suggest that at the school and individual levels, underst...

Compelling empirical research shows that a positive and sustained school climate promotes students' academic achievement and healthy development. Not surprisingly, a positive school climate also promotes teacher retention, which itself enhances student success. Yet the knowledge of the effects of school climate on learning has not been translated i...

Background/Context Educators have written about and studied school climate for 100 years. School climate refers to the quality and character of school life. School climate is based on patterns of people's experiences of school life and reflects norms, goals, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning practices, and organizational st...

In this commentary, the authors call upon educational leaders to think broadly and anew about the responsibility that the federal as well as State Departments of Education have for the well being of children and families. The authors detail six recommendations that will help to close the current gap between school climate research, policy, practice...

In this commentary, the authors call upon educational leaders to think broadly and anew about the responsibility that the federal as well as State Departments of Education have for the well being of children and families. The authors detail six recommendations that will help to close the current gap between school climate research, policy, practice...

Since the original “Wednesday night” meetings Sigmund Freud and ensuing generations of psychoanalysts have been interested in applying psychoanalytic discoveries to the education of children and adolescents. Child analysts and educators are potentially natural allies: both are concerned with promoting children’s healthy development and capacity to...

In this article, Jonathan Cohen argues that the goals of education need to be reframed to prioritize not only academic learning, but also social, emotional, and ethical competencies. Surveying the current state of research in the fields of social-emotional education, character education, and school-based mental health in the United States, Cohen su...

In this article, Jonathan Cohen argues that the goals of education need to be re- framed to prioritize not only academic learning, but also social, emotional, and ethical competencies. Surveying the current state of research in the fields of social- emotional education, character education, and school-based mental health in the United States, Cohen...

This article summarises what is old and new about the social-emotional education of children and adolescents. Building on educational research as well as the Center for Social and Emotional Education's work with over 15,000 educators, school-based mental health professionals and parent leaders, we summarise the core principles and practices that ch...

Guest Editorial: Stopping School Violence

In the last fifteen years, there have been three major developments in child and adolescent psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. After briefly reviewing what is clear and unclear about the nature of child psychoanalysis, the author describes and critiques three recent trends: (1) a greater differentiation of aetiological fa...

Children may present with reading and/or attentional and/or affective (depressive) disorders in childhood. Although reading problems are more readily identifiable, childhood attentional and affective disorders can be difficult to recognize and diagnose. Here are discussed a number of complex and potentially confusing ways in which reading, attentio...

The relationship between learning disabilities and psychological development is a complex, ongoing intrapsychic and psychosocial process. The results of two clinical-psychological investigations about a group of learning-disabled children and a group of learning-disabled adolescents is summarized. Although the learning-disabled youngsters were psyc...

Although patients and clinicians have often noted that autonomic self-regulation learning results in an increased awareness of internal states, it is unclear how sensory thresholds change during this process. To begin to study this, three single subject experiments were conducted in which participants received EMG and thermal biofeedback while prac...

In the last two decades there have been a number of reports suggesting that non-pharmacological procedures can reduce blood pressure in hypertensive adults. It is well known that fifteen to twenty percent of the adult population suffers from some form of hypertension. There is relatively clear evidence demonstrating an inverse correlation between l...

To examine how various aspects of attentional functioning are affected by autonomic self-regulation procedures, this study compared the effect of two treatment programs (EMG and thermal biofeedback used in conjunction with various somatic and cognitive relaxation/self-regulation strategies, and Benson's Relaxation Response procedure) and a Waiting...

There is a striking silence in the psychotherapeutic, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic literature with regard to psychotherapists preparing for their deaths. The anxiety-provoking nature of contemplating, let alone actively planning for, death as well as the experience of separateness and timelessness that can be an integral aspect of the practice o...

The identification and diagnosis of a learning disability in the college student are complex tasks. They constitute important tasks when we realize that 720,000 college students (6 percent, if we assume that there are 12 million in college today) may be learning disabled ( Astin 1983). It is evident that children with learning disabilities are at r...

This study sought to examine how perception of time duration was affected by two autonomic self-regulation treatment procedures: a biofeedback/self-regulation treatment program and a relaxation response treatment program. Time experience was assessed in two ways: time interval estimation during an actual treatment session (N = 5, in each of the two...

This study sought to examine how perception of time duration was affected by two autonomic self-regulation treatment procedures: a biofeedback/self-regulation treatment program and a relaxation response treatment program. Time experience was assessed in two ways: time interval estimation during an actual treatment session (N=5, in each of the two g...

In the past 15 years there has been a growing interest in the Tavistock group relations approach to group and organizational behavior. To begin to ex-amine and evaluate the current status of training and education in Tavistock group relations work in America, this paper describes one comprehensive group relations training program. We then describe...

20 undergraduates were given 8 sessions of guided imagery (GI). Pre- and postdata indicate that relative to a control group, Ss who experienced GI became significantly more inner directed, as measured by the Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) and that they became significantly more field independent, as measured by the Embedded Figures Test. Incr...

Pdf document that compares and contrasts Social and emotional learning programs to Conflict resolution education, with bibliography. Written above title on document: NCIP (National Curriculum Integration Project).