Forgiveness Education Identified by the CDC as a way to “Promote Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Learning”

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) recently released a new “Action Guide for School and District Leaders on Promoting Mental Health and Well-Being in Schools” and Dr. Suzanne Freedman’s 2018 Journal of Moral Education article, “Forgiveness as an educational goal with at-risk adolescents,” was included as an example program for what schools can do to “Promote Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Learning.”  Forgiveness education helps students recognize and express all emotions, with a specific emphasis on the message that anger is a normal and natural emotion and it is what we do with our anger that can be considered good or bad. It helps students recognize, express, and decrease anger as well as develop perspective-taking skills, empathy, and compassion for one’s offender and others.  To have the CDC recognize it and use it as an example of a targeted approach to teach emotional development illustrates how important forgiveness education is in teaching students to express and regulate all emotions, specifically the release of anger after conflict and situations of interpersonal or intrapersonal hurt.

As described in the abstract in Freedman’s (2018) study,  forgiveness education  was implemented with 10 at-risk adolescents

attending an alternative high school in a Midwestern city. Twenty-one participants were randomly assigned to either the experimental group (forgiveness education class) or the control group (personal communications class). Classes met daily for 31 sessions for approximately 23 hours of education. Enright’s process model of forgiveness was used as the focus of the intervention. After the education, the experimental group gained more than the control group in forgiveness and hope, and decreased significantly more than the control group in anxiety and depression. Verbal reports from the experimental participants following the education also illustrate the positive impact forgiveness had on the students.

Go to the following link, https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health-action-guide/index.html, to see the CDC’s recommendations for “Promoting Mental Health and Well-Being in Schools.”  To specifically view Freedman’s (2018) article, click on the tab, “Promote Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Learning,” then scroll down again and click on “Example Programs” under “Offer Targeted Education Focused on Teaching Social Skills and Emotional Development,” then click on “Forgiveness within the family.”  If you are not an APA member, to access the article go to,  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322326007_Forgiveness_as_an_educational_goal_with_at-risk_adolescents