Humans are social species that rely on cooperation to survive and thrive. The impact of social deprivation is well documented and presents a grim picture of severe physical and psychological consequences. As the evidence for the importance of social interactions piles up, the awareness of teaching social skills increases as well. For these reasons, social-emotional learning has become a really popular framework in classrooms today.
In this article, we’ll break down the concept of social-emotional learning, talk about its importance, and see how it can effectively be incorporated in mainstream classrooms as well as homeschooling settings.
If there was anything you ever wondered about social-emotional learning, here is where you’ll get your answers. So, without further ado, let’s begin by addressing the importance of social skills in general.
The Need for Social Interactions
When talking about the importance of social skills, people usually focus on the benefits seen in all aspects of life – personal, educational, and work-related. However, the importance of teaching kids social skills has a much more fundamental value. That is, people who have poorly developed social relationships, are withdrawn or isolated, and find it hard to communicate with the people around them, face severe health problems, on top of the impoverished mental health.
Just how serious the social impact is on our lives is shown in studies that have linked social relationships with mortality. One meta-analysis published in the PLOS Medicine journal in 2010 reviewed the extent to which social relationships influence risk for mortality and which aspects of social relationships matter most. They found that participants who had poor social relationships had a 50% higher chance of dying than those with strong social relationships, even when controlled for other external factors. Of the many different social aspects, the authors found that the social integration factor influenced the mortality rate the most. What does that mean?
This study is in line with previous studies that have also reported similar social effects, especially related to loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Social integration, which is typically defined as having a broad range of social relationships, actively engaging in social activities, having a sense of belonging in the community, and identifying with the social roles, plays a big role in people’s quality of life. We need social connections to survive and thrive.
Toward Social-Emotional Learning in Classrooms
As you’ve seen from the definition of social integration, building successful relationships and acknowledging and managing our own emotions are the two key components that represent the foundation of social-emotional learning (SEL). For these reasons, teaching kids social-emotional skills is just as important as teaching them classic cognitive skills, such as reading or writing.
But, before we get into the details of how to organize the process of social-emotional learning in the classroom, let’s provide a theoretical conceptual framework of what exactly social-emotional learning is and what it’s not.
What is Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)?
To better understand social-emotional learning, we need to define it and identify its key components.
The term social-emotional learning refers to a specific pedagogical methodology that aims to help students better understand their emotions by identifying what they’re feeling and why, so they can control, manage, and focus them on positive outcomes, such as building close and strong relationships based on mutual respect, open communication, empathy, and healthy boundaries, among other things. On top of that, these learned behaviors will help students to make better decisions, to be more resilient against social pressures, and to believe in themselves.
Social-emotional learning (SEL) in the classroom should be an integral part of the standard curriculum. This means that it can work well with other methods such as brain-based learning, personalized learning, or even game-based learning and gamification.
Benefits of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)
To sum up everything that we’ve said so far, in addition, we’ll share all the benefits of implementing social-emotional learning in the classrooms.
- Healthy Identities. While, we don’t usually like associating terminology such as “healthy/unhealthy” to psychological phenomena, in this case, considering the consequences of social isolation, we can say that learning social-emotional skills will help kids to build a resilient identity. This, in turn, will lead to much more satisfied and healthy lives.
- Being better individuals. Everyone wants to be a good human being, and part of that is being able to understand others, listen actively, show empathy, have consideration, and be there for them when they need you. Social-emotional skills lie at the base of all prosocial behaviors.
- Being happy! Life satisfaction is strongly associated with social-emotional skills because they lead to emotional maturity, figuring out who you are, and what you want from life.
- Being successful. Academic and later career achievements are not solely based on cognitive capacities, but also on social-emotional skills. To be successful, children will need to have discipline, patience, motivation to work hard in the long run, to show determination, and dedication. And intelligence or academic knowledge has almost nothing to do with these things.
Core Components of Social-Emotional Learning
By now, we probably have your interest and you’re wondering how you can introduce social-emotional learning in your classroom. Let’s find out.
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), an organization providing high-quality, evidence-based knowledge and resources for social-emotional learning, identifies 5 core components (or abilities) of SEL.
Teaching SEL means promoting these 5 competencies:
- Self-awareness – an ability to recognize, identify, and understand our own emotional state. Increasing kids’ emotional vocabulary, giving reflective exercises or class assignments, encouraging dramatic play or role-playing, are all good ways to promote self-awareness. Another important factor is to actively listen and acknowledge kids’ feelings by talking about them and making them “normal.”
- Self-management – an ability to control our own emotional responses. Be careful, controlling the emotional response is NOT the same as controlling what we’re feeling. No one can control their feelings and it’s important for kids to know this. By denying or repressing emotions, we’ll lose control over our behavior because they’ll manifest in an unconscious way. On the other hand, we can control how we respond. This is a step beyond self-awareness, which means kids will first identify their emotions and then manage their behavior by learning constructive coping mechanisms (social support – giving and receiving is one of them).
- Social awareness – an ability to understand the emotions of others. Imagine entering a room full of people with serious faces. How would you feel? If a child answers uncomfortable questions, then they already pick up social clues. Social awareness is a skill that can be learned, not something we have within us. It’s also closely related to empathy, so if you want to read more, check out our article on how to teach empathy.
- Relationship skills – an ability to build and maintain close and healthy relationships with people from diverse backgrounds. This skill is based on open communication, conflict resolution tactics, and boundaries.
- Making responsible decisions – an ability to take into consideration others in making a decision or responding. For instance, making a responsible decision can be defined as a calculated act to respect others, not hurt anyone, and keep promises.
Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) in the Classroom
The above-described components make up the framework of social-emotional learning which can be used for the establishment of optimal learning environments and coordinated practices across different aspects of the child’s life (home, classroom, hobby, friends, etc).
In the classroom, social-emotional learning programs and practices require a systemic approach involving everything in the child’s life – from parents and teachers to school leaders and other community members. However, the biggest responsibility falls over parents and teachers, meaning positive coordination between them is crucial.
The most beneficial way to introduce social-emotional learning in school is by integrating it through the typical curriculum. One example of this would be making lectures more personal and relatable, without actually changing the academic material.
Different teachers for homeschooling parents will approach SEL in different ways, and this is okay. Some prefer to schedule a formally designated portion of the lecture or school day to social-emotional learning where kids can focus exclusively on social-emotional assignments. Writing an essay or text about one’s feelings at the end of each day is one way to achieve this.
Others, on the other hand, find it better to include social-emotional learning elements into standard subjects such as math, science, physics, history, and so on. For instance, role-playing a historical event and having a reflective discussion afterward is one example. But, this can also include giving group assignments with self-delegation requirements, asking reflecting questions during class, or organizing practical thematic activities that promote social skills.
Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Activities
In the previous paragraph, we mention on a couple of occasions that you can schedule formal SEL time or assign kids practical social-emotional learning activities in combination with the standard academic material. But, what would these activities look like?
We recommend reading the book “All Learning Is Social and Emotional: Helping Students Develop Essential Skills for the Classroom and Beyond” by Nancy Frey for more information, but in the meantime, we’ll share our favorite SEL activities:
- Asking kids to make art on an abstract topic based on how they feel about it.
- Teaching emotional vocabulary (including learning what emotions are, learning the specific emotions with theoretical definitions and practical examples, why emotions occur, what their function is, etc).
- Always accompany homework or class assignments with reflective questions for kids to answer after finishing the assignment.
- Assigning roles to students. For instance, board eraser, chart writer, librarian, financial manager, homework monitor, lunch monitor, first-aid helper, computer helper, and so on.
- Making SMART charts for setting goals in different aspects of life.
- Team Building activities. The simplest activities are the most fun and probably most effective. For instance, group rope jumping, trust walks, and so on.
- Encouraging kids to speak in a positive way.
- Practicing affirmations.
- Daily greetings can become a ritual.
- Visualizing stress as a concrete object in front of children so they can tell them how they feel about it and throw it away from them.
- Naming the emotion everyone is bringing to class every day.
- Sharing personal stories.
Before You Go
We hope that this article helped you better understand the concept of social-emotional learning. It’s a very important framework that rapidly gains popularity in education, which means that it’s not a good idea to underestimate it. In fact, in a couple of years, the mainstream curriculum might change to leave space for learning social skills in early childhood education. And, if that doesn’t happen, we’re sure that schools and other educational institutions will incorporate social-emotional learning standards in the future.
In the meantime, we’re here to support teachers by sharing all the trends and methods reliably. To be objective, we base our guides on scientific findings and leave questions open when there’s still room for discussion. If you head over to our blog, you’ll find many other useful guides for both new and more traditional teaching practices.
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