Playing Nicely With Others: Why Schools Teach Social Emotional Learning
If your children’s school seems to suddenly be devoting its time and resources to something called SEL, it may be leaving you wondering what happened to good old reading, writing and arithmetic (or even that new darling, coding). You’re not alone. SEL stands for social emotional learning, and it’s a hot topic at the moment among educators with good reason.
While you may not have heard the acronym SEL before, you have probably seen social emotional learning sprinkled throughout schools’ mission
statements, behavioral expectations and curricula, under the varying monikers of character, resilience, personal responsibility, self-control, “grit,” emotional or social intelligence, among others.
statements, behavioral expectations and curricula, under the varying monikers of character, resilience, personal responsibility, self-control, “grit,” emotional or social intelligence, among others.
The Collaborative for Social Emotional and Academic Learningdefines social emotional learning as: “the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.”
In other words, social emotional learning is what allows students to control their behavior, understand how their personal behavior impacts others, and enables them to empathize and collaborate with others. As any teacher can attest, children who are less able to master these skills impede their own learning and can disrupt the educational process for their classmates as well.
An oft-cited study on the impact of SEL on learning indicates that students who lack of social-emotional competencies become less connected to school over time, “and this lack of connection negatively affects their academic performance, behavior, and health.” The study goes on to report that SEL programs confer a positive impact on student behavior, academic achievement and grades.
While social emotional learning programs may look different from school to school, most are designed to support and enhance five areas of social and emotional development:
•Self-awareness: The ability to reflect on one’s own feelings and thoughts and understand how those feelings and thoughts affect behavior.
•Self-management (also referred to as “self-control”): The ability to control one’s own emotions, actions and thoughts.
•Social awareness: The ability to empathize with other people, understand and adhere to social cues and adapt behaviors so they are appropriate to a given social situation.
•Relationship skills: The ability to communicate with peers, make friends, manage disagreements, manage appropriate and inappropriate peer pressure and cooperate with a diverse range of people.
•Responsible decision making: The ability to make healthy choices about one’s own behavior while weighing consequences, safety, ethics and the well-being of the group.
One aspect of social emotional learning that has drawn a lot of attention in the news media over the last few years is the characteristic of “grit,” a term coined by Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Duckworth defines “grit,” a relative of the self-management competency mentioned above, as the ability to resist distractions in the short-term while remaining focused on long-term goals. She refers to it as “the key to success” in her incredibly popular TED talk that has racked up nearly 5.5 million views, and many have come to tout “grit” as the magic X factor in learning and an important part of social emotional learning education. Whether that approach is valid, educators and parents are scrambling to find ways, in Dr. Duckworth’s words, to “be gritty about getting our kids grittier.”
Many schools are working to implement social emotional learning programs in the hopes that strengthening these five core competencies can reduce bullying and increase school safety. From a teaching perspective, I can attest that it’s far easier to educate a classroom of students who feel feel emotionally and physically safe, supported by their teacher and their peers. Conversely, when students and teachers don’t treat one another with dignity and respect, the classroom can become an oppressive and unpleasant place to spend any time, let alone learn.
