Social Emotional Learning
What is Social Emotional Learning?
Social-emotional learning (SEL) encompasses the cultivation of skills, attitudes, behaviors, and values essential for individuals to thrive in educational, professional, and personal contexts. SEL helps individuals to navigate challenges effectively, yielding advantages in academic, career, and social domains.
Why is Social Emotional Learning Important?
Some skills that SEL can help people develop include social awareness involves the capacity to appreciate others' viewpoints, acknowledge their strengths, and demonstrate empathy and compassion. Responsible decision-making refers to the ability to make ethical choices while considering the repercussions of one's actions. Self-management entails the capability to regulate emotions and impulses, handle stress, and set achievable goals. Relationship skills involve the ability to form and sustain healthy interpersonal connections.
What Skills are Taught in the School Setting?
Within the school setting, we teach our students many domains of social emotional learning, including both social thinking skills as well as emotional regulation skills. In order to learn how to regulate their own emotions, it is imperative that we teach students the language pertaining to different states of emotion, how to accurately identify their current emotional state, a repertoire of tools to assist with emotional regulation, and to use these learned tools and strategies in order to change their current emotional state when needed
Social Emotional Learning Resources
Emotional regulation: AIM curriculum, mindfulness, the incredible 5-point scale, zones of regulation (the road to regulation & the regulation station)
Social thinking/social skills: flexible thinking + unthinkable (Superflex curriculum), size of the problem/size of the reaction (We Thinkers curriculum), social boundaries (a five is against the law), thinking with eyes, social behavior map, ME map, power cards, social stories/social scripts, you are a Social Detective curriculum