How do SEL programs work?

Broadly speaking, social and emotional learning (SEL) refers to the process through which individuals learn and apply a set of social, emotional, and related skills, attitudes, behaviors, and values that help direct students. This includes thoughts, feelings, and actions in ways that enable them to succeed in school.

How do you implement a SEL program?

SEL implementation at the school level focuses on four main areas of activity: Build foundational support and plan, strengthen adult SEL competencies and capacity, promote SEL for students, and reflect on data for continuous improvement.

What is the SEL program curriculum?

Approaches and delivery methods for SEL curricula can vary widely. Some programs focus on character development, while others focus on building core competencies such as Social Awareness and Self-Management. Some are game oriented, while others are movement based or project based.

Why are parents against SEL in schools?

Those accusations have surfaced during school board meetings, within parent-teacher associations, and during routine parent-teacher conferences, said Hughes. Parents express fears that SEL is a slippery slope—or even an indoctrination tool—to teach kids about racial inequality, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

What are the 5 concepts of social emotional learning?

The five SEL competencies (self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, social awareness, and relationship skills), are vital to the teaching and understanding of social and emotional learning at school.

Social-Emotional Learning: What Is SEL and Why SEL Matters

What are the 3 R's of social-emotional learning?

Embedded at the core of positive psychology, and emotional learning, are the three R's of emotional literacy: Regulation, Reconstruction, and Resilience. To regulate emotion, students learn the ability to flip a negative emotion to positive emotion like they flip a baseball card.

How do you include SEL in the classroom?

For instance, examples of SEL-in-action can include assigning a group project where students self-delegate roles to work together for the good of the group, role playing as historical figures to understand the rationale behind a person's actions, or for students to conduct formal interviews with one another to take a ...

What are the downsides of SEL?

Why do SEL programs fail?

So SEL is rushed, shortened, or even skipped. Note to administrators: you cannot put one more thing on a teacher's plate without at the same time taking something off. The less obvious but perhaps most important reason that SEL programs fail is that they conflict with the SEL program the school already has.

What is the controversy around SEL?

Critics of social-emotional learning, like Parents Defending Education, a group tracking what it says is “liberal indoctrination,” say the programs focus too much on children's identities. It shouldn't matter what a child's race or gender is, these parent groups say.

What does SEL look like in schools?

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning defines SEL as “the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, ...

Is SEL a hidden curriculum?

And, because we can also learn unhealthy social and emotional skills and mindsets—like racism, aggression, and helplessness—from our surroundings, it's especially important for educators to bring awareness and intentionality to the hidden SEL curriculum.

How is SEL taught in schools?

In the classroom, SEL lessons can be explicitly taught through curriculum or integrated into other subjects, including through activities like labeling feelings, goal setting, cultivating empathy, and collaborating with peers.

How do I create a SEL curriculum?

What makes a good SEL program?

Best Social Emotional Learning Curriculum. An effective social emotional learning program promotes the development of the five SEL competencies: self awareness, self management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making.

What percentage of schools use SEL?

More than 90 percent of schools and districts in the U.S. report a focus on developing students' SEL skills (Duchesneau, 2020). There is growing consensus that implementing SEL programs well by definition includes inclusive, collaborative approaches that value culture and consider context.

Why do high school SEL programs feel lame?

The big problem, researchers and practitioners say, is that too much of what constitutes SEL learning feels patronizing to teenagers and fails to address their core psychological needs and motivations: developing an identity and sense of agency, being recognized and respected by peers, finding ways to excel, and ...

What is the best SEL curriculum?

Do SEL skills need to be explicitly taught?

These abilities are captured in five social and emotional competencies: cooperation, assertiveness, responsibility, empathy, and self-control (C.A.R.E.S.). The skills that make up these competencies can and should be explicitly taught in the same way that any academic or life skill is taught.

What is the difference between SEL and Tsel?

TSEL is a form of SEL implementation toward the aim of concentrating SEL practice on transforming inequitable settings and systems and promoting justice-oriented civic engagement. One of its core features is enhancing and foregrounding social and emotional competencies needed for civic engagement and social change.

Why is SEL good for kids?

SEL contributes to healthy well-being and safe schools

SEL enhances young people's coping skills, resiliency, and emotion identification, which can help reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety in the short term.

What are negative effects of a low social emotional learning?

Unfortunately, many students lack social-emotional competencies and become less con- nected to school as they progress from elementary to middle to high school, and this lack of connection negatively affects their academic performance, behavior, and health (Blum & Libbey, 2004).

How do you teach SEL effectively?

What are the 5 components of SEL?

The following descriptions of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) are from CASEL. They address five broad, interrelated areas of competence and provide examples for each: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.

What is the role of the teacher in SEL?

Teachers are the engine that drives social and emotional learning (SEL) programs and practices in schools and classrooms, and their own social-emotional competence and wellbeing strongly influence their students.