Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a framework used to develop interpersonal skills, regulate emotion in a healthy manner, and connect and communicate effectively with others. SEL isn’t just useful for daily life; research demonstrates that it also helps in academics, serving as a complementary tool to central subjects like math and reading.
CASEL
CASEL, or the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, is at the forefront of SEL. They are a multidisciplinary organization of researchers, educators, and practitioners that supports and promotes its efficacy.
CASEL is also responsible for the most widely accepted model for SEL, which incorporates five central components that individuals focus on improving:
- Self-Awareness: This involves recognizing one’s emotions and being in tune with individual strengths, motivations, and limitations.
- Self-Management: Building off of self-awareness, self-management involves learning how to regulate emotions and behaviors in different contexts. Examples would be stress management and impulse control.
- Social Awareness: This entails understanding the perspectives of other people and being mindful of different sociocultural contexts. Part of this is empathy, and, together with self-awareness, can be thought of as emotional intelligence (EQ).
- Relationship Skills: Relationship skills are used to establish and maintain healthy relationships — family, friends, colleagues. There’s teamwork, leadership, conflict resolution, and more.
- Responsible Decision-Making: Responsible decision-making includes sound judgment and even extends to problem-solving.
Teaching SEL
When it comes to teaching SEL, some schools and teachers integrate it into the curriculum directly. Classrooms might have lessons on communication, for instance. In other cases, the principles are taught indirectly. Students might have a discussion on literature, where they’re prompted to think about a particular character’s emotions or behavior. Alternatively, a project for a science class that is team-based requires interpersonal skills for teamwork, in addition to the other skills like time management and planning.
Instruction By Age Range
- Early Childhood/Pre-K: Young kids start by identifying basic emotions, like happiness and sadness. They also begin with important values like fairness and sharing.
- Elementary School: Kids start to build and bolster friendships, and work in groups to achieve a common goal.
- Middle School: Peer pressure and conformity, group identities, and more become prominent here and going forward. This is where the adult identity begins to display.
- High School: High school continues a lot of the same processes from middle school, while placing a greater emphasis on relationship skills, stress management, and responsible decision-making.
- College and beyond: This is where advanced skills are honed, including workplace collaboration and leadership.
Limitations
As mentioned, SEL differs from other subjects, such as math and literacy, and one of those distinctions is that it is much more difficult to quantify and track. Comprehension assessments and exams have questions with answers that are right or wrong and are easily scored, but there’s more nuance to SEL.
Interpersonal behaviors and individual psychological processes — things like empathy, decision-making, emotional regulation — are qualitative, and require observation and self-assessment, the latter of which is notoriously unreliable As a result, it can be hard to indicate progress and thus, on a research level, harder to show SEL is having a positive effect (especially at the long-term level, where there are numerous confounding variables).
Another limitation stems from improper implementation, such as if an educator isn’t well-informed on SEL, it will then look like SEL just doesn’t work.
Bottom Line
Still, the research shows that SEL is beneficial to students overall. The largest and most comprehensive SEL meta-analysis, which reviewed 424 experimental studies involving over 500,000 K-12 students, found that students in SEL programs had stronger academic achievement and reported lower rates of mental health concerns like stress, anxiety, and depression. Moreover, the positive effects persisted beyond the end of the programs.