All Learning is Social and Emotional: Distilled for Educators

Changing Professional Development One Question At A Time

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All Learning is Social and Emotional

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All Learning is Social and Emotional boldly claims the necessity of cultivating social and emotional skills in students. Frey, Fisher, and Smith define the core aspects of social and emotional learning (identity and agency, emotional regulation, cognitive regulation, social skills, and public spirit) and provide practical suggestions for how schools might adopt them and how teachers can focus on them in their classrooms. This is a quick read packed with valuable information for school leaders and classroom practitioners alike.

What Would Socrates Ask?

What long-term benefits will social-emotional learning at a young age have for people later in life?
What does effective school-wide buy-in for social-emotional learning look like?
How can social and emotional learning complement the academic material that students are already learning in their classes?
How can we make abstract concepts like emotions and civic engagement concrete for students?
How can social-emotional learning be fostered and implemented?

Relevant Statistics

In their meta-analysis of 213 SEL programs (Involving 270,034 students in grades K-12), Durlak and colleagues (2011) noted that classroom teachers were very effective in implementing SEL. In fact, teacher implementation resulted in statistically significant outcomes on all six factors studied:
- Social and emotional skills
- Attitude toward self and others
- Positive social behavior
- Conduct problems
- Emotional Distress
- Academic performance

Concepts

SEL is a part of the curriculum that should be transparent so that the community can monitor and critique these efforts.
In general, SEL focuses on “a set of social, emotional, behavioral, and character skills that support success in school, the workplace, relationships, and the community.”
SEL CONCEPT #1: IDENTITY AND AGENCY
- Identity: an understanding of who we are - our attributes, the way we see ourselves in relation to others, our perceived talents, and the awareness of our shortcomings
- Agency: our capacity to act in empowered and autonomous ways
SEL CONCEPT #2: EMOTIONAL REGULATION
- Emotional Regulation helps us cope with frustration and cheer ourselves up in helpful ways by fostering habits of reflection, self-checking, and response moderation.
SEL CONCEPT #3: COGNITIVE REGULATION
- Cognitive regulation is when students engage in behaviors that help them learn. These include “such methods as organizing and transforming information, self-consequating, seeking information, and rehearsing or using memory aids.” (Zimmerman, 1989)
- Cognitive regulation includes goal-setting (performance goals and mastery goals), recognizing and resolving problems, help-seeking, decision-making, and organizational skills,
SEL CONCEPT #4: SOCIAL SKILLS
- Pro-social skills include helping behaviors, sharing and teamwork that are foundational to developing relationships with others which may evolve to become friendships. Relationships also require communication, empathy, and methods for repairing relationships when they are damaged. Students also need to cultivate empathy in order to take others’ concerns or feelings into account.
SEL CONCEPT #5: PUBLIC SPIRIT
- Public spirit is “an active interest and personal investment in the well-being of one’s communities.”
- A major outcome from investing in SEL might be the development of civic dispositions and civic skills that result in civic action. The foundation of which is respect for others, courage, ethical responsibility, civic responsibility, social justice, and service-learning, and leadership.
BUILDING AN SEL SCHOOL
- To build an SEL school, use data, involve families, and set goals.
- SEL principles taught to children will not gain traction unless adults in the school can integrate them into daily practice.
- PD for faculty must not be isolated training days. It must be purposeful and have faculty buy-in. There must be follow-up, coaching, and mentoring with careful planning and clear targets.
- Recommend using the Social Influence Survey to help adults understand the social dynamics between students; this could help adults see students who have potential to lead but might be overlooked because of academic or behavioral challenges.

Quotes from the author

SEL belongs in schools... “because teachers unquestionably influence students’ social and emotional development, they have a responsibility to do so in a way that is positive and deliberate.”
“If SEL remains part of the hidden curriculum, there will be gaps in students’ learning. For example, if students are not directly taught self-regulation strategies, those who have yet to develop these strategies might be marginalized.”
“A school that successfully weaves SEL into the fabric of its academic learning and its policies and procedures doesn’t get that way by chance. School leaders, staff, and families collaborate with intention to create these conditions. The stakeholders confront troubling issues that bubble just beneath the surface...doing this work and meeting its many challenges, is only possible if the adults in the school are themselves SEL-competent.”

Quotes from Others

“How we teach is as instructive as what we teach. Just as the culture of the classroom must reflect social belonging and emotional safety, so can academic instruction embody and enhance these competencies and be enhanced by them.” Berman, Chaffe, and Sarminento