Social Emotional Learning

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is an important practice in many of today’s school systems. SEL is the process of students and teachers learning how to manage and be aware of their emotions and behaviors, have appropriate decision making, relationship skills, and social awareness. 

When talking to a 5th grade teacher last week, she said that their school system refers to SEL daily when considering the wellbeing of students and staff. So how is this done? How do schools put it into practice? 

SEL is not a curriculum, but can be found in activities, lessons, classroom dialogue, and many other things. Casel.org has some more specific approaches of including SEL in the schools. They include:

Children can to be taught through modeling and coaching to recognize how they feel or how someone else might be feeling.

 

Prompting the use of a conflict-resolution skill and using dialoguing to guide students through the steps can be an effective approach to helping them apply a skill in a new situation.

 

Through class meetings students can practice group decision-making and setting classroom rules.

 

Students can learn cooperation and teamwork through participation in team sports and games.

 

Students can deepen their understanding of a current or historical event by analyzing it through a set of questions based on a problem-solving model.

 

Cross-age mentoring, in which a younger student is paired with an older one, can be effective in building self-confidence, a sense of belonging, and enhancing academic skills.

 

Having one member of a pair describe a situation to his partner and having the partner repeat what he or she heard is an effective tool in teaching reflective listening.

So how can I put SEL into practice in a lesson in my future art classroom? When thinking over what that would look like, I came up with a middle school lesson idea that focuses on identity and the way that people socially present yourselves in person and online. Social Emotional Learning has been identified by the Iowa Standards, confirming that we need to implement it into our classrooms. The Iowa Core skills for SEL writes, “Recognize that the same norms and behaviors for face-to-face interactions apply to interactions through social media.” I want my students to collage a collaborative art project, pretending it is a social media status for the class. They will all contribute drawings and text that represent their unique contributions to their classroom community. They will also be reminded of the dangers of posting inappropriately on social media and reflect on what is appropriate to post. They will also be asked to consider the way they present themselves in person vs. online. 

What do you think? Will this lesson reflect SEL?