Social-Emotional Learning

According to Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, and Schellinger (2011):

A key challenge for 21st-century schools involves serving culturally diverse students with varied abilities and motivations for learning…Unfortunately, many students lack social-emotional competencies and become less connected to school as they progress from elementary to middle school to high school, and this lack of connection negatively affects their academic performance, behavior, and health (p. 405). 

In other words, schools have an important role to play in raising healthy children by fostering not only their cognitive development, but also fostering their social and emotional development. Yet schools have limited resources to address all of these areas and are experiencing intense pressures to enhance academic performance.

For this discussion, imagine you are a classroom teacher and your school has just adopted a new social-emotional learning curriculum. The parents of your students are concerned that this will take valuable time away from academic subjects and that this is something parents should teach at home. Your job is to write an explanation of this curriculum for your classroom website. In this description, define what social-emotional learning is and what it isn’t. Provide links for parents to find out more about it and what the research says about it.  Describe how social emotional learning will enhance learning in other content areas and the benefits their children will experience.

For more information, refer to the following articles:

• Beyond book learning: Schools teach social and emotional skills
• Benefits of SEL
• Office of Academics, Social Emotional Learning
• The Impact of Enhancing Students’ Social and Emotional Learning: A Meta-Analysis of School-Based Universal Interventions
• Why it Matters

Guided Response: Analyze several of your classmates’ posts.  Respond to at least two classmates, and provide suggestions on how to make their information clearer and more user-friendly for parents.  Help your classmates identify aspects of their explanation and educational jargon that may need clarification, and suggest alternative ways to explain the information.