In the age of COVID and increasing academic pressure, it’s becoming more difficult to keep emotions in check and focus on the tasks at hand: homework, reading, extra-curricular activities, and nourishing social time with friends and loved ones. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) is focused on how we acquire, process, and use knowledge while managing emotions, personal goals, and navigating the world through caring decisions. It’s an approach to growing well-rounded, community-engaged young adults for a more equitable future. Through SEL, students learn to balance emotional and social growth along with academic knowledge for a healthy and holistic future.
What are the Components of SEL?
Social-Emotional Learning uses a systematic approach to establish equitable learning environments across classrooms, schools, families, and communities. SEL bases its core emphasis on five intersecting aspects of a student's life: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. Here’s what you need to know about each of the five elements of the SEL framework:
Self-awareness brings the ability to understand emotions, thoughts, and values and how they affect life. Through practices of self-awareness, students integrate personal and social identities, language assets, and emotions through understand how they connect to personal values and growth mindset.
Self-management focuses on managing emotions in balance with personal goals and aspirations with a focus on stress management strategies and organizational skills for personal and collective agency.
Responsible decision-making focuses on curiosity and open-mindedness and the process of discerning judgment in social situations. It recognizes how a student uses critical thinking skills beyond the classroom in developing their role as an interconnected part of their family and community.
Relationship skills focus on establishing and maintaining relationships that support all parties in the relationship. This practice involves effective communication, cultural competency, and collaborative problem-solving through teamwork.
Social awareness is the ability to understand other perspectives and demonstrate empathy across cultures and backgrounds. Like SEL, social awareness focuses on recognizing strengths in others as well as demonstrating compassion and expressing gratitude.
Through addressing the five elements of SEL, students assess their personal strengths and limitations within each aspect and how they intersect. Once students have a greater understanding of their strengths and limitations, SEL can help families develop support systems and plan for equitable learning in a healthy and nourishing learning environment — at home, in school, and beyond.
Why Use Social-Emotional Learning Strategies?
Social-Emotional Learning shifts a student’s life in both the short and long term. A support plan can immediately change a student’s attitude towards themselves, peers, and loved ones as well as their perception of the classroom or tutoring environment. This shift, in time, brings increased academic success and lowers emotional stress, which in turn may lower conduct problems and drug use. Over time, the balanced approach of SEL prepares students for college and careers, improves mental health, and can increase civic engagement.
SEL provides students with tools beyond the classroom, encouraging students’ growth into more empathetic, grounded, and compassionate adults, not only driven to succeed academically but also inspired to participate in equitable social justice within their community and beyond. Through improved emotional health and attention comes improved academic success, passion, and drive to make each student’s dream a priority.
For more questions on SEL practices, academic tutoring, and/ or classroom support, reach out today at info@platinumedgetutoring.com.