How SEL Empowers Positive Learning

What’s been your best learning experience? What made it the best experience for you? Like many others, the topic may have been personally relevant. You may have trusted the teacher or the environment where you were learning. You probably got to choose either the topic or another big experience aspect. Engaging in this learning and making choices about it probably empowered you. Skills learned as part of SEL, self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making all support our best experiences.

Research Behind SEL-Empowered Learning

Schools have access to multiple programs supporting SEL. According to research from CASEL (2019), when SEL is implemented well, 27% more students improve their academic performance (by 11 percentile points), 57% more gain in their skill levels, and 22% more show fewer conduct problems.

Materials in different programs highlight the following aspects of SEL: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. These ideas fit well with what we know about self-regulated learners—learners who set goals, monitor their progress, plan, and manage their time and resources, make responsible decisions, and practice self-control (Nilson, 2013).

Nurturing SEL Engagement

Ways to nurture emotional engagement include inspiring confidence in learners; demonstrating consistently that all contributions and interactions are valued – acknowledging and reinforcing each contributor; creating an intellectually safe place – encouraging questioning for understanding; personalizing feedback, remembering that the focus of the feedback is the task, not the person.

Making the content relevant allows learners to recognize and internalize why the content is important. The importance of the content and its personalization helps learners develop a positive emotional response to instruction. They feel good about participating and are more open to instruction. As Tomlinson and Sousa (2020) said, “…emotions are a gateway to cognition and learning. When curriculum and instruction evoke enjoyment, surprise, empathy, personal relevance, and so forth, the gateway opens, and learning is likely to proceed more effectively and durably.”

SEL Empowerment and Engagement 

One of the key aspects of a culture of learning is the idea of empowerment and engagement. Once students are open to learning, we want to engage and empower them. There are three aspects of engagement teachers need to ensure learners have regular access to:

• Voice and choice: Learners need to know how to make good decisions, as this is more than just who a learner might work with. Think about options regarding when and how the learning occurs, the focus (the learning targets and success criteria), and even assessments.
• Collaboration: Opportunities to collaborate may involve brainstorming, problem-solving, assessment, co-creating success criteria, rubrics, peer feedback, peer assessment, or peer observation. To support these collaborations, learners must develop social awareness, self-management, and relationship skills.
• Challenge: The appropriate level of challenge not only engages but also may be viewed as fun. Make learning not too easy and not too hard. Make it just right and “desirably difficult.” 

Flower Darby (2018) said, “Our emotions are a central part of our humanity… Emotions grab our attention and keep our interest. Emotions motivate us, inspire us, and move us to action.” What was experienced between 2020 and 2023 heightened our awareness of positive and negative emotions, even in education.

Recognizing Students Emotions

There is no way to ignore the emotions of our learners, community, or educational ecosystem. Incorporating emotions into learning is critical moving forward. What stories and histories are we teaching, and whose stories are missing or misrepresented? How can we incorporate current events to increase feelings of personal relevance, interest, and autonomy for all? Brene Brown (2022) spoke about expanding our emotional vocabulary. In Atlas of the Heart, Brown shares a list of 87 emotions and experiences.

Expanding the vocabulary of students (and educators) to better identify and name their emotions can support them in deepening their self-awareness, self-management, and relationship skills, which will support them academically.

Connecting via two-way respect goes a long way to fostering the learner/teacher relationship. How can we teach our kids social awareness and relationship skills if they don’t see us practicing them? Explicitly making the instruction and content relevant helps build self-awareness in students and supports them in decision-making.

Explicit and Implicit SEL

Talking about current events, for example, and why they caught your interest helps build the relationship, encourages students to be self-aware of their thoughts and feelings about relevant issues, and supports the development of social awareness as they listen to how others respond.

Educators currently teach SEL both explicitly and implicitly. These ideas are not new, just organized and presented coherently. Consider these classroom examples:

• The language arts teacher asks students to think like the author or explain what a character might think – look from another perspective.
• The math teacher asks a student to try a different approach or formula in solving a problem – perseverance and making choices.
• The history teacher asks students to write a letter as if they were someone experiencing a historical perspective – self-awareness and social awareness.
• The art teacher reads a poem and asks students to create a drawing depicting the emotions of the piece – self-awareness and perspective.

There will be a time when explicit instruction focused solely on SEL is necessary for topics that aren’t as easily integrated into academics. These instances may involve instruction focused on the identification of feelings or empathy.

For SEL to stick, teachers need to create structure and consistency. Students must learn and see that effort builds their knowledge and skills. Implementing learning that empowers students means they are taught equitable content that taps into their funds of knowledge and skills to build their self-management so they can demonstrate self-efficacy.

Build and encourage the classroom team (individual learners, peers, and the teacher). Learners feel valued when they become self-regulated, acting as instructional resources for themselves and others.

Strategies to Support SEL

• Breathing and movement strategies include belly breathing, yoga breathing, and counting breaths – all ways to calm breathing and the mind. Some classrooms have incorporated yoga or other movements.
• “What might happen…” – this strategy is easily integrable into academics in numerous ways. In historical contexts, learners can imagine what might happen in different events if different choices had been made. This offers the opportunity to investigate perspective, problem-solving, and choices. In reading, when learners are asked to predict, teachers can make connections to current events or instances that may occur at school, at home, or in the community.
• Journal writing is one mechanism for learners to reflect, predict and capture emotions related to learning and what is happening in their lives.
• Help learners connect their emotions to content to enhance learning and emotion identification. This provides a choice in how students demonstrate their skills in the assessment.
• Using talk partners and collaboration fosters learners’ building and maintaining relationships and becoming instructional resources for one another.

Resources

• Kautz, T., Heckman, J. J., Diris, R., Weel, & Borghans, L. (2015). Fostering and measuring skills: Improving cognitive and non-cognitive skills to promote lifetime success. OECD Education Working Papers No. 110. OECD.
• Nilson, L. B. (2013). Creating self-regulated learners: Strategies to strengthen students’ self-awareness and learning skills. Stylus.