The Social Emotional Way of Being

Kathy Dyer wrote this in 2023 to define social emotional learning, link it to the hardship families and students lived through during the pandemic, and describe it as a way of being. A new section below brings the picture up to date with research evidence from 2023 and shows how the framework plays out in a school.

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) has been a topic of conversation for decades, even before it was labeled SEL. The pandemic of 2020 caused SEL and the need for it to erupt from just beneath the surface into the minds of educators, parents, and the community. When educators, students, and families experienced the major shift to digital learning, many worried about SEL, even if they didn’t name their worries as that.

Defining Social Emotional Learning

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions. 

SEL encompasses five interdependent competencies: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social-Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision Making.

Simply put, social and emotional learning is how we all acquire and apply skills to manage our emotions and maintain positive relationships. More importantly, consider SEL as the need for specific skills that present themselves in a person’s life. Some skills are foundational others require additional practice. 

Using Social Emotional Learning to Recognize Student Hardship

Now consider what the world has experienced in the past three years. Were you one of the parents who worked from home, facilitated digital learning for one or more children, and ran the household? An essential worker spending days or weeks away from your family? A first responder dealing with health situations or civil unrest?

During this time, experiences of loss have varied and included income, illness, death, services, and experiences. People need to be seen and heard. Showing empathy is part of SEL and requires looking for and from perspectives that may differ from your own. Listening deeply as people share their stories is another skill of SEL.

Pandemic and Social Emotional Learning

The pandemic provided an opportunity to pause, reflect and figure out how to do things differently. Think of it as worldwide action research that touched business, education, and daily life. We tried things that worked and kept them without modification or replacement. There is a need to keep the best and build from there, focusing on social, emotional, and academic development. 

The SEL Way of Being

I continually review CASEL’s definition of SEL. Each review, I am reminded that the skills and attitudes necessary to manage my emotions, set and achieve my goals, show empathy to those I encounter, act responsibly and caring towards myself and others, and work on building and maintaining supportive relationships are truly a way of being in the world. SEL-based skills and attitudes aren’t just for the day or the week. The lessons of SEL aren’t only for my family and friends; they are the way I want to be present in the world.

As the world continues to understand our individual and collective losses and the roles in our personal challenges and perhaps even systemic inequities, how can we promote SEL and create sustainable change toward self-awareness, self-management, and responsibility?

Resources

• What is SEL? (casel.org)
• Adverse Childhood Experiences Among U.S. Youth – RWJF
• YouthDuringCOVID_FINAL (1).pdf (americaspromise.org)
• Posttraumatic stress disorder in parents and youth after health-related disasters – PubMed (nih.gov)

Social emotional learning after the pandemic: what the research shows and what schools do with it

Social emotional learning after the pandemic is now a matter of choosing practices that have evidence behind them. Kathy Dyer’s 2023 article above defines social emotional learning (SEL) with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and argues that the skills reach well past the school day. This section sets out the framework as CASEL presents it today, summarizes the largest recent review of school programs, and lists decisions a school team can make. For a full introduction to the field, see edCircuit’s Social-Emotional Learning guide.

The framework in brief

CASEL describes SEL as the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions. On its framework page, CASEL organizes the skills into five areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. It places them inside four settings where learning happens, namely classrooms, schools, families and caregivers, and communities.

The four settings matter to the question Dyer raises about sustainable change. CASEL lists explicit instruction and a caring classroom climate as the classroom’s contribution, schoolwide culture and policies that support belonging as the school’s, partnerships that carry SEL into the home as the family’s, and aligned opportunities with community partners as the community’s. A program taught in one period a week reaches only the first of those settings.

What a large review found

In 2023 the journal Child Development published a meta-analysis led by Christina Cipriano of the Yale Child Study Center and Michael Strambler of Yale, summarized on the center’s news page. The review combined 424 experimental studies of school-based SEL programs, covering more than 250 programs, more than 50 countries and more than 500,000 students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Compared with students who did not take part, students in the programs showed gains in academic achievement and school functioning, such as attendance and engagement, and in skills such as perseverance and self-efficacy. They also showed lower anxiety and stress, better relationships with peers and teachers, and more positive civic attitudes. The largest effect was on students’ sense of safety and inclusion at school, and social and emotional gains lasted six months or longer after programs ended.

The researchers found that programs that were high quality, sequenced, active, focused and explicit, and that were delivered by teachers, had the strongest effects. The Yale summary, dated July 14, 2023, gives no effect sizes, so a school board or district office that wants to judge how large the academic gains are should read the full paper. A review of this kind also averages many different programs, and a gain found across hundreds of studies does not guarantee the same gain for a particular program in a particular building.

Decisions for school teams

• Choose the program for its design. Ask whether lessons build on one another, whether students practice skills rather than only hear about them, whether the target skills are clear and whether the lessons are taught explicitly.
• Treat adult relationships as part of the program. Dyer’s section on student hardship calls for listening and empathy. Staff time to talk with students and families is a cost to plan for, not an extra.
• Use the family and community settings. Share the vocabulary with families in plain words and invite their questions before a program starts.
• Measure what changes. Track results a school can observe, such as attendance, discipline referrals and student survey items on belonging, before and after.

Students and staff who are in distress need qualified help rather than a classroom lesson. In the United States, anyone thinking about suicide or self-harm can call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, and schools should keep their counselors’ and community providers’ contact details where families can find them.

Dyer closes by asking how schools can promote SEL in ways that produce lasting change. The 2023 review points toward well-designed programs, consistent adult practice and attention to all four settings, and each school still has to decide where to start and how to check that the work is helping.

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